Richard Pachter at the Miami Herald  does a terrific job reviewing it as business book, and decides it’s “imaginative, provocative and expansive.”

Jon Lebkowsky, who’s emceeing the discussion of the book at The Well (open to all – if you’re not a subscriber, you can submit a question via inkwell at well com), writes:

…this is the most important book I’ve read in years, and one of the best at getting at what’s really as we move online and digitize everything we know.

Also, on his site, Jon has posted what I can only hope is the worst photo of me ever.

Over at the ongoing conversation about Everything is Miscellaneous at The Well, Jamais Cascio defines “fauxsonomies” as folksonomies gamed by “metadata added with the conscious intent to confuse or obfuscate,” or to weight them for spammish reasons. Great term. Very clever, Jamais!

Since nothing has ever been said on the Net just once, I googled “fauxonomy” and got 53 hits, plus eight with Jamais’ spelling, including one by Tom Coates at PlasticBag.org. Tom even has a fauxonomy tag; at del.icio.us. (Google also revealed that I’d blogged Tom’s post about it in April 2005. Ah, the multiple pleasures of having a poor memory.)

I was delighted to get reacquainted with the term, this time with a definition attached. [Tags: folksonomy tagging]

Moira Gunn interviewed me for TechNation about Everything is Miscellaneous. We talked about the three orders of order, “meta-business,” Wikipedia as a guide to what humans are interested in, and the Internet and politics. Here’s the excerpt. [Tags: moira_gunn wikipedia politics business everything_is_miscellaneous]

Lion Huai Yu at WhiteNoise does a nice job summarizing the themes of the book, and applying them (in question form) to education. No evaluative terms are used in his discussion, but the seriousness and clarity of it certainly pleases me.

Chris Vallance has posted the full, 29-min., unedited version of the interview of me that ran last week on the BBC. I haven’t listened to it, so Lord knows what errors, embarrassments and infelicities it contains, but I like that Chris has posted the full version. (You can hear the edited version here. I’m all the way at the end of the show.)

Rob Styles usefully disambiguates these. Since I have rightfully been charged with willful abuse of the term “metadata,” I found his operational definition encouraging:

 Metadata is different from content and data because most of the time we don’t actually want it. We step over it, often not noticing, on our way to the content we really wanted.

And now that just about anything can be used to find anything else — the content of a book can be used to find the year it was published, once that content is online and indexed — we all just got smarter.

Are library catalog data copyright-able? Richard Wallis at Panlibus gives us a good place to start on this fascinating topic.

Strumpette (Amanda Chapel, which is a pseudonym) strongly recommends it, but only to get insight into how deluded Web optimists think. She thinks it’s wrong inside and out: “If you want to protect what makes sense, best know the language of nonsense.”

FWIW, I don’t recognize much of the book in her recounting of it, which means I failed to communicate my ideas :( For example, Amanda says that “…the minor systemic flaws and the dynamic nature of the language are not necessarily strong arguments for a complete system reboot, so to speak.” In fact, the first half of the book tries to show that the systemic flaws are far from minor. They apply the constraints of the physical to our ideas and knowledge, and they give rise to a system of authority that likewise limits knowledge. The old system cannot manage the volume and complexity of information in the new world.

Amanda’s right that I see the “reboot” as a great opportunity to get past the old limitations. Overall, I like what’s happening, but not because I love “chaos.” Rather, the new principles and processes allow us to get so much more order — and meaning — from of the oceans of information we’re generating.

Amanda also seems to think that the ideas in the book taken a step further would lead us to get rid of money and instead rely on a barter system. That one I simply don’t understand. I am pleased, however, that it gets me into the same paragraph as John Lennon, even if my favorite Beatle is mentioned only to mock me.