David Weinberger

David Weinberger - Recently old. - writer - Harvard Library Innovation Lab - Brookline, Boston - I write about the Internet, am at Harvard's Berkman Center

The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual Copyright © 1999, 2001 Levine, Locke, Searls & Weinberger.

What is the Web for? And why do we care so much? Why has this simple technology sent a lightning bolt through our culture? It goes far beyond the Web's over-hyped economic impact: 500 million of us aren't there because we want a better "shopping experience." The Web, a world of pure connection, free of the arbitrary constraints of matter, distance and time, is showing us who we are - and is undoing some of our deepest misunderstandings about what it means to be human in the real world.

May-June 2007, I did a series of podcasts about topics in my book, Everything Is Miscellaneous. They were posted at The Berkman Center and at Wired.com, complete with transcripts. Here's a list of them:

Amazon.com:Human beings are information omnivores: we are constantly collecting, labeling, and organizing data. But today, the shift from the physical to the digital is mixing, burning, and ripping our lives apart. In the past, everything had its one place--the physical world demanded it--but now everything has its places: multiple categories, multiple shelves. Simply put, everything is suddenly miscellaneous.

David Wienberger explains how methods of categorization designed for physical objects fail when we can instead put things in multiple categories at once, and search them in many ways.

Everything is Miscellaneous takes all the precious ideas we are taught as librarians and throws them out the window. Structure, order, precise metadata, bibliographic control: gone, gone, gone, gone.

A session that explores Weinberger's book Everything is Miscellaneous and its implications for education.

About David Weinberger’s book (May, 2007) and how we’re pulling ourselves together now that we’ve blown ourselves to bits.

David Weinberger (born 1950 in New York) is an American technologist, professional speaker, and commentator, probably best known as co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto (originally a website, and eventually a book, which has been described as "a primer on Internet marketing"). Weinberger's work focuses on how the Internet is changing human relationships, communication, and society.

At its heart, David’s book is about what happens when we liberate knowledge from the world of atoms. In the physical world, we can only organize books on a shelf in one way or another - books can’t be in multiple places at once

BoingBoing:It's a powerful idea: from org charts to science, from music to retail theory, from government to education, every field of human endeavor is tinged with hierarchy, and every hierarchy is under assault from the Internet.

The first in a series of interviews conducted by David Weinberger, author of the new book Everything Is Miscellaneous.David and Cory discuss the advantages and pitfalls of explicit and implicit metadata, tags and etc.