Buy Viagra - HQ Pharmacy

First of all, I did significantly less live-blogging from Picnic in Amsterdam than I expected -- I had to give two talks at partner events (for HIVOS and the European Journalism Center) and I was attending most of the European Bloggers Unconference, so this really kept me busy. I hardly caught anything mainstream other than a Wednesday evening talk by David Weinberger. I read his book this summer and it was great to hear him reiterate all those ideas in public -- it has definitely helped me better understand them. My detailed account of his talk is below.

                                                ***

David Weinberger, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School and the author of "Everything is Miscellaneous" and a co-author of "Cluetrain Manifesto" delivered a succinct version of his "miscellaneous" argument at Picnic 2007, one of the biggest new media gatherings in Europe.

David is the blogosphere's ambassador to the Keen-land: he is one of the few big names who have responded in earnest to Andrew Keen's argument on various occasions (for example, see the transcript of an earlier debate between them in Wall Street Journal, this post that Weinberger wrote for the Huffington Post and this audio debate the two had on a Dutch radio station). The much-anticipated Keen-Weinberger debate was scheduled for Thursday morning, but in preparation to it Weinberger held a talk on Wendesday evening where he was trying to both articulate Keen's position and fight it (hey, isn't that a great way to win a debate?).

Why Weinberger should be the one debating Keen still escapes me, since they are essentially talking about different issues (Keen -- about the dilution of the expertise on the Internet; Keen--about the superior ways to organize and find data that the Web offers). Their arguments do not necessarily contradict each other, but, well, both men need to sell books, so they keep arguing.

Weinberger starts by outlining Keen's best case -- or rather summarizing the previous points he had made in his Huffington Post entry. "The short summary of Andrew's argument -- which he may not fully understand himself is that all things happening to the Internet are bad", says Weinberger. Those who have read Keen's book would know how much stress Keen places on the notion of expertise and mainstream media's role in cultivating talent (which is rare, says Keen).

On the web, argues Keen, we don't have people who do that. Talent goes unrecognized. It also means that we are left with homogenous mass of untalented amateurs and if there are bright spots in this mix, we can't find them, because we are overwhelmed by the amount of information, says Weingberger. In short, Keen laments the lack of guides that can help us find information. So this is how we end up on YouTube instead of finding the great works of art.

There is some merit to Keen's argument, acknowledges Weinberger, as there are many negatives on the Internet and we often need to give something up in exchange of what we gain via the Web. Instead of saying that the the old way of doing things was really good and the new way of doing things is really wrong, we should think of ways in which they can co-exist.

David's point is that we never really see the Web, which is growing so rapidly that it's hard to follow. Instead, what we see is the stuff that we are being pointed to by friends and other nodes on our social network who recommend resources to us all the time, either openly or indirectly. A link is a way of recommending things, this is the reason why Tim Berners Lee built the Internet, says Weinberger. The Web we had before him did exist, but it wasn't properly linked and suitable for recommendations and hence was deficient and unpopular. So, even if we follow Keen's argument that we are overwhelmed with crap (which Weinberger doesn't really seem to buy into),  the Web is not the problem, it's the solution. Sure, people disagree and we are overwhelmed, but the web was designed precisely for this.

After 15 minutes of Keen-bashing, Weinberger finally goes into the core of his own argument. He presents a huge organizational tree and points to the little box at the bottom which says "Misc" on it while all other boxes cluster things that are alike. Our traditional understanding of successful organization has been to minimize that box; the bigger it is, the worse our organizational efforts have been.

Weinberger suggests that in the world of the Internet,  it's a good strategy to let the misc box eat everything else and take over. Weinberger also points out that he uses the term "miscellaneous" in a context that is slightly different from its traditional use. "There are many many jigsaw pieces lying on the floor in the main conference hall. This is the traditional miscellaneous".

In the digital world, however, the miscellaneous is the opposite of the traditional. The miscellaneous is saturated and rich with connections and meaning. It's a completely different sense of the miscellaneous, which we traditionally have understood as "useless". The more you think about the misc, you end up with the net – where you can post/read/write what you want – all without commission. As a result, we end up with more of everything. It's more art, but also more porn. More love, but also more hate. More intelligent analysis but also more utter foolishness (at this point Weinberger shows Google results for each term). It's more of everything on the Web, concludes Weinberger.

Weinberger looks deeper into how we have traditionally gone about organizing things; the main purpose has always been to keep things apart, as in the physical world two things can't be at the same place at the same time (David shows a very funny photo of two cars jammed in one parking spot). "We are good at arranging stuff", says Weinberger. We cluster students at secondary school. We do the same in science. We do it in museums. As soon as we start doing this – that everything has to go somewhere and two things can't be at the same place-- we immediately create a regime of power.

Weinberger shows a slide with a cover of the Washington Post and laments the presence of the limited physical text space in the newspaper. The limits mean that somebody has to make a decision about what's important and what's not. Sometimes those decisions are good, sometimes they are not, but they need to made in a world where we face physical constraints. So we take this limitation of the physical world and believe that we have to eternalize it.

The notion of joints that make the whole has been part of the Western tradition, says Weinberger and points the audience to Plato, who is succeeded by what he calls the"cannibalistic beef chart"—dissection of the beef products advertised by a beefy salesman. This is the right word of the world, that's what we believe in the West, says Weinberger.

This is probably why we often end up having very long and heated arguments over very silly things (last year's scientific squabble over Pluto is a case in point). But, counters Weinberger, how we categorize things really depends on our interest and intents (hence such classification decisions are often arbitrary). "If you are interested in life on other planets, you'll cluster them by if they have water or not. If by weather, then you'll go for the atmosphere. We pick a category based on our interest/motivation".

When it comes to archived information, it gets even worse, says Weinberger, because we are still largely a paper-based culture. Our education and culture are transmitted by paper. We are taking one part of life and making that into objects that are difficult to change, says Weinberger. “There is one way of doing things and there is one particular authority, and this is it".

Weinberger talks about three orders of organization, First, he shows a photo of a traditional archive with lots of data pigeonholed into folders and files. This is the first order. Then, he pulls up a picture of  a library, which presents the organization of the second order. In this second order, you get the library data -- medadata, the information about information. This is best represented by a card catalogue model. So we are trying to reduce the amount of info into a really little piece of paper that would be descriptive enough for us to find it. And we can also walk our fingers through that pile, which is actually nice.

The third order occurs when data meets metadata in the digital world, which, as we know, has a completely different set of rules than the real world with all its constraints. It also means that we need to reinvent the basic principles of organization. Weinberger points to four new principles that define this new metada+data way of organizing data.  

The first principle is what Weinberger calls "leaf on many branches"--think about an online store like Amazon and  such a basic product as a camera being listed under recording devices, equipment, gadgets, etc -- the more categories it falls under, the better it is.

The second principle "messiness is a virtue" refers to the cross-linking culture of the Internet, where meaning emerges out of what appears to be a very messy world of connections between blogs, web-sites, social network profiles, etc. "Each of those links adds value and enriches what you've written. In the online world, messiness is not a disaster -- the way it is in real world", says Weinberger.

The third principle is the disappearing difference between metadata and data. In the physical world, we don't confuse the label and the object in the physical world. But in the online environment, things are rather different: when you search for a particular book, for example, you can search by the name of the author (meta-data) or by the actual text of the book. Thus, there is no formal distinction between metadata and data. If you know the one, you can get to the other. Curiously, says Weinberger, if everything is metadata, then we can eventually use it to get smarter as a species, as search is going to become much easier and different.

The fourth and the last principle that Weinberger identifies is the "unowned order".  Offline, whoever owns the stuff, also owns the organization of it. Online, it's different, whoever access the stuff owns the organization of it. To illustrate this distinction, Weinberger draws a comparison between shopping in a big mall with lots of highly organized stuff and shopping in a big online mess; paradoxically, you are much more likely to leave the online shop if you have limited time -- it's just easier to.

The broader message that it all alludes to is that our way of accessing stuff is no longer constrained by the owners/producers of the data, but rather by the browsers/users of it.

Then Weinberger ventures into more practical examples from the Web. First, he loads Delicious and gives a brief introduction to how it works.  "it feels really great to have the whole world do research for you", says Weinberger talking about the possibility to subscribe for specific tags on this popular social-bookmarking web-site. However, Weinberger doesn't limit the potential of social bookmaking just to finding new interesting information; he also says that one gets to know and remember other people by their ability to link. You discover they save similar pages as you do, you go to all other pages they've saved, you find who they are, follow their tags. "Eventually, you marry", jokingly says Weinberger.

Tags tell a great deal about us and can cast a better view of our true identity, says Weinberger. The pages we visit, save, and tag are all relevant for us somehow, so tag clouds and all sorts of other tag aggregators can be very informative.

The big change is that we are moving from a time when we thought that the best way to organize the info is to get some experts together and have them decide what's relevant and what's not relevant--thus making them shape our knowledge. No need to argue with that -- we still have experts who are amazingly good and professional about what they do and how they do it.

"Yet the good news about the new ways in which data is organized is that they are additive; we can keep the good old ways, but we are also saying let's take those leaves off the tree and make a miscellaneous pile of stuff hoping that it would reveal connections between pieces", rather enthusiastically says Weinberger.

"So instead of excluding stuff, let's include anything. When you as an editor make an assumption that Paris Hilton article is trivia, you include them anyway and let people decide. Who knows, in ten years there will surely be somebody that would be writing a thesis about it,  so include it!".

Weinberger also talks about the need to postpone the decision about categories until the very end--this is the best scenario."Let the user/reader decide. You don't have to decide what's interesting and what' not. Best editors of the newspapers simply can't know what we are all interested in", he observes.

But it's also valuable to let the information from your service--be that a music or video or photo sharing site--go in many infinite directions. Other aggregators add intrinsic value to most information -- this is why we go to travel sites that offer us the best deal by aggregating data from multiple airlines (and this is also why the airlines are willing to disclose this data to third-part sites with their own business models). Referring to the springing culture of mash-ups on the Web, Weinberger points that the aggregated information can be mixed with history of fares, user behavior, and many other factors that would make it much more useful and informative.  

"Rather than thinking that info needs to be guarded, it needs to be free. It already wants to get together and meet with other data. I called this meta-business, but the name didn't catch on", smilingly says Weinberger.  

What are the immediate applications of all these factors?

The first one is simplicity. Weinberger gives an example of a speech that George Bush gave on immigration sometime ago. That was a relatively simple speech. Yet within hours thousands of bloggers had examined it from a multitude of angles and managed to introduce quite a few complexities that Bush probably hardly anticipated. Bloggers do this all the time -- looking at something really straightforward and try to position within the broader complex--because that's what humans do; we find a topic of common interest and engage in conversations about it. That's the opposite of what we get in broadcast media, which tends to simplify rather than complicate. "That's why we are so happy to be on the web, that's why we like blogging--we get to be complex again", says Weinberger.

The second application is the triumph of the implicit. We see it in knowledge management, although this is a term that doesn't go well anymore. When employees leave jobs, we want to make all their knowledge explicit -- this is not a very good strategy. "Computers are fantastic at the explicit, but not at implicit", says Weinberger.

To illustrate his point, he shows a photo of a gas station in Boston--it was one of those modern ones that don't have buttons but only have touch-screen labels on them.

Although the screen did have a special label that said "start", many people though it was just a marker. So the gas station had to put up a sign that said “press start here” and had an error on it. The conclusion that Weinberger draws from this is that we are so good at metadata that when the implicit and explicit goes mixed up, many funny things happen (especially because most of the time we get things right).

Next, he shows a picture of his two teenage children. If you asked him to write a profile of himself, he won't do it well â€“ it's the worst picture of himself ever;  his tag cloud is much better and way more representative of his real identity. "We get terribly know when we go explicit; we are much better at being implicit".

Facebook is a good case in point. Weinberger had a very peculiar experience when his son had "befriended" him there. It's curious how pages get really messy very quick on Facebook â€“ we see what groups people join, what they care about and what they don't care about. Sites like Facebook pave new ways in which people can be connected to one another. These sites are already dense with feeling and relationships – most of it is implicit and it should remain so, argues Weinberger.

The third application is social knowledge. Weinberger shows a slide of a Mars bar. Then he shows a Wikipedia page about deep-fried mars bar. Let's suppose three people contributed to it. First is the leading expert on the subject That's the best article ever written on deep-fried Mars bars. Along comes a second person – who fixes it and reverts it back to its previous versions. Finally, a third person comes along and changes it again. Finally, the first expert gets really frustrated with Wikipedia and leaves. "So off goes the leading expert and we lose this person from the conversation. We hope that he or she goes to his own web-site and still creates content, but he is gone from the global conversation". But that's not all: by leaving this global conversation developing on the pages of Wikipedia talk, she also becomes the most leading expert who is not relevant any more.

What's also interesting, says Weinberger, is how knowledge emerges from a conversation. "Conversation drives bugs out of knowledge", assures Weinberger. "This is not just a Wikipedia phenomenon. This has been  going on for many years – and Weineberger gives an example of mailing lists. Suppose he's been on one one for years – over the years he's learn that Harold is an excellent expert on a particular topic. In part, because other experts are agreeing with him...Yet if i had a chance between Harold or subscribing to the mailing list, i'm better off at the mailing list – because the knowledge is in social interaction – the list is smarter than he is. This is how humans work and this is how we talk. Conversation drives bugs out of knowledge, as well as bias and prejudice, repeats Weinberger. 

Today, we develop knowledge socially in the media, and Digg and Reddit, popular social news web-sites, which Weinberger briefly talks about, are good examples.  Even some traditional media have realized this -- a case in point is USA Today, which has recently implemented a "thumbs up" feature (it still doesn't give the opportunity to "bury" an article they don't like by giving them "thumbs down"-- perhaps, it's still a bit too controversial even for USA Today). If we don't want to see Timberlake on a newspaper cover (Weinberger shows one), we should be able to say so. Nevertheless, what USA Today is doing is a step forward.

Another example of how knowledge has become social is how today's kids do homework today -- obviously, they do most of it online with four or five instant messaging windows open. But even though they acquire their knowledge socially, they are still graded individually. This needs to change, says Weinberger.

Weinberger can't resist to comment on Britannica vs Wikipedia argument. To him, Wikipedia is a more credible source and the credibility comes because of the experts vs non-experts divide. On Wikipedia, you can spot big obvous errors; you can go and edit a page you don't like, you can check the discussion page; you can watch ourselves arguing over issues. If you need to alert the world about quality standards on Wikipedia, you stick in warning labels like "this article documents a current event" or " need to reference more sources", so that readers can understand the context. arning labels -- “quality standards”, “clean up”.

Wikipedia's willingness to have a stick in it that warns that an article is not credible makes Wikipedia far more credible than Britannica whose contents you are forced to believe in blind faith. "Wikipedia is on our side. It's helping us to understand our world better and it admits human fallibility".  You would rarely notice corrections that New York Times runs to its articles -- they are well-hidden somewhere deep inside the paper, as the business models of such institutions depend on their credibility. Wikipedia is not ashamed, so it puts them on the front page.

Martin Heidegger--whom Weinberger doesn't like so much for his politics--once had a very good example of what it takes to understand how it's like to be a hammer

To know that a hammer is, you need to know wtat nails are. But to know that, you need to understand what wood is, and then you need to understand trees, forest, economic system, and you need to understand that they are on Earth, so understand the hammer one needs to understand everything. The meaning of the hammer is its context and its place in those semantic links.

We are talking about a web of meaning and significance that helps us to externalize meaning . That's a big deal, believes Weinberger, as some of these materials are linked in ways in which it would be hard to do it otherwise.

Web is more of everything, repeats Weinberger. It's more of tags, more of mess, more of taxonomy. Link sharing has evolved into an act of generosity -- a way for us to give away interesting stuff that others may be interested in -- but in the process, we also add meaning to those links by sharing them. We are pointing each other to a bunch of ideas and a bunch of other people. This is a very primordial thing--and this is also how we converse generally. e doing for one another.

The most important thing about is not just its richness and its potential. The most important thing about the Web is that it has not been given to us by someone else. It's ours. We are building it for ourselves, on purpose and implicitly. That's how we are building our infrastructure of meaning.