In chapter 5 Weinberger looks at the organization of information in retrospect to it's usability for everyone. He uses an example of Getty's Thesaurus was extremely easy to use for those who are familiar with it but to those who aren't, it is almost impossible to find anything. The categories in which everything is organizes are too simple for the complex topics in which it is explaining and therefore makes it hard to use. The Thesaurus example represents orders 1 and 2 (as explain earlier in a previous blog) there has to be a deciding winner, folder, or category that the information falls into.
Web 2.0 really solves this issue of over generalization of categories. Sites like delicious.com and flickr.com have proven that having a community tag images on their own organizational schemes creates a universal order that organizes metadata in a perfect fashion. This is explained as Weinberger's 3rd order.
Wienberger also gives 4 strategic ways of organization:
1)Tagging- This gives a personal user friendly way to remember how and what some thing is ex.delicious.com where people can tag previous website to remember and for others to discover.
2)Filters-With a large number of people to edit information filtering the information can keep the bad stuff out while maintaining the necessary stuff, it becomes a essential tool for web 2.0 organization. Ex. Wikipedia.com where users can edit one another articles.
3)Everything can be labeled- In completely miscellaneous the only real way to organize is to tag to help find it later.
4)Giving up control- Not one person can organize completely miscellaneous information. Web 2.0 gives use the opportunity to compile and look through data us a reasonable means.
I like how you clearly stated the 4 strategic ways of organization, with your own explanation afterward. I agree with your comment about a universal order, that would order all metadata perfectly. I also liked how you talked about the Getty's Thesaurus, since it is a key element in Weinberger's explanation of orders 1 and 2.
ReplyDeleteThe breakdown you gave was great; It made it simple to understand what Weinberger was talking about. How do you think Weinberger's categories compare to those of O'Reilly? You mentioned Web 2.0 as kind of this revolutionary step in organization and I agree. In this era of development, the ability to pick the needle out of the haystack is becoming much easier even though the haystack is growing exponentially.
ReplyDeleteYou do a great job summarizing Weinberger here. I would've been curious to see a few more ties to the articles, specifically backed up w/ evidence from those articles. Hang onto the ideas here, because you're spot on. You just might want to go back and check the Web 2.0 & Squared articles so you can pull some specific terms/ideas from there for the midterm.
ReplyDelete4)Giving up control- Not one person can organize completely miscellaneous information.
ReplyDeleteI disagree with this whole concept. I think we are all capable to organize our information. We organize it the way we want it to be organized that fits our needs but we take out to th public they will organize it to fit their needs. I think is more of losing a personal feeling and a sense of losing ownership to that information more than losing or giving up control.