nonlinear

Everything is Miscellaneous and The Cluetrain Mainfesto, both in whole (Miscellaneous) and in part (Cluetrain) by David Weinberger, tell the story of what the internet is: A digital conversation.

Cluetrain is a quick and compelling read, and, it can be read online here.

Everything is Miscellaneous dives into what the digital nature of our online information means.
We’re in a third order of information – information that was once physically located in a book or as a specimen is now hindered if we treat it like its physical ancestors.

• For example, the role of editors in a digital world should not be to limit the amount of available writing on a topic – but rather to collect all available writing on a topic.
• And Wikipedia rules because it has adopted a working definition of neutrality that works in the messy intersection of people online: An article in Wikipedia is neutral “when people have stopped changing it.” It also engenders authority by recognizing when an article isn’t neutral, truthful or hasn’t been verified. (All things that my own workplace, wkyc.com could use a touch of). It also kicks more digital ass than wkyc.com by linking to topics directly within the text of an article*
• “Conversation improves expertise by exposing weakness”
• Pandora.com, Last.fm, Zillow, PropSmart, FareCast.com, Digg.com and kayak.com are examples of meta-businesses that provide users more ways to sort information.

Some web sites of note from Miscellaneous:

• Thinglinks.org
• Valdis Krebs (A greater-Clevelander)
• Librarything.com
• PLoS One

*But, Wikipedia does save links to outside sites for the bottom of an article.

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