Beware the Seduction of the Miscellaneous

David Schatsky | August 14, 2007, 07:47 PM

David Weinberger's excellent book, "Everthing is Miscellaneous" is enlightened, exciting, and inspiring. And taking it too literally could destroy your business.

Because my recent reading of Andrew Keen's "The Cult of the Amateur" got my blood pumping, and given the frequent juxtaposition of Keen and Weinberger, I was prepped for a direct counter-attack in Weinberger's book.

You don't exactly find that, but you do find is a very persuasive explanation of the value of non-hierarchical, messy systems (such as tagging) for organizing information. You also find some controversial assertions about the nature and creation of knowledge and how the Internet is affecting business.

Most aggravating to me is how Weinberger keeps smudging the line between understanding, meaning and knowledge. Now, I recognize that line smudging is the subversive work he champions in the book. But temperamentally rigid folks like me may be frustated with this boundary blurring. And categorical promiscuity may cause some, maybe even me, to misunderstand what Weinberger is up to.

Take Wikipedia, for example. For Weinberger, Wikipedia is an example of the awesome power of collective intelligence, harnessed by an elegant social media framework, to create knowledge. Wikipedia shows, he says, how "a miscellaneous collection of anonymous and pseudonymous authors can precipitate knowledge" (p. 139). But is knowledge created in Wikipedia? Or does Wikipedia merely suck it out of other, more traditional sources, weakening or destroying their business models? Read that sentence closely and you think, sure, they are "precipitating" it--shaking it loose from a variety of other sources--but they are not creating it.

He characterizes Wikipedia as a grand conversation, and then says that "conversations aim at understanding, not knowledge" (p. 203), suggesting that it's not about knowledge, but rather the mutual understanding taking hold in the community that has arisen around Wikipedia. Wikepedia may be better characterized, then, as a social network that links people who shared interests such as Paris Hilton [], Psoriasis and oregano.

Weinberger says "knowledge isn't in our heads: It is between us" (p. 147). But not all knowledge is socially constructed. Much of it comes from patient, solitary work conducted by lone researchers.

Weinberger is quite enthusiastic about the idea that the dynamic, unreliable and unauthoritative nature of much of the information you find on the Internet requires us to be more engaged and critical consumers of information. "The trust we place in the Britannica enables us to be passive knowers: You merely have to look a topic up to find out about it" (p. 142). But that's what great about sources like Brittanica. It's why the creditials of the contributors have value; it's why we pay skilled editors. Can you trust the accuracy of that Wikipedia entry? Who knows? Look at the edit history, look at the track record of the last person who edited the article. "Deciding what to believe is now our burden," Weinberger says, approvingly(p. 143).

Weinberger creates a false dichotomy between passive knowing--in which you can trust the authority of a source--and active knowing--in which you have to be skeptical and validate the accuracy of information you read. I would rather have the accuracy relatively assured, freeing me to actively analyze the implications of the information I read, rather than wasting time fact checking my encyclopedia.

In his descriptions how the Internet is transforming business, Weinberger is clearly enthusiatic about the changes. But there is a kind of idealistic or panglossian tone suggesting that the Internet makes everyone better off, and that all businesses should jump on the bandwagon and set their information free. "Now that information is being commoditized," he writes, "it has more value if it's set free into the miscellaneous. For example, airlines do better when their proprietary scheduling and pricing information is made available to travel sites such as Expedia, Travelocity, and Orbitz." That's true, and it largely because airlines are not in the information business; they are in the transportation business.

Companies in the information business, from newspapers to Brittanica to my own, however, would do well to read Weinberger cautiously. Here's an example of a dangerous misreading of the information ecology of the Internet:

Google ... owns the information it has gathered (or at least the metadata it has gathered from the pages it has indexed), the ways to navigate it, and the experience users have on the site. But Google has been innovative in letting that information be miscellanized. For example, by making it easy for people to do mashups with Google Maps, combining maps with other information, Google maps have become the defacto standard on the Web.

This is misleading for the simple reason that the core data of Google Maps is not owned by Google; the company licenses it from NAVTEQ. Google's core proprietary data--data on page rank, the mechanisms of relevance, AdWords pricing data--are all secret or tightly controlled by Google, and understandably so: being too open would enable competitors and a new breed of search intermediaries to grab a share of Google's revenue.

Arguing that companies must free their data so customers can use them as they like, Weinberg writes "...the most successful businesses will have to get over the second-order assumption that they own the customer's experience. In a truly miscellaneous world, a successful business owns nothing but what it wants to sell us. The rest is ours." It kind of sends a chill up your spine, doesn't it? But what many businesses are selling is the experience. It's why we go to restaurants instead of "aggregating" our own ingredients and cooking them ourselves. It is how companies can differentiate themselves and compete, particularly in the face of relentless commoditization.

Weinberger's book is highly stimulating. But his enthusiasm for the new "digital disorder" needs to be tempered with some skepticism, particularly on the part of traditional businesses, who will need to be open and wily to survive and thrive in the Internet's next era.