12 Responses to “About”

1. on 27 Mar 2007 at 4:30 am1 Yannella Amendola

   I read the interview about Why Tagging Matters by Lee Rainie, Director of Pew Internet and American Life Project and I think was really interesting. Currently I am working in a project of tagging call tag2find, will be a pleasure for me if you have the time to visit my website http://www.tag2find.com and tell me what are your opinions about our project, I think you have a lot of knowledge about the concept of tagging and I think this will be a really helpfully for my team.

2. on 26 May 2007 at 9:04 am2 Michael

   The book is a fascinating read, with an extremely visually noisy cover - why print text in white on a highly-reflective glossy blue background? This is a kind of visual equivalent of high and very disturbing background noise, and is quite off-putting. Computers have matt screens for a reason - so that one can see what’s on them - putting text on a highly glossy cover shows a disrespect for the reader, and conveys a message that what’s written there is not to be read.

3. on 15 Jun 2007 at 6:35 am3 Daniel

   Hello,

   Thanks for interesting information in your blog.

   Tip: Your titles “prevents” me from promoting your content.

   I would like to bookmark links to several of your posts so they appear in my public bookmarks at Diigo.com , sharing them with others (and you will get more visitors).

   Why your “titles” prevents this in practise:

   As I have too little time to both categorise and rephrase titles, I mostly use the one-click posting option, that goes right into the list, unaltered, like a “look what I stumbled upon” thing.

   However, since your site currently shapes all your titles in this way:

   “Everything is Miscellaneous » Blog Archive » TITLE-GOES-HERE”, then my list of bookmarks will both look really strange (like a storefront for your site, taking some of its “credibility” and usefulness away. Further, it becomes annoying and actually moves the catchy titles out of focus. That is counterproductive.

   I suggest you do the following as “best practise”:

   Use just that form on the front page only.
   Use the reverse form on each blog post:
   “TITLE-GOES-HERE » Everything is Miscellaneous » Blog Archive”

   That way it will be more catchy, less annoying, and dont make my bookmarks list look odd when I add links to 10 of your posts one after another.

   Anyway, thanks for interesting content.

   Daniel

4. on 16 Jun 2007 at 10:47 am4 David Weinberger

   Daniel, I don’t know yet know how to do this in WordPress. I’m looking into it. Thanks for the suggestion.

5. on 25 Jun 2007 at 5:18 pm5 qpnbhbasop

   Hello! Good Site! Thanks you! jiirzmcgqpg

6. on 10 Jul 2007 at 9:10 am6 Paul N

   Is this a practical joke? Is this some kind of performance art thing?

   I clicked a banner ad at SciAm.com for what looked like an interesting book called Everything is Miscellaneous. I never click banner ads, but this ad somehow got my attention.

   The ad linked me directly to this blog, which is supposedly about the same book, Everything is Miscellaneous. The blog is loaded with random information, as miscellaneous as can be, but there’s nothing here about the book I thought I was finding out about. Not even a link to other sources. Does this supposed book even exist? Is this blog the “book”?

   Is the theme of the book “You can’t get there by clicking”?

7. on 27 Jul 2007 at 1:32 am7 Ian

   Maybe the “Pages” menu should be at the top of the right-hand column rather than at the bottom. Wordpress should be able to do that, surely.

   Like Paul N, I also struggled to find the interesting stuff (sample chapters, reviews etc) and was confused by seemingly random blog entries and links that appeared to have nothing to do with the book. Now I see that the same links are displayed in tabs across the top, but for some reason they didn’t stand out when I first looked at the page. I’m going to send people a link to this “About” page, rather than to the home page.

   I suppose I should have been able to find what I was looking for by using the tags or something… but I”m not yet conditioned to think that way. I think some default pattern of organisation is useful for orientation and quick access to the commonest queries/views, even if we allow the miscellaneous/tagged way of looking at it too.

8. on 27 Jul 2007 at 8:42 am8 David Weinberger

   The home page’s top right box explains what the blog is, as does this page. I’m not sure how to make it clearer.

   I’ve added a note at the top of the right-hand box pointing out the tabs.

   Thanks for pointing out the problems.

9. on 05 Nov 2007 at 9:48 pm9 Steven Harris

   I will be leading a book discussion of Everything Is Miscellaneous in Second Life, on November 8, 2007. Should be fun.

   http://librarydiary.wordpress.com/2007/11/05/second-life-is-miscellaneous/

10. on 06 Nov 2007 at 2:51 pm10 effing librarian

    reading the book now, and commenting on my page:
    “The arbitrary and random nature of the Internet becomes ordered through agreement. If we agree that something is important, it becomes important.
    I’ve been blogging for a few months and I’ve had visits from lots of people, but only a few come back. Even though I have a catchy name that gets lots of random search hits, only a few come back. So out of the chaos of the Internet, some order has formed. A few people have agreed that this site has some use. If I were to use math to link and analyze visits, I might calculate some social network created by this site. And if I could define this site, I could form a theory about that network and maybe even form some conclusion. But I would need lots more data. So I guess I need a catchier name.”

11. on 13 Dec 2007 at 7:12 pm11 jfarr

    Re: “Now, what is the big point I’m missing that’s so obvious that I’m about to go D’oh! ?”

    http://www.everythingismiscellaneous.com/2006/11/30/free-the-space/

    The short answer is http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt

    See especially section 2.4.3. Excluded US-ASCII Characters:

    “The space character is excluded because significant spaces may disappear and insignificant spaces may be introduced when URI are transcribed or typeset or subjected to the treatment of word-processing programs. Whitespace is also used to delimit URI in many contexts.”

    You have to remember that URIs are used in many contexts outside of HTML, and one of the (if not *the*) most important design considerations of the Uniform Resource Identifiers standard is “uniform”, as described in section 1.1:

    “Uniformity provides several benefits: it allows different types of resource identifiers to be used in the same context, even when the mechanisms used to access those resources may differ; it allows uniform semantic interpretation of common syntactic conventions across different types of resource identifiers; it allows introduction of new types of resource identifiers without interfering with the way that existing identifiers are used; and, it allows the identifiers to be reused in many different contexts, thus permitting new applications or protocols to leverage a pre-existing, large, and widely-used set of resource identifiers.”

    If you want to argue your case with the people who invented the internet, then by all means go ahead. ;)

12. on 21 Dec 2007 at 9:40 am12 scott

    Darn, I lost your email address, David. I wanted to link you to this. (I am the lucky coworker.)

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