Philipp Keller applies Gartner’s hype cycle to tagging…

The Wall Street Journal online has published an exchange between Andrew Keen (”The Cult of the Amateur”) and me. The full version is here. The condensed version is here. (I recommend the full version.) [Tags: andrew_keen web2.0 cult_of_the_amateur everything_is_miscellaneous ]

Stephen Francoeur has a very interesting post that tries to miscellanize the desk vs. digital reference dichotomy by suggesting lots of other facets one could use to slice and dice the reference trade. (Self-aggrandizement warning: He begins his post by saying something nice about EiM.)

Tom Matrullo has yet another beautifully written and – dare I say it? – deep meditation. Here he looks at Walter Benjamin’s thoughts on collecting as a type of ordering in which the passion for the unique overwhelms systematic classification.

Tom manages to mention EiM in the piece also, although Benjamin is talking about something far more difficult and important than my book does. Here’s Tom on the initial difference between what Benjamin is talking about and what EiM chatters about:

 Benjamin’s polarity is far more charged with value than with matters of the true. As Arendt notes, Benjamin puts into contagious adjacency the collector and the revolutionary. Both are good at breaking established orders. Take a suicide bomber and pin him, wriggling, to the wall. His purpose is subverted, at least changed: he’s no longer in service to Allah, but at the whim of the collector, who might merely be admiring his shoes, or his special grimace. Because the collector is not about rational ordering, or even passional use, but more about the whims of the performance of collecting.

The Open Library project has opened the doors on its demo, and it is a big, big deal. Read the about page (written by Aaaron Swartz) to see how exactly promising this project is.

From my provincial point of view, the Open Library Project addresses the miscellaneous nature of books: Lots of editions, lots of variants, lots of relationships.. So, include everything you can and enable the creation of rich metadata.

This is exactly the sort of infrastructure of meaning Everything Is Miscellaneous is so excited about. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous libraries metadata wikis ]

GalaxyZoo is a mechanical Turk site that uses the “If everyone classifies just one galaxy…” approach. So far, they have a million done. (Thanks to Timo Hannay for the link.) [Tags: timo_hannay mechanical_turk astronomy science ]

Supernova has posted the video of the session I did with Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur. It begins with my 15-minute version of my Everything is Misc talk, followed by Andrew’s more informal opener, and then us discussion whether the Internet is killing culture. [Tags: andrew_keen supernova2007 supernova07 ]

There’s a fascinating discussion at Wikipedia about whether lists of loosely associated items should be kept or deleted. in this particular case, a list of song titles that contain first names was deleted.

I don’t feel I have standing to have an opinion — this is a discussion among people who spend a good chunk of their lives building and maintaining Wikipedia — but (nevertheless) I do tend to favor including articles rather than deleting them. Wiki is not paper. As you’ll see in the discussion, there are lots of criteria at play, but some of the arguments for deleting such lists seem to me to be based on a desire to keep Wikipedia dignified. That argument I don’t buy. Other criteria adduced for deleting “silly” lists are far stronger. And in the discussion you get to see Wikipedia continuing to figure itself out through a process of suggesting criteria, interpreting settled criteria, appeals to precedent, and personal persuasion. [Tags: wikipedia encyclopedias everything+is+miscellaneous lists ]

In a 4-part series, Mark Bower presents a useful chapter-by-chapter summary of Everything Is Miscellaneous. Thanks, Mark!

Parts 1 2 3 4

His recommendation:

A good read on the whole.  Does a good job of summarizing the information management trends on the web today.  If you are an information architect or consultant working in the field of knowledge management then I would say you should have a copy on your bookshelf.

Adobe Illustrator C3’s help system incorporates links to del.icio.us as a source of information. Cool!

(Thanks for BradSucks for the link.)