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.

The eighth and last in my series of Miscellaneous interviews, sponsored by the Berkman Center and Wired, is up. I talk with Richard Sambrook, head of the BBC World Service and blogger. We talk not so much about citizens as journalists as about citizens as those who exercise editorial judgment. How will the BBC compete in a world where we’re busily telling one another what we ought to read…especially as content gets pulled out of the sites themselves? [Tags: richard_sambrook bbc news journalism citizen_journalism everything_is_miscellaneous berkman wired]

Jeremiah Owyang has found a great place not to be reading Everything is Miscellaneous. Yes, Jeremiah, you are “a real web geek.” But I’m glad you like the book.

Bill Sodeman, a professor at Hawaii Pacific University (tough gig, Bill!), says it’s “a mind-bending book about the modern Web, with serious implications for competitive strategy.”

Kes Sampanthar of Beyond Brainstorming writes: “If you are at all interested in the history of information and how we as humans have struggled to come to terms with the world, then this book is one of the best I have come across. It is well written and a pleasure to read.” He provides an extensive summary of the book, with reflections.

Christopher Maier writes, “when you come across a book that makes you look at everything a little longer and a little differently, you’ve found a rare and good thing.” He then applies the notion of the miscellaneous to the Human Genome Project.

Tom Wilson of Information Research doesn’t much like it. He thinks it jumps around and doesn’t have much to say that’s either new or worth saying. In a sober and long-ish review, he finds lots of faults in the argument and presentation. (I respond a bit on the Reviews page.)

Lucy at Over the Backyward eFence likes it a whole lot more than Tom, and says so in a paragraph.

Later: Andrew Whitis at library+instruction+technology is really, really annoyed that I use card catalogs as my main example of second order organization, as if libraries still use card catalogs. He’s not the only librarian who’s had that criticism. True enough, and I do know that. But card catalogs are still one of the most familiar of second order examples around.

Later that same day: Jim Kalbach rounds out a set of posts (June 13, 2007, June 2, 2007, and May 28, 2007) about the book with one that evaluates it overall. His summary: “This is perhaps one of the most interesting books about information and its order that I’ve read. Though I disagree with Weinberger on many points, the book got me thinking, and I found it quite engaging overall.”

10ZenMonkeys has posted a transcript of the interview RU Sirius did with me, as well as a link to the audio.

Writers Read asked “Erin McKean, aka ‘America’s Lexicographical Sweetheart’ and ‘the queen and rock star among lexicographers,’ is the Editor in Chief of Oxford’s American Dictionaries, what she’s reading.  She replied:

I’m right in the middle of David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous, which is terrifically smart and eerily prescient about where information is going (and how we’ll find it once we’ve caught up to it). As a lexicographer, I especially enjoyed his take on the evolution of alphabetical order … finally, someone gets it!

Thanks!

AcademHack thinks it’s an ok book — good for an aiplane ride, but not scholarly enough.

Hans-Christoph Hobohm considers it at length (in German), finds it to be too American and hype-y, but also thinks it’s a “beautifully written, intelligent essay” that is “absolutely worth reading.”

Seamus McCauley looks at the book as an economist, focusing on what it has to say about the disintermediation of business (what I call “meta-business”). He thinks the book is “excellent.”

Harald Staun in the Frankfurter Allegemeine  says “Weinbergers Thesen … welche tektonischen Verschiebungen auf der Landkarte des Wissen derzeit zu beobachten sind, sind dabei gar nicht so wahnsinnig originell, die Art aber, wie er die gegenwärtige Entwicklung zusammenfasst und wie er ihre Effekte auf die unterschiedlichsten Lebensbereiche skizziert, macht die Tragweite der Veränderungen so klar wie kaum eine Arbeit zuvor. „Everything Is Miscellaneous“ ist ein wissenschaftlicher page turner in der Tradition jener amerikanischen Sachbücher, die keine Angst haben, gelegentlich etwas banal zu klingen, weil sie die Relevanz ihrer Aussagen für den Alltag andeuten wollen.” And, he contines, “In diesem Fall ist dieser Zugang besonders wichtig…”

I think this means: “Weinberger’s theses … about which tectonic shifts in the map of knowledge are currently to be observed are not so much insanely original as to be of the sort that — in how it outlines the current developments and   how it sketches the effects on the most varied aspects of life — makes the consequences of the changes clearer than any work before. EiM is a scholarly page turner in the tradition of the American non-fiction book that has no problem occasionally sounding  banal because it wants to hint at the relevance to everyday life of what it says.  In this case, this approach is especially important …” (Here is Google’s  automatic translation.) Harald is skeptical, however, about the wisdom of the crowd.

In Everything Is Miscellaneous, I use a famous quote from the famous Ted Nelson:

People keep pretending they can make things deeply hierarchical, categorizable, and sequential when they can’t. Everything is deeply intertwingled. (Cited on p. 125 of EiM)

In conversation, Scott Rosenberg said he had been trying to track down the actual source of the quote. I couldn’t help him, and I noted that on the “errata” page of my book’s Web site.

Now, Frank Hecker (see comments #3, #4, and especially #5) has figured it out, which required searching through several editions of Ted Nelson’s “Computer Lib/Machine Dreams.”

The quote I used mixes what Nelson wrote in the original 1974 edition with a sidebar quote from the 1987 edition. The 1974 edition says “everything is deeply intertwingled” twice (p. 45). The 1987 edition says:

Hierarchical and sequential structures, especially popular since Gutenberg, are usually forced and artificial. Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged–people keep pretending they can make things hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can’t. (p. 31)

Next to that is a sidebar that quotes “Everything is deeply intertwingled” from the original edition. Note that the quote as I attributed it to Nelson does not contain the word “deeply.”

For more details, see Franks three comments on my Errata page.

Thank you, Frank! (PS: Wikipedia had the quotation wrong, too. Frank has fixed it.)