90% of American public school libraries and public libraries use the Dewey Decimal Classification system. A public library in Arizona has decided to drop it, and to instead organize itself using lessons from bookstores. Here’s a BuzzFeed page that aggregates links about this.

Harald Staun in the Frankfurter Allegemeine  says “Weinbergers Thesen … welche tektonischen Verschiebungen auf der Landkarte des Wissen derzeit zu beobachten sind, sind dabei gar nicht so wahnsinnig originell, die Art aber, wie er die gegenwärtige Entwicklung zusammenfasst und wie er ihre Effekte auf die unterschiedlichsten Lebensbereiche skizziert, macht die Tragweite der Veränderungen so klar wie kaum eine Arbeit zuvor. „Everything Is Miscellaneous“ ist ein wissenschaftlicher page turner in der Tradition jener amerikanischen Sachbücher, die keine Angst haben, gelegentlich etwas banal zu klingen, weil sie die Relevanz ihrer Aussagen für den Alltag andeuten wollen.” And, he contines, “In diesem Fall ist dieser Zugang besonders wichtig…”

I think this means: “Weinberger’s theses … about which tectonic shifts in the map of knowledge are currently to be observed are not so much insanely original as to be of the sort that — in how it outlines the current developments and   how it sketches the effects on the most varied aspects of life — makes the consequences of the changes clearer than any work before. EiM is a scholarly page turner in the tradition of the American non-fiction book that has no problem occasionally sounding  banal because it wants to hint at the relevance to everyday life of what it says.  In this case, this approach is especially important …” (Here is Google’s  automatic translation.) Harald is skeptical, however, about the wisdom of the crowd.

Why I’m going back to watching Heroes via torrents

I’m glad NBC is posting the Heroes series on its site. Heroes‘ schedule isn’t my own. So, I decided I would put up with NBC’s “limited commercial interruptions” because downloading torrents takes time, too.

But, the mistake of hitting the “reload” button on my browser, which slammed the NBC video player all the way back to the beginning. And guess which parts you can’t fast forward over? Plus, now the ads are freezing, so I’ll have to restart again, and watch the same damn Silver Surfer ads again. (Every time I see that ad, I think again about how bad the movie looks.)

Torrents may be a pain in the butt, but at least once they run, I can control what I’m looking at. Plus, the picture is bigger and clearer.

So, NBC, you’re going to have to do better to compete with free. [Tags: torrents heroes tv nbc]

In Everything Is Miscellaneous, I use a famous quote from the famous Ted Nelson:

People keep pretending they can make things deeply hierarchical, categorizable, and sequential when they can’t. Everything is deeply intertwingled. (Cited on p. 125 of EiM)

In conversation, Scott Rosenberg said he had been trying to track down the actual source of the quote. I couldn’t help him, and I noted that on the “errata” page of my book’s Web site.

Now, Frank Hecker (see comments #3, #4, and especially #5) has figured it out, which required searching through several editions of Ted Nelson’s “Computer Lib/Machine Dreams.”

The quote I used mixes what Nelson wrote in the original 1974 edition with a sidebar quote from the 1987 edition. The 1974 edition says “everything is deeply intertwingled” twice (p. 45). The 1987 edition says:

Hierarchical and sequential structures, especially popular since Gutenberg, are usually forced and artificial. Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged–people keep pretending they can make things hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can’t. (p. 31)

Next to that is a sidebar that quotes “Everything is deeply intertwingled” from the original edition. Note that the quote as I attributed it to Nelson does not contain the word “deeply.”

For more details, see Franks three comments on my Errata page.

Thank you, Frank! (PS: Wikipedia had the quotation wrong, too. Frank has fixed it.)

Ellen Hoffman takes my Google talk as a starting point, and wonders what’s happening with education:

Many practitioners and scholars have commented on how little impact educational technology has on schools. But if … authority is shifting, the basis for formal education founded on disciplinary expertise and traditional knowledge definitions is likely to be impacted in ways that we haven’t even begun to explore.  … When students have more knowledge and capability to explore it at their fingertips than the entire school holds, and they have the ability to contribute rather than just consume, what is the role of the teacher? This is an impact far greater than determining if technology enhances achievement or has value in classrooms. Is it possible that educational technology should be thinking of itself as a revolutionary discipline?

That’s exactly the question, although the answer of course isn’t obvious or settled. Right now, the teaching cycle tends to go from textbook to classwork to test…that is, from solitary to social to solitary. But the Web is enabling us to learn socially and even to know socially. With the growing importance of reputation (in counterbalance to credentials), even the reward and measurement system is becoming social. The Web is disrupting the old rhythm. And it’s not clear that the traditional rhythm is teaching our children how to dance in the new world. (Block that metaphor!)

Dan Gillmor points to public.resource.org, a nonprofit that encourages us to buy info from government archives and then upload them to the Internet Archive, where all can find these public domain materials for free.

Putting the public domain into the public domain. As Dan says, how subversive! [Tags: public_domain copyright internet_archive public_resource dan_gillmor everything_is_miscellaneous]

Last night at the Edelman/PR Week “New Media Academic Summit,” Gordon Crovitz, publisher of the Wall Street Journal, described how the Journal had rethought its role as a newspaper. Rather than trying to present the first view of news, the Journal assumes its readers got the news the day before on line. Instead, 80% of the articles aim at helping readers understand the news they already have.

During the Q&A I asked something like the following: Nicholas Lemann on the panel said that the NY Times was disappointed with the traffic at Times Select (i.e., its content behind the pay wall). That seems to suggest that there are plenty of people around who can help us understand, and we’re willing to switch. Further (I said), I can get more focused analysis on the Web. E.g., the mailing lists I’m on about Internet regulation issues gives me far more coverage and analysis than any newspaper devotes to the topic, and the mailing lists include people with great expertise; newspapers can’t compete with that.

Crovitz replied that WSJ.com subscriptions are doing really, really well. So, apparently people are indeed willing to pay for the quality of analysis they get from the Journal.

So, that’s a model that works for the WSJ, and I’m glad to hear it. But, I wonder if it’ll work more widely. After all, some very high percentage of those WSJ.com subscriptions are expensed.

[Disclosure: I am on retainer to Edelman PR.] [Tags: media newspapers journalism wsj ]

11:25 AM Link | Comments (0)

I came in towards the end of the panel on blogging and journalism at the New Media Academic Summit, with Jodi Kantor of the NY Times, Dan Gillmor and Steve Rubel . What I heard was, not surprisingly, really good.

I asked whether the rhetorical voice of blogging is changing the reportorial voice. Jodi replied that that voice has been getting more informal for years, and not just because of blogging. But, she said, when you can see how your readers are taking what you say, you try to write even more clearly and precisely.

“Another example of how blogging is improving journalism,” said Dan. [Tags: journalism media jodi_kantor dan_gillmor everything_is_miscellaneous]

It’s hilarious if you’re a classification nerd. If not, it’s merely very funny. (Thanks to Heather for the link.)

Intensely cool demo of PhotoSynth, at TED, shown in a 9 min video. It begins with an infinite zoom that could change the model of how we get more info from linking to a new page to just looking closer at the page.And then he shows how we could reconstruct “every interesting part of the earth” using random Flickr photos by linking them together automatically. And linking together the other information associated with it.

Mind-blowing. And an incredible tool for deriving meaning from the miscellaneous. (Thanks to Erick for the link.) [Tags: photosynth flickr photos metadata ted everything_is_miscellaneous ]