I attended Dr. David Weinberger’s keynote presentation (22MB, PPT) at the Information Architecture summit in Vancouver last year. It was a preview of his Everything Is Miscellaneous book. The presenation was very inspiring and thought provoking so I was looking forward to the release of his book. And I wasn’t disappointed. I expected a book about Information Architecture (a passion of mine) and library science, but it provided much more.

The theme of this book is that in the 3rd order of information (digital), the constraints for categorizing information in a single structured way has become irrelevant. In the digital order, information can be placed in many places, often without the need for any categories. Information is democratized, and conventional experts are replaced with the wisdom of crowds; no longer is information pre-filtered by editorial boards, but post-filtered by the users of the information, by their own definitions of authority.

The book provides the reader the history of cataloging knowledge, starting with Aristotle, analyzes traditional authorities like the Dewy Decimal system, all the way to the current folksonomies. New ways of managing and retrieving information and knowledge are challenging the conventional wisdom that everything in the world can and should be neatly organized. This new way of thinking is not only applied to knowledge management but can be applied in other areas as well, such as the way organizations are structured.

Dr. Weinberger’s blog is worth subscribing to.