The Biologists Helping Bookstores blog reports on another in its guerrilla librarianship raids, in which it reshelves non-science books out of the science shelves.

I’m sympathetic. It drives me nuts to see New Age self-help books shelved in the philosophy sections. But…shelving not only expresses beliefs about the topic, it also serves as a non-semantic look-up system. When an employee doesn’t know where a book is shelved, she looks it up in the computer. So, while re-shelving maintains the purity of the topic, it also hides the re-shelved books. And I’m not crazy about that.

Damn first order of order! (Thanks to Brian Christiansen for the link.)

Brand Eins magazine has run Steffan Heuer’s interview with me about all things miscellaneous.

You will be impressed by my flawless German, thanks to the magic of speaking in English and being translated.

Dave has a rich piece on the problem with closed social networks. He concludes:

Eventually, soon I think, we’ll see an explosive unbundling of the services that make up social networks. What was centralized in the form of Facebook, Linked-in, even YouTube, is going to blow up and reconstitute itself.

In my terms, he’s talking about social information going miscellaneous: Lots of it, detached from any particular app, a seedbed of emergence. There have been attempts to make this happen before — FOAF springs to mind — but they attempted to get us to write things down about ourselves independent of any application. FaceBook et al. make writing things down worth our while. So, the data is there. We just have to (a) get it everywhere, (b) provide strong user control over it. (A is likely to happen before B does. But you never know. At least I never know.)

Dave also wants more-better metadata, especially with regards to the types of relationships these sites capture. Jeez, do I agree. For most of my friends at Facebook, the available categories are inadequate. A folksonomic approach would turn up far more interesting relationships. As it stands, FaceBook requires us to reduce this richest of social information. [Tags: social_networks dave_winer facebook identity everything_is_miscellaneous]

Sarah Mahoney, in an article in Marketing Daily, reports that American men suck at shopping in groceries because we’re overwhelmed by choices. We need more order in the aisles. “Lists are a big part of the problem” Mahoney writes… (The article is here but you need to register, for free, to read it.) [Thanks to Joe Turow for the link.]

The latest in the Miscellaneous Podcast series I’ve been doing, sponsored by the Berkman Center and Wired, is now up at Wired. Craig Newmark (the Craig of CraigsList) and I talk about why strategic planning can get in a business’ way and the value of working with limited resources. [Tags: craigslist craig_newmark business strategy newspapers media]

Here it is an iPod compatible download. (Try renaming it to .mp4 if your player thinks it can’t play it.)

Steve Smith has an interview with Matt Colebourne, CEO of CoComment, a service that tracks comments across the Web so that companies can see what people are saying about them. “We are looking at how we can help a community find its own experts,” says Matt. He writes about the next version of the product:

So they can look at a conversation stream of tens of thousands of comments and say, I only want to see those answered by people that I know. But then it is useful if you can start to pick up on the individuals who have natural authority on the topic. So we are building a ranking system or a behavioral system where people rate other people. But after a while, once the experts start appearing, they in turn should be able to bring other people up quickly. So an expert on medieval history can see I actually do have something to say on it and give me a positive ranking. That will give me a much higher rank than someone else who knows nothing about it. So it is like a peer review and commenter ranking system, but against the taxonomy of topics that allows the natural experts to appear.

Interesting.

At the moment, the service tracks a mere 150,000 sources. <font style=’font-size:80%’;>[Tags:<a href=”http://www.technorati.com/tags/berkman” rel=”tag”> </a> <a href=”http://www.technorati.com/tags/blogs” rel=”tag”> blogs</a> <a href=”http://www.technorati.com/tags/everything+is+miscellaneous” rel=”tag”> everything_is_miscellaneous</a>]</font>

Lorcan Dempsey has a brilliant post on why Google's moving from a SOAP API to Ajax syndication transforms it from an information landscape into an "information brandscape"™ Amazon, he points out, is happy to let other apps and sites use its product data because the data — a link to a book, a book cover — is by itself and ad. Google wants to get their actual ads into those other sites. Lorcan goes on to apply this distinction to library Web services.

(BTW, Lorcan, I slapped the trademark on to "information brandscape" so now it's mine. Bwahaha!) [Tags: google libraries amazon lorcan_dempsey everything_is_miscellaneous web2.0 api soap ajax worldcat]

Here's a list of the interviews I did at the Fast Forward user conference, along with the little blurbs describing them. I've appended an occasional editorial comment. Most are around 5 minutes, although a few run considerably longer. (I'm writing this in an airport and will probably get things wrong. Darn that haste!)

Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired and author of The Long Tail talks about when taxonomies, text search and tagging works, and how this applies to a magazine site. And what about tagging's own long tail? [Tagalicious!]

John Battelle, the author of the best book on Google, says that search should be a conversation with your customers. And it won't occur only by typing into a text box.

Jeanette Borzo of the Economist Intelligence Unit talks about her survey of 400 executives that showed that even though they're unclear about what Web 2.0 means, they're planning on using it to increase revenues and drive down costs. [Quite amusing survey results.]

Matthew Brown, a senior analyst at Forrester Research, talks about the future in which search is ubiquitous but also frequently less visible.

Susan Feldman, an analyst with IDC, gives an advance peak at a study she's going to be announcing tomorrow that upsets expectations about how people find sites…and opens a possibility for "long tail" advertising. [I think I forced a "clarification" on her that's actually misleading. From talking with people afterwards, the two types of "queries" she's talking about probably are ones made at search sites, and ones made using the search services of particular sites, e.g., searching for a book at Google or Amazon. I thought by the second type of query she meant people typing a URL directly into the address bar of a Web site. Sorry!]

Carl Frappaolo of the Delphi Group explains why we should think of search not in terms of finding so much as in terms of teaching.

Stephen Gallagher, Senior Director at Accenture, says that business intelligence is the main factor high performance companies have in common. Bottom-up, "messy" data (in Tim O'Reilly's phrase) is only a "nice to have."

Kathleen Gilroy, who's also doing video blogs at the conference, answers her own question, "How has search changed her life?" If you want to know, just ask her husband.

Joyce Haas, search product manager at WebMD, talks about the use of social software in her company, the resistance to it, and the transformative effect it has. [WebMD's willingness to let its employees talk this frankly says a lot about WebMD.]

Dorothea Herrey of Dow Jones Consumer Media Group, Director of Franchise Development and Partnership (a subsidiary of the Long Titles Divisional Department :) talks about how Dow Jones organizes itself in the multi-dimensional world of the Web, where the dimensions include content, brands, devices, markets, interests….

Bill Inmon of Inmon Data Systems says that at last we're able to combine structured and unstructured search, so that (for example) a search for a customer will find transaction records in the database and emails the customer may have exchanged with customer support.

Dan Keldsen of the Delphi Group talks about the intersection of full text search and tagging.

John Markus Lervik, founder and CEO of Fast, talks about who is a bigger competitor, Oracle or Google [a question I totally stole from blogger Joe McKendrick], and the ways in which Fast internally is a Web 2.0 company…wikis and blogs, emerging bottom-up.

Lydia Loizides, a former VP of technology and emerging media at IPC.

Andrew McAfee, creator of the Enterprise 2.0, talks about what Knowledge Management 2.0 looks like…and whether it will arrive top-down, bottom-up or both.

Tom Mandel of ConnectBeam, a social software company, explains why tags are like poetry. [And the extent to which poetry and tagging are expressions of the individual. And why rhyming adds meaning.]

Jim McGee of the Huron Consulting Group, and DiamondHead founder, talks about the need for businesses to allow employees time to think, and the extent to which thinking can be done in the social public of blogs.

Tim O'Reilly, creator of the Web 2.0 meme, says that organizations have been slow to understand how "network effects" can benefit their business if applied internally as well as externally. As customers add to what the company knows, should that added-value information be made accessible outside of the company? [Tim emphasizes the need for internal sharing and notes that that sharing externally may not always make business sense.]

Hadley Reynolds, VP of Fast's Center of Search Innovation, discusses the implications of the fact that in enabling sites to provide us with highly relevant results, we may trade-off some of our privacy.

James Robertson of Step Two Designs explains why "search sucks," and how it can be kept simple and made more effective if the implementers do more work up front. [Plus, there's the great Prawn vs. PrOn confusion...]

MIT's Michael Schrage explains why getting highly relevant results from a search can actually inhibit the iterative process by which we discover and learn. [Is this the first use of the term "post-relevant results"?]

Euan Semple, formerly the knowledge management guru at the BBC and now an independent consultant, says that he thinks search is overrated. He trusts more the answers given to him by his social network. [Did the leave in the part where I find out that Euan, whom I've counted as a friend for years, pronounces his name "You-ann," not "Eee-an"? How embarrassing!]

Sandeep Swadia, head of Search Business Consulting for Fast, talks about the intersection of customer needs for search and the evolving media business model.

David Watson, VP of Product Design and Development for Digital Media at Disney/ABC, talks about the role of user-generated metadata in guiding people toward his company's content. Look for looser licensing of news content before creative content. [This is a Disney guy who understands that an importnat measure of control has slipped from producers to the audience.]

Zia Zaman, SVP of Strategic Marketing at Fast, talks about search as the visible surface of deep business processes, and what this means for Fast as a partner. [Tags: ff07 fastforward web2.0 videos interviews search everything_is_miscellaneous]

Interesting stuff percolating around the question of how controlled content ought to be, where "ought" means morally, culturally, and for hard-nosed business reasons. Is the issue coming to a head?

We have Viacom sending 100,000 take-down notices to YouTube, including some videos Viacom is pulling out of the public domain without even having viewed them. Viacom's shareholders ought to start up a suit right now. This is the stupidest marketing move in a long time. Jeff Jarvis puts it succinctly in a post that ends "Damned fools." Terry Heaton also lays it down. And then we have Steve Jobs asking the music publishers to give up on DRM, although Job's piece also has some special pleading that (imo) weakens it.

Could the content control bubble be about to burst?

[Tags: media viacom drm youtube everything_is_miscellaneous ]