I’m about to read three reviews of Everything Is Miscellaneous at The Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies, “an online community, academic journal, and learning repository devoted to the study of digital media and culture.” EiM is the book of the month there. Thanks!

Everything Is Miscellaneous is indexed, searchable, and previewable at Google Print. Yay!

Pardon my self-puffery, but this means a lot to me. Howard Rheingold, who is way up on my list of Net heroes, picked his three favorite books of the year for strategy + business, the Booz Allen Hamilton magazine:

Of the three books, I believe David Weinberger’s is the standout; it is not just prescient and useful, but profound. Weinberger looks deep below the obviously lucrative business model of Internet search and sees how the ability to tag and search extends human knowledge the way mathematics and the alphabet did. Everything Is Miscellaneous is not just the best book on behavioral theory of 2007, it’s the best book I’ve read all year — a rare combination of important social science and business insight, and fun to read…

Thank you, Howard. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous howard_rheingold ]

Hugh McKellar at KMWorld has posted a long interview with me about the miscellaneous and business. Hugh is a good interviewer, and I am a long-winded interviewee.

There’s a transcript of a long chat about my book among librarians in a book club, led by Stolvano Barbosa. They give it a good going over, including frequent drubbings. Fascinating, at least to me; I kept wanted to jump in, but that’s sort of hard to do with a transcript :)

Andy Greenberg at Forbes takes the book seriously, seems to think it’s on a topic worth writing about, and thinks it has interesting things to say, although he thinks I say most of them in the first few chapters (I disagree - I think the book develops a thesis, but, well, I would think that, wouldn’t I). Even so, my “story-laden writing keeps readers from straying.” Here’s his final paragraph: “As the author of a book about the virtues of chaos, Weinberger may be putting the last brick in the tomb of that “ancient and beautiful Greek idea.” But Everything Is Miscellaneous isn’t just about the promises of a messy Internet. It’s also a thoughtful obituary of history’s librarians, an elegy for the last order of order.”

This, and every other review I’ve found, is listed on the reviews page…

Andrew Keen and I, helpfully joined by Willem Velthoven, debated last week on Radio Netherlands. You can hear it here.

Clay Shirky - who I thank profusely in EiM because of how influential and helpful he was, even though he may not know it - responds to Nick Carr’s criticism of page 9 of my book. Then he responds to Sven Bikerts’ complaints about the blogosphere’s effect on literary criticism.

It’s a rousing defense and brilliantly expressed. Thank you, Clay, once again. [Tags: clay_shirky nicholas_carr music everything_is_miscellaneous]

Chris Shioyama at Gyaku has a great review that not only likes the book (thank you) but discusses it in detail. I’m very comfortable with how Chris explains the book.

At the end, he criticizes me for not crediting the importance of language and, in particular, for not seeing that the post-geographic divisions will be linguistic. (Chris cites Clay on this point.) FWIW, I certainly agree that linguistic divisions are real. In EiM’s terms, they matter because they are under-girded by semantic differences that can’t ever be fully overcome (because translation is always rewriting).

AKMA, whose opinion I value highly (he’s one of the voices in the back of my head as I write about some topics - “What would Akma say about this?”), says  nice things about my book. He disputes 5% of it, however, and wonders if the difference between then and now warrants saying there’s a whole new order of order. I’ve replied in the comments.