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. In Everything Is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger charts the new principles of digital order that are remaking business, education, politics, science, and culture. In his rollicking tour of the rise of the miscellaneous, he examines why the Dewey decimal system is stretched to the breaking point, how Rand McNally decides what information not to include in a physical map (and why Google Earth is winning that battle), how Staples stores emulate online shopping to increase sales, why your childrens teachers will stop having them memorize facts, and how the shift to digital music stands as the model for the future in virtually every industry. Finally, he shows how by "going miscellaneous," anyone can reap rewards from the deluge of information in modern work and life.
From A to Z, Everything Is Miscellaneous will completely reshape the way you think--and what you know--about the world.
The Flocking of Information: An Amazon.com Exclusive Essay by David Weinberger
As businesses go miscellaneous, information gets chopped into smaller and smaller pieces. But it also escapes its leash--adding to a pile that can be sorted and arranged by anyone with a Web browser and a Net connection. In fact, information exhibits bird-like "flocking behavior," joining with other information that adds value to it, creating swarms that help customers and, ultimately, the businesses from which the information initially escaped.
For example, Wize.com is a customer review site founded in 2005 by entrepreneur Doug Baker. The site provides reviews for everything from computers and MP3 players to coffee makers and baby strollers. But why do we need another place for reviews? If youre using the Web to research what digital camera to buy for your father-in-law, you probably feel there are far too many sites out there already. By the time you have scrolled through one stores customer reviews for each candidate camera and then cross-referenced the positive and the negative with the expert reviews at each of your bookmarked consumer magazines, you have to start the process again just to remember what people said. Wize in fact aims at exactly that problem. It pulls together reviews from many outside sources and aggregates them into three piles: user reviews, expert reviews (with links to the online publications), and the general "buzz." (For shoppers looking for a quick read on a product, Wize assigns an overall ranking.) When Wize reports that 97 percent of users love the Nikon D200 camera, it includes links to the online stores where the user reviews are posted, so customers are driven back to the businesses to spend their money.
Zillow.com does something similar for real estate. The people behind Expedia.com, Rich Barton and Lloyd Frink, were looking for a new business idea--and were in the market for new homes. After hunting for information, they found that most of it was locked into the multiple listings sites of the National Association of Realtors. Now Zillow takes those listings and mashes them up with additional information that can help a potential purchaser find exactly what she wants. The most dramatic mashup right now is the "heat map" that uses swaths of color to let you tell at a glance what are the most expensive and most affordable areas. At some point, though, Zillow or one of its emerging competitors will mash up listing information with school ratings, crime maps, and aircraft flight patterns.
Wize and Zillow make money by selling advertising, but their value is in the way their sites aggregate the miscellaneous--letting lots of independent sources flock together, all in one place.
Were seeing the same trend in industry after industry, including music, travel, and the news media. Information gets released into the wild (sometimes against a companys will), where it joins up with other information, and the act of aggregating adds value. Companies lose some control, but they gain market presence and smarter customers. The companies that are succeeding in the new digital skies are the ones that allow their customers to add their own information and the aggregators to mix it up, because whether or not information wants to be free, it sure wants to flock.
Think about how you organize your CD collection. Whether you're quirky or meticulous, once you pick a system, you're pretty much stuck with it. But in the digital world the laws of physics no longer apply. At iTunes you can sort music by any number of criteria, including artist, genre, song name, length, or price. The Internet itself is a hyperlinked web of information that we cruise organically, often finding ourselves far afield of where we started. Weinberger takes us on a journey through the human constructs of classification, from alphabetization through the Dewey decimal system, all necessary but limited approaches to organization that seem antiquated in the digital age. At places like Amazon.com and Wikipedia, an almost infinite ability to sort and combine objects and ideas produces results that range from the surprising to the ridiculous. This so-called third order mixes it all up; it's all about multiple connections and a realization that the world is not as orderly as we thought. Weinberger presents a thought-provoking and entertaining look at our rapidly evolving culture of data. David Siegfried
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"The world is messy, like it or not, and it's only going to get messier as the Web destroys rules and rule-makers. You can either complain about the chaos and wish for the good old days of order, or you can buy this book and understand why delirious disorder will soon make us all smarter."--Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail "David Weinberger attacks the complexity of the real world, not by making it simple, but by making it clear. Once he explains how things can be in more than one place at a time--and make sense--you'll never look at a humble index card the same way again."--Esther Dyson
"From how information is organised, to the nature of knowledge and how meaning is determined, this book is a profound contribution to understanding the impact of the digital revolution."--Richard Sambrook, director, BBC Global News "Everything Is Miscellaneous is a rare and mesmerizing mix: one the one hand, it's an essential guide to latest information age trends, one that will be extremely useful for businesses and consumers alike. But the book is much more than that as well: it's a probing and profound exploration of how we create meaning in the world."--Steven Johnson, author of The Ghost Map and Everything Bad Is Good For You
"Just when I thought I understood the world, David Weinberger turns it upside down--and rightside up--again. Everything Is Miscellaneous explains the radical changes happening in digital information--and therefore in society as a whole."--Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and chair, Wikia.com
About the Author
David Weinberger is the co-author of the international bestseller The Cluetrain Manifesto and the author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined. A fellow at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for the Internet and Society, Weinberger writes for such publications as Wired, The New York Times, Smithsonian, and the Harvard Business Review and is a frequent commentator for NPR's All Things
Considered. In 1994, he founded Evident Marketing, a strategic marketing firm on technology issues, and he served as the senior Internet adviser to the Howard Dean campaign. He lives in Boston.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Prologue
Information in Space
"Absolutely not."
I've apparently begun by asking Bob Medill the wrong question: "Don't you put the most popular items in the back?" He could have taken it as an insult, for it's a customer-hostile technique many retailers use to force shoppers to walk past items they hope they'll buy on impulse. But the soft-spoken Medill is confident in his beliefs. Besides, he's been asked that before. It's a rookie question.
"No," he says, looking out over the Staples office supply store he manages. "In front are the destination categories because that's what our customers told us they want." His arm sweeps from left to right, gesturing to the arc of major sections of the store: "Paper, digital imaging, ink and toner, business machines, and the copy center."
It's two o'clock in the afternoon, but we have the place to ourselves. Even if a customer wanted to buy something, no one is at the cash register. If you need help with your purchase, no "associates"--Staplesese for "sales assistants"--are available. Medill is unconcerned. That's the way it's supposed to be. We're in the Prototype Lab, a full-sized store mock-up at the company's headquarters in an office park in Framingham, Massachusetts.
The site has nothing of a Hollywood set about it. It's all real and fully stocked, from the twenty-four-pound paper marked on sale to the blister-packed pens hanging neatly side by side. Eight people work there full-time, which is less than a real store's typical complement of twenty-nine but still no small expense. Yet it's worth it because, despite the aisles of pens and the pallets of paper positioned by forklifts, the Prototype Lab is actually about information. Every day Bob Medill and his staff work on strategies to overcome the limitations of atoms and space so customers can navigate a Staples store as if it were pure information.
That's not the way Medill would put it. From his point of view, the Prototype Lab is a testing ground for making shopping at Staples easier for customers. That by itself puts him in the vanguard of merchandisers. More typical merchandisers use physical space against customers so that customers will spend more money than they intend. It's a science retailers know well. Supermarkets stock popular items, such as milk and bananas, in the back of the store to take advantage of the way physical space works: To get from area A to aisle C, we have to go past shelf B, which just happens to have a sign announcing a special on something we didn't come in for. Likewise, you'll find doggie treats below eye level because it's something kids are more likely than their parents to put in the cart. When Medill talks about making it easier for Staples' customers to get out of the store fast, he's a bona fide revolutionary.
"Customers fall into two buckets," says Liz McGowan, Staples' director of visual merchandising. "People who feel that asking for help is a personal failure and those who don't." Despite what comedians tell us, the dividing line is not based on gender. "My mother is in the first bucket," she says. McGowan is data-driven, so she knows the precise volume of the buckets. "Thirty-two percent ask associates. Twenty-four percent use signage. Forty percent already know where things are." It's the 60 percent who need help that determine the informational layout of the store. In the Prototype Lab, that's known as "way-finding," and it's where how people think meets the way their bodies deal with space.
"We learn by watching our customers' eyeballs," Medill says. Customers enter the store and move nine to twelve feet in, and then they--we--"stand and scan." That's why, unlike most stores, Staples doesn't put much signage in the entranceway. Instead, it places signs over the most popular destinations, and signs for subcategories under those signs, like a map of continents divided into countries and then into states. Gesturing at the cleanliness of the design, Medill says, "Originally we had 'focals,'"--signs that call out special offers--"but they blocked eyeballs." In the retail world, the point of "focals" is to interrupt the logical order of the store, bringing some exceptional, can't-be-missed offer to your attention. But focals are also concrete objects, so they not only grab your attention, they also physically obscure information about the store, like a map that puts a big "McDonald's here!" label that obscures most of downtown Poughkeepsie. That's just the way eyeballs work. Because a sign is not information if it can't be physically seen, the average height of human eyeballs also determines the height of the shelves. "By having a store that's mostly low, it's easily scannable," says Medill.
Eyeballs also determine how much information goes on the product description placards that line the shelves, prefacing the products themselves. "With twenty-twenty vision, you have to be able to read it one and a half feet away," explains McGowan. "Three bullets is pretty good," adds Medill. "Five is too many." If human visual acuity were better, there would be more information on the signs, and if we mixed our genes with giraffe DNA, the shelves would be twenty feet tall. And if the shelves were twenty feet tall, a typical Staples might be able to stock 15,000 items instead of 7,200. But why dream? Physical stores are laid out for a species that rarely has eyeballs more than six feet off the ground.
In a physical store, ease of access to information can be measured with a pedometer, and each step is precious. "People come in with lots of ways of identifying printer ink," Medill says. "An old cartridge, an ID number, a printer number, a label from the box." Staples created a catalog of all available printer inks, and gave it its own attractive kiosk. Yet only 7 percent of customers used it. "It was too far away from the inks," Medill explains. "Now we've broken the catalog into pieces and embedded each piece with the relevant merchandise." If you have an Epson printer, you'll find the catalog of Epson inks next to the Epson segment of the ink shelves. "Once we integrated the catalog, twenty percent used it," reports McGowan, the keeper of the numbers.
The purely informational layout of the Prototype Lab is warped by the brute fact that in the physical world, two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time. As we arrange items in space, we're also determining the time it will take to reach them. Eliminate this basic fact of the physical world and there'd be no need for the Prototype Lab.
Of course, we could try stocking the same item in many places throughout the store. But most stores, including Staples, don't like to do that. I ask Mike Moran, the person in charge of figuring out the spatial relationships, for an example of an item that's stocked in more than one place. "Cables," he responds immediately. "What do I use them for? For printing," he says, assuming the customer's point of view. So cables are in with printers. But they're also in a separate cable section. Yet the same argument could be made for stocking blank CDs and DVDs in lots of places. Instead they're confined to a display toward the start of the arc of destination areas Medill had gestured to. Why aren't they also stocked next to the devices that record onto them? Why not also next to paper, since both are ways of recording information? Why not also with software, since they're both CDs? For that matter, why not put pens with paper, with notebooks, with the yellow stickies, and with the blank labels? "Operational simplicity," says Moran. If CDs were put everywhere a customer might want to find them, it would be impossible to make sure that each pile was kept stocked. Besides, it would eat up shelf space, a commodity so limited that in groceries and bookstores, vendors pay for the privilege of having their goods placed well. Destination areas are the only places where there's double stock because, Moran says, "If I leave the store with a printer but not cables, paper, and ink, the product isn't usable, and I come back annoyed."
Having to come back: the victory of space and time over the human ability to remember what goes with what. Many of us find it unreasonably irritating to have to make a second trip to pick up what we forgot the first time--what we forgot because the store-as-information failed to help us remember. Information is easy. Space, time, and atoms are hard.
Medill's crew doesn't think of it this way, but they're in a battle. Their constant enemy is the physical, three-dimensional world itself. Software programmers would say that the people at the Prototype Lab are "hacking the physical"--finding clever ways around the limitations built into the system. The limitations are so much a part of our everyday world that we don't even recognize them as such. For example:
In physical space, some things are nearer than others. That's why Liz McGowan worries about way-finding: She wants us to be able to get everything on our shopping list with the minimum number of steps.
Physical objects can be in only one spot at any one time, so McGowan and Moran have to figure out which one place--or two at the maximum--to put items, even though it'd be easier for customers if anything they wanted was always within arm's reach.
Physical space is shared, so there can be only one layout, even though we all have different needs. If you're in a wheelchair, McGowan's careful organization of signs at average height isn't going to work very well for you. Or if you go to Staples primarily for school supplies, you'll probably find the store's choice of what counts as a destination area irrelevant, since it doesn't include crayons and three-hole Harry Potter notebooks.
Human physical abilities are limited, so the amount of information provided to us is constrained by our ability to see; you wouldn't want the informational signs to be so detailed that they obscured the products themselves.
Th...
