Post #6

Everything is Miscellaneous: What i got out of this book is that the world is jam packed with information. Everyone has information and is constantly labeling and organizing data how they feel is appropriate. He discusses all the different ways of organizing data and also some sites out there that people use for data. Key terms- digital order, metaknowledge, metadata.
Convergence Culture: In this book it tries to proves that new media will not simply replace old media, but rather will learn to interact with it in a complex relationship he calls "convergence culture." He talsk about how so many technologies are converging and how society is dealing with this and where he sees is going. He talks about technology not taking over but merely a cultural shift, technologically. Key terms - collective intelligence, convergence, digital revolution.
Remix: Lessig frames the problem as a war between an old read-only culture, in which media is being sold as copyrighted music and movies to passive consumers, and a new digital read-write culture, in which audiovisual products are freely downloaded and manipulated in an explosion of creativity. Both cultures can thrive in a hybrid economy, he contends, pioneered by Web entities like YouTube. He tries to argue that the world is changing so we must change with it. New arts, media, and everything are rising. Should peoples creativity be banned? Key terms - barter economies, collaboration, creative commons, fair use, hybrid economies, lego-ized innovation.

All these books deal with society and people having to cope with the way technology is changing the world. It bring so many new things to us that we must figure out how to use them. This causes many things to be harmed but also is helping society. The world is heading for a technological millennium and we must change along with it.

For the final project, we must take in all this knowledge inorder to better understand how people will be using this site and looking at it. We must build off of tags and organization while building this site to its highest potential.

Convergence Culture - Intro

1. The introduction of this book is about what he plans to talk about with media convergence. There is not too much in detail yet, simply because this in an intro but what he has to say is very insightful. He discusses how he wants people to understand how convergence is impacting the media they consume but he also seems to focus on the popular culture subject area. What these changes mean to us and how they will change is what he will be discussing in his upcoming chapters.

2. “Printed words did not kill spoken words. Cinema did not kill theatre. Television did not kill radio.”

“Yet, history teaches us that old media never die-and they don’t even necisarially fade away. What dies are simply the tools we use to access media content.”

“Welcome to convergence culture, where old and new media collide, where grassroots and corporate media intersect, where the power of the media producer and the power of the media consumer interact in unpredictable ways.”

3. This relates to my life in almost every way. I am always researching on my spare time for whats new and what is to come in the technological world. Reading and dissecting the future of some of these technologies. Ever since I was a kid, I would get the newest technology at the time, no matter how long I had to save up for it.

4. How does this relate to Everything is Miscelaneous? This books talks about how all these things are converging or building off of each other, in Weinberger’s book, he talks about how there is so much out there that it needs to be organized. With the more convergence there is, the more organizing and forms of organizing there needs to be.

So what?

This book is the kind of book that connects all the miscellaneous things that are out there and makes something new, and understandable out of them. The world is divided into categories, topics, and subjects because physical objects need to be in one place or another, they can't be in all the places they might belong. But, computers and the Internet turn this all around because a computer can place these things in as many categories as they need to be in. It is done by individuals classifying this information. Technology is taking over but only with the help of us.

Every hierarchy is under assault from the Internet. It reveals the biases underneath our systems. Weinberger makes a great case for a new kind of knowledge that better represents the messy but, glorious realityof the real world. Everything is Miscellaneous is what is important to our understanding of the Internet. All this knowledge, data, information and everything is out there and the web is filtering through this information; but only with our help.

Chapter 8 & 9

Chapter 8:

I found chapter 8 very interesting. It talked about things that I have always wondered myself. Like, what the purposes of some signs are and even what I see on the internet really is. The information that is on the web does not always tell you everything when it comes to tagging and this chapter discussed how we may not always be getting everything but we are getting a variety of information from one thing.

With the web being an open source this is much more of an issue now. I also enjoy the explicit and implicit information that was talked about. The implicit is what I am always thinking about when I see things online. The what if's or the information behind the subject. When he discussed the explicit being too obvious at times that it makes our society look dumb, I completely agreed. I see signs all the time that I dont think, have a point because they are to obvious. I feel like the implicit information is the real descriptive information. It is much more than just tags.

Chapter 9:

This chapter was also very interesting. Its about how things may not seem organized but they are in some certain order for some other use. Then, the more information that comes in, the more jumbled and mixed up the information gets. Information is always needed to be ordered by someone for something.

I find this chapter to be very personal to some. Everyone has their own way of organization. Whether it is throwing all their photos into just one folder titled "images" or if it is making numerous folders within folders giving each item its own place. This is where the web has some issues. If people do things differently, then how should it be ordered online? The web was built from people just "post it. Just link to it. Click. Done" said Weinberger. With all these posts and links everywhere, how is the organized human supposed to find the information they are looking for. Organization is key, but each person has their own way of doing it.

Chapter 5:

1. This chapter is about how nearly everything in our lives are random or unorganized. Even if something seems organized in one way, it may be a complete mess in another. Then is explains how in the digital world, tagging seems to have fixed this mess in its own way for individual users to use information how they please.

2. "Sometimes...sorting on the way in takes more effort than sorting on the way out."
"But, every time you organize matter in one way, you are disordering them in another."

3. As I was reading about tagging things, and how it helps people to find this information easier, it reminded me of when I am searching for information online. I often find a large article, when all I need is a little piece of it. I will often do the Ctr+F trick and search for a key work I was looking for. Like, if I am trying to find the date that Picaso died, I will find numerous articles about him, being pages long. So, I simply search for the word "died" or "death" in the article to find this information.


Chapter 6:

1. What I got out of this chapter is how categories of information are so large but can be placed into so many sub categories. These sub categories, or ways of finding information, make it easier to find the desired information.

2. "The indentifiers in this stew are themselves mixed. Some are as carefully assigned as Thinglinks, bar codes, ISBNs, and uBio identifiers. Others are as loose as the vernacular names for fish."
"Modern biologists are more like accidentalists than essentialists."

3. When I was reading about Microsoft's AURA development I related to this because I have a similar application on my phone. I am able to scan the bar code on an item and get an internet search for the product or it will give me all of its dietary information. Even coupons or local price comparisons.