Weinberger on organizing digital information

David Weinberger answered questions about his book, Everything is Miscellaneous, in an interview with Hugh McKellar, KMWorld (Nov 1, 2007)


He explained that he doesn't mean miscellaneous as a jumble of things that are unrelated to each other but as "the aggregation of everything, with the important difference that with the digital miscellaneous, we find all sorts of ways that the things are alike, all sorts of connections and relationships". He believes in the power of user tagging - of using the relationships that people identify as the means for finding information in an enterprise.

"Tagging systems let the users of information decide how they’re going to think about that information, or what that information means to them. Tagging within the corporation is potentially a very powerful tool for sharing knowledge and for enabling social networks to emerge around shared expertise."

On being asked if this replaces the traditional top-down taxonomies, Weinberger comes very close to saying yes, although in the end he seems to see them as being complementary.

"The real importance of a folksonomy is that it retains much more information than the traditional top-down taxonomy does. The top-down taxonomy only knows, typically, that x is a member of y and y is a member of z. With a folksonomy, you know that 17 percent of people think of x as a member of y, but 23 percent think of it as a member of q, and 42 percent of them think that it’s really the same thing as an x." ... "The folksonomy doesn’t have to replace the taxonomy with another static set of categories. It can instead allow the people who are in the minority a way of thinking about something to search the way that they want to. The folksonomy can surface those minority relationships."


Follow David Weinberger's musings about the organization of information at his blog Everything Is Miscellaneous.com/. The main page also has links to interviews, videos, and podcasts with Weinberger.

Professor Michael Wesch's video Information R/Evolution is especially recommended as it brings home the point that organizing digital information is much different to what civilization worked out for paper.