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."

Vloggers and Lifecasters

Bloggers with video. Subjective audiovisual journals telling intimate stories. They have been posting to YouTube since the beginning, but now many outlets broadcast personal video logs.

United Vloggers is attempting to attract outspoken, talented and interesting storytellers to post regular videos. Some great stuff...some junk.

Ze Frank broadcast a short vlog every day for a year straight. This is a master storyteller and an articulate spoken word master. Few vlogs are this eloquent.

Justin.tv started a huge live video trend recently. This is vlogging to the extreme. Justin Kan began broadcasting his life continuously around the clock in early 2007 and now many others have joined this "lifecaster" by broadcasting their own lives 24/7 using wearable cameras.

A gazillion hours of talking heads and their personal narratives await!

iPhone Parody Parity

I walked by the Seattle Apple Store today just to check out the line. It certainly stretched for a few blocks. I want my iPhone, but I can wait. I shot this video with my Treo 650 Palm-based camera phone.

There is very little to say about the iPhone that hasn't already been said. The reviews are good, with some complaints that the "phone" part of the iPhone is lacking, but the "i" part of the iPhone is ground-breaking. This product is not so much the ultimate palm computer, it is more like a milestone along the road to computers becoming more and more personal and simplified.

Apple has orchestrated the marketing masterfully. They know the limits of hype and how to push it right to the edge of saturation...and beyond. One thing is for sure, slick marketing creates slick parody. Dozens of sites and mock commercials are floating around the web. The beautiful iPhone marketing graphics and slogans become a press kit full of assets for satirists. It works well for Apple.

iPhone parody is everywhere: Saturday Night Live, iPhoneSize.com, iPrecious, College Humor, Conan O'Brien, Craig Ferguson, the biPhone, YouTube Ad, and, of course, The Onion.