A Fun Read

What a fun book. The main idea of the book is that digital information can be organized in fundamentally different ways than previous information formats. Basically, before, with what Weinberger calls 1st and 2nd order organization, everything in an organizational structure can only exist in one place, a book can only have one Dewey Decimal Number, an animal can have only one place in a taxonomy. This is a limitation of physical media. A book could perhaps be about five different things, but you can only put it on the shelf in one particular place. With the digital medium, however, information can be categorized more comprehensively. Tagging is the best example of this: you can "categorize" something an indefinite number of times just by affixing tags to it that others can search for. The searching process calls up everything within a category without it having to be stored in a particular category order.

This book said a lot of the things I've been wanting to hear. There is a lot of potential in this type of thinking that has not really been explored. Moreover, it was a fun read- very entertainingly written, with examples made from most of the interesting websites I could think of. A fun an interesting look at digital organization, or, if you want to look at it that way, and interesting tour through the more innovative corners of the internet.