Trained as a philosopher and a former gag writer for the Woody Allen comic strip, David Weinberger provides, in his own words an “argument against organization” and possibly even more controversial “an argument against Aristotle.” Weinberger says that there’s not one way to organize the universe, as Aristotle tried to do, and nothing can belong in only one place, so it’s miscellaneous. Wait, before we decide that his work is counter to everything we hold to be true, realize his disorder is about putting things everywhere they belong. In his latest book, Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, he presents three orders of organization describing how in the beginning things, constrained as atoms, could be in one and only one place. Later developments, or the “Second Order” brought metadata (remember the card catalog?) and the ability to place the content in one place but point to it via even more physical objects arranged in probably a maximum of three different ways. The “Third Order,” the “Digital Disorder” allows content and its metadata to exist everywhere it is logical and enables findability from all angles. While this may not be new to you, Weinberger certainly treats the web in a new light and makes some interesting connections along the way. Classified in the ‘futurology” genre among others on Wikipedia, this book is a tribute to library science, a wake-up call to businesses and an exhilarating read for anyone who navigates the web.

In closing here, I have a few additional thoughts from writing this piece. First, I am quite impressed with Blogger’s new autosave feature. It appears to be a nice Ajax or Ajax-esque implementation. Also, I think findability should join the Webster I am getting tired of telling Word and now Blogger that it is indeed the word I want to use. At least I can change the settings in Word to include it in my personal dictionary. Lastly, shortly after this post I am going to add a tag cloud to my template and maybe even a nice spiffy graphic for the header. I am most interesting in seeing my tagging habits, however. Maybe what I write about the most will guide me to an appropriate title for this outlet. What a concept! Titles that actually reflect what the content is about. It’s good to be back home from the beach, where the internet was spotty and back to my exciting work at IBM tomorrow.