Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder

I hate folders. My files never fit perfectly into a folder structure. Many modern taxonomists are suggesting that we are seeing the demise of folders and the death of buckets. In other words, if all content can be tagged with keywords then why bother sticking it in any particular folder. How often have we all tried to file a document in a particular folder only to realize that it could actually be at home in multiple folders? With tagging, we don’t have to worry about this, just tag a document with a variety of keywords and you’ll be able to find it again one day.

David Weinberger talks about this in a much more eloquent fashion than I do. Check out his new book Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. I especially enjoy his humorous brushing aside of Melvil Dewey, inventor of the stunningly frustrating Dewey Decimal System. Check out the video below where he talks about (among many other things) how Dewey was a man obsessed with the number ten...so much so that he would arrange his travel dates so that he would arrive at his destination only on dates that were divisible by ten.


"Google Tech Talks May 10, 2007 David Weinberger's new book covers the breakdown of the established order of ordering. He 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. This is no dry book on taxonomy, but has the insight and wit you'd expect from the author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, Small Pieces Loosely Joined, and a former writer for Woody Allen."

Download: The True Story of the Internet

The Science Channel is broadcasting a great documentary chronicling the history of the Internet called Download: The True Story of the Internet. Created by technology journalist John Heileman, this film is full of interviews and insights and behind-the-scenes gossip.

They describe it this way: "From the founders of eBay, Yahoo, Amazon, Netscape, Google and many others, we hear amazing stories of how, in ten short years, the Internet took over our lives. These extraordinary men and women tell us how they went from being geeky, computer obsessed nerds to being 21st-century visionaries in the time it takes most people to get their first promotion. And, how they made untold billions along the way."

Presenting Perfectly with PowerPoint

PowerPoint has reached ubiquitous status in most parts of the world. Today anyone can give a multimedia presentation. Although most of these presentations are either mind-numbingly boring or brain-bendingly confusing, there are still artful public speakers who can use this tool to make magic.

David Byrne (formerly of the Talking Heads) created a great book and DVD art project called Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information that is a must see for any serious PowerPoint junkie.


Also, check out Clif Atkinson's seminal guide to presenting, Beyond Bullet Points.


Very Funny: Don McMillan on most common mistakes people make while doing PowerPoint presentations.

2007 Year in Review

It has been said that when journalists get lazy at the end of the year, they write “Year in Review” articles. When bloggers get lazy, they link to these retrospectives. So, without further ado, I present my own year-end linking extravaganza.

Reuters Year in Review
The worldwide news service looks at 2007 with photos and video.

The Onion 2007 Year in Review
What the Hell Just happened?

People Magazine Best of 2007
The Bible of pop culture.

KEXP 13 Great Musical Discoveries of 2007
Including Vampire Weekend, Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings, and Yeasayer with audio samles.

NPR Music Top 10 Lists
Tons of great music was birthed this year.

ABC News Top 5 Quotes of 2007
Some things are better left unsaid such as “Don’t tase me, bro”.

The Time Magazine Best Websites of 2007
Including Mozy, StumbleUpon, Etsy, and Weebly. Also a list of the worst sites.

JibJab Remembers 2007
The kings of link fodder wrap it all up.

Best Product Design of 2007 on Business Week
A slideshow of the 2007 International Design Excellence Awards.

Internet TV Year in Review
Mucho movement in the world of Internet TV including Joost, Divx, set top boxes, Zattoo, Hulu, and iTunes.

The CNN Year in Review
A year of tragedy and scandal.

The CNN Top Science & Technology Stories
Facebook, iPhone, crazy astronauts, new planets and Halo 3.

YouTube Year End Video Wrap Up
Including Obama Girl, Chocolate Rain, Nora the piano playing cat, and the Haiti UFO.

Some of the most popular posts on ToddTibbetts.com have been: They Promised Us Convergence, Idioms, Credos, Sayings and Maxims, No Schmooze, You Lose, SWAG Stories, and My Widget Wad.

Those Who Left Us in 2007
Notable deceased include Art Buchwald, Michelangelo Antonioni, Boris Yeltsin, Jerry Falwell, Robert Goulet, Molly Ivins, Norman Mailer, Evel Knievel, Charles Nelson Reilly, Anna Nicole Smith, Don Ho, Oscar Peterson, and Paul Tibbets, commander of the Enola Gay.

Technology, Entertainment, Design

Since 1984, the TED Conference has organized many of the worlds great thinkers, artists, scientists, architects and performers for an annual gathering. Each presenter gets only 18 minutes to give a talk. This forces them to crystallize their ideas into a direct and efficient performance.

Recently TED has embarked on an ambitious web initiative. They have digitized many of these speakers and are offering their talks free to the world via their website.

Some of my favorite talks include:

Dutch artist Theo Jansen demonstrates his amazingly lifelike kinetic sculptures, built from plastic tubes and lemonade bottles.

Planetary scientist Carolyn Porco shows breathtaking images from the Cassini voyage to Saturn.

In a friendly, high-speed presentation, Will Wright demos his newest game, Spore, which promises to dazzle users even more than his previous masterpieces.

Jonathan Harris wants to make sense of the infinite world on the Web -- so he builds dazzling graphic interfaces that help us visualize the data floating around out there.

After sweetly confessing that he never meant to be a performance artist, Golan Levin explains that his art is all about the quest to find a personal way to use a computer.

Bill Stone, the maverick cave explorer who invented robots and dive equipment that have allowed him to plumb Earth's deepest abysses, explains his efforts to build a robot to explore Jupiter's moon Europa.

Kevin Kelly uses evolutionary theory to discuss the purpose and value of technology.

Also, don't miss The Future We Will Create: Inside the World of TED, a documentary about the conference, available from Netflix thru their "Watch Instantly" online streaming video service.