joho - hyperlinked organization - home page (david weinberger)

joho - hyperlinked organization - home page (david weinberger) now available! everything is miscellaneous (times books) "...an instant classic"-- cory doctorow, boingboing.net   we blog! we blog every day. stop us before we blog more recent writings click to get an annoying separate window listing everything i've been saying in public. improved! right-hand navigation bar - now on the left! ||faq ||overall home page for david weinberger ||speaker's kit if you want to hire me to speak somewhere ||preemptive trademarks™™ ||what is a hyperlinked organization? ||speaker testimonials ||who does david weinberger think he is, anyway? ||evident marketing - it's how we feed the kids   coming soon! everything is miscellaneous (times books, may '07) my 100 million dollar secret (for kids) cluetrain manifesto small pieces loosely joined ( buy it at amazon) people we love saying nice things about us tom petzinger, wall street journal columnist, says we're "an outrageous genius ... joho is filled with gonzo-style front-line reporting and outlandish bromides that somehow manage to make everything clear in our webby world." more doc searls, editor, linux journal, says "...the leading authority on what the web is all about.." kmworld gives joho 5 stars out of 5. "joho combines quality insight and commentary into high-tech topics, market trends and technologies with unparalleled snarky humor... "joho is informative, it's thought-provoking and it's rollicking good fun. few sites get a 5 rating from us. joho deserves it." more andover.net likes us. really! they say joho: "... is one of those quirky, eclectic newsletters and web sites produced by the kind of person you think you might enjoy knowing. at least, i do." more henso.com thinks we're g-d. in german! "ich glaube übrigens eh dass weinberger gott ist und es nur am design seiner site liegt, dass das bislang unbemerkt blieb.." more gary turner likes our blog, too: "if joho was about the best 'zine on the web then david's blog has amazingly managed to top that." partnerwerks thinks we pierce!: "...irreverant, piercing and highly intelligent commentary about organizations and leadership now that anyone can communicate with anyone anytime." more softletter (jeff tarter) says joho is: "wonderfully eccentric" more joho illustrated gallery of success fork your way to success survive a nuclear blast know your fonts   this space unintentionally left blank     receive email issues. free! augut 31, 2007 the privacy non-principle: privacy is too squirrely for principles. we need to keep it difficult. the web as perpetual embarrassment: suppose the norms never settle down? are hierarchical organizations hierarchies? or: why don't we salute our bosses? do all organizations have hierarchies? not by any reasonable definition of the term. vowels or consonants: some of us are vowelers, some are consonantals. wanna make something of it? tip: scanning is a pain. snapping is easy. cool tool: librarything.com july 7 , 2007 delamination now! to achieve net neutrality, we're going to need a policy with such strong teeth that it can rip the industry apart, and finally give us business models that work with, rather than against, the net's real value. may 4 , 2007 can tags be wrong?: you tag it potato. i tag it tomato. shall we just call the whole thing off? tim spalding, creator of librarything.com, asked me an excellent question: can tags be wrong? what if everyone in a room is an idiot and tags moby-dick as "penguin." i sputtered for a moment and then came up with the perfect response: "is there a wrong way to underline a book?" brilliant! it surrounds a tiny germ of truth with a massive coating of tasty misdirection, like rising to a challenge in one's proof of the turing incompleteness theorem by faking a coughing fit. tim afterwards sent me a thoughtful and thought-provoking message. so blame him for the following... more of everything: the internet is swamp of lies. the internet is a haven of knowledge. yes to both. whatever case you want to make about the internet, you can make. want to show that it contains the most wretched ideas and images? there's a whole bunch of sites you can point to. want to prove that it is the salvation of democracy and rational discourse? google and ye shall find. want to show that it's a haven for red-headed sociopaths who raise chihuahuas for their milk? yup, you can probably find those sites, too. twittering away: what looks trivial may turn out to be, up close, not so trivial after all. book notes: "everything is miscellaneous" launched a couple of days ago. you thought i wasn't going to mention it? bogus contest: elevator pitch: can you come up with the everything is miscellaneous elevator pitch? lord knows, i can't. march 9, 2007 the abundance of meaning: if too much information is noise, what's too much meaning? every abundance generates its own pitfall. an abundance of wealth can lead to waste, moral corruption and even revolution if it isn't distributed with a modicum of fairness. an abundance of information becomes noise if we can't navigate it. but what about the abundance of meaning we've developed with the arrival of the web? if too much information becomes noise, what does too much meaning become? as bill clinton did not say, that all depends on what the meaning of meaning is... the abundance of worthiness and the new relevancy: when there's an abundance of worthwhile pages on just about any topic, search engines need to evolve.  ...yahoo's unexpected success turned it into a gatekeeper. getting your site selected for inclusion in the yahoo tree was a big deal. and the selection process was a black box: you could nominate your site, but there was no way to tell why it was selected or rejected. nevertheless, that solution worked well  when there were a million pages on the web and search engines were wimpy. there weren't that many worthwhile pages on, say, bird watching, so you could trust yahoo to have found a handful of good ones and to have spared you the dozens of crap ones. sure, yahoo faced problems as the web got larger. the pile of pages to be sifted got bigger, and it required more and more employees to clamber through the existing tree to make sure none of its fruit had become withered with age or had gone wormy with spam. (yeah, work that metaphor, loverboy!) but the growth of the web during the late '90s tipped the scale, changing the equation and our expectations.... book stuff: (1) why finishing a book sucks, (2) the new book's site, and (3) the book's word cloud i decided to go the traditional publishing route with everything is miscellaneous because when it comes to lifetime ambitions, i'm a traditionalist. rail as i might about the mainstream media, i would still kill a minor celebrity (please let it be paris hilton!) to get published in the new yorker. also, and not incidentally, us volvo-driving, birkenstock-wearing east coast liberals have to put the tofu and kelp on the table, you know. so, given that my book will be repurposing trees, here's why it sucks to finish one... a (commercial) model of miscellaneousness: biomed central embodies many of the current trends. biomed central is a commercial publisher of peer-reviewed scientific research that permits open (= free) access to all of its content. in so doing, it happens to exemplify a whole bunch of trends, many of which are associated with "web 2.0." it is not a voice from the future, describing visions we cannot yet imagine. it's in some ways more valuable than that, for it's an existing business, dealing with the future in practical ways. in it we can see not just where the web may go, but where it is right now... why do movies suck?: we don't make that many movies, we invest heavily in them, and yet most of the comedies aren't funny, the suspensers aren't suspenseful, the action ones are incoherently edited. why is that? cool tool: the o'reilly hacks series what i'm playing: dreamfall and devastation troopers bogus contest: suggest a daily open-ended puzzle august 21 , 2006 anonymity as the default: as digital identity management systems come one line, the norm is switching from being anonymous to being identified, with unintended consequences we may not at all like. "anonymity should be the default" doesn't say what i mean. sorry to have put it badly. "defaults" come to us from the software world where shipping software with the right options turned on can make or break a product. it may be that anonymity is the right default option for digital id management software, but that's not what i meant. and if it is the right default, it will be due to anonymity's social, political and personal roles. those roles are what interest me... one web day: earth day for the web. come celebrate! susan crawford — law professor, berkman fellow, icann board member, blogger — has been working for the past year to make her idea real. just as earth day is a time to celebrate our planet, one web day is a day to celebrate the web. just as on earth day it's up to each locality to decide how to celebrate, on owd it's up to each locality — physical or virtual — to come up with an appropriate activity, although owd encourages doing something that increases the web's value and brings it to more people... my hundred million dollar secret: i've self-published a kid's novel. you can buy it or read it for free. (my promise: harry potter does not die in it.) i just published my novel for halflings (or "young adults" if you prefer), called my 100 million dollar secret. it's about a boy who wins $100,000,000 in the lottery, but (for reasons explained) can't let his parents know and refuses to lie to them. in another sense, it's about the boy's growing sense of the moral obligations that come with having so much dang money. it's also supposed to be a little funny. cool tool: roboform is great...except for one thing. bogus contest: a contest no one really enters july 23 , 2006 why believe wikipedia?: wikipedia is credible. not always. not in every detail. but nothing passes that bar except perhaps for some stuff scratched into stone tablets. what is the source of wikipedia's credibility? oddly, it has something to do with its willingness to admit fallibility. simply appearing in the encyclopedia britannica confers authority on an article. simply appearing in wikipedia does not, because you might hit the 90 second stretch before some loon's rewriting of history or science is found and fixed. yet, wikipedia is in some ways as reliable as the britannica, and in some ways it is more reliable. where does it get its authority? there are a few reasons we'll accept a wikipedia article as credible... the end of the story (or: the tyranny of rectangles: journalism can't get stories right because the world doesn't fit into rectangles. if you've ever been part of a story covered by a newspaper, it's a near certainty that you didn't think the story got it exactly right. even if there were no outright mistakes, you read it thinking that the emphasis was wrong, that it didn't quite capture all sides, that there was more to the story, that a turn of phrase was prejudicial. you would have written it slightly differently. at least. this is not because reporters aren't good at their job. by and large they are, and it is hard job requiring skill, experience and persistence. it also generally doesn't pay that well. the problem is not with the reporters. lord bless them and multiply them. the problem is with the notion of "the story"... book report (or: my obsession): the first draft of my book is done. here's a brief report on chapter 8. ...one odd manifestation of my obsession is that i never get to a point where i'm ready to talk about the book... walking the walk: raytheon tags. and taxonomizes. cool tool: diigo notes socially. what i'm playing: gun is disappointing. indigo prophecy progresses from cool to idiotic. bogus contest: metadata for traditional authorities december 29, 2005 why the media can't get wikipedia right: in the wake of the seigenthaler affair, wikipedia made some changes. why did the media get the story so wrong? when the mainstream media addressed the john seigenthaler sr. affair — he's the respected journalist who wrote an op-ed in usatoday complaining that slanderously wrong information about him was in wikipedia for four months — the subtext couldn't be clearer: the media were implicitly contrasting wikipedia's credibility to their own. ironically, the media got the story fundamentally wrong. most media reports presented the narrative line of the story roughly as follows: a person of indisputable honor was smeared in wikipedia. faced with incontrovertible evidence of its failings, the mainstream media shamed wikipedia into reluctantly becoming more like them. see, wikipedia was unreliable all along, just like we said! we're the grownups, and now we're making wikipedia grow up... are leaves mulch?: peter morville's criticism of folksonomies, et al. i'm very fond of peter morville's ambient findability, a highly readable exploration of what's going on in the field of information architecture, i.e., how we find stuff, written by a practitioner and thought-leader. larry irons wrote to me recently, however, asking about peter's jibe about the idea that i've been pushing, that we're moving from trees of knowledge to big piles of leaves... cool tool : power scanning! what i'm playing: murderous rivolity rules. december 5, 2005 the year of unique ids: we're about to get very interested in assigning meaningless numbers to lots of things. very interested. last year, it was web 2.0 and tagging. this year, it's going to be unique ids (uids), and for the same reason that web 2.0 and tagging matter: the web is going miscellaneous. (the fact that i'm writing a book about the invigoration of the miscellaneous could not possibly have colored my perception. nope. all of this is based on highly scientifical research done by people with clipboards who were teased as children.)... living on an internet houseboat: save the net for aging hippies? probably not going to happen. as we survey the damage being done to the internet by (sometimes) well-meaning regulators trying to save the net from itself, i find myself asking: are we living on the same internet planet? the answer pretty clearly is no. and it's not just regulators whose vision of the net is so at odds with mine. there are plenty of academics, librarians, and even some of the net's creators who view it as an occasional resource, a place to go to do research, and a swamp of filth. to me, the internet is a social world... my book: progress report: here's what chapter 3 looks like. although readers of my blog might not know it, working on everything is miscellaneous is my full-time job. here's what chapter 3 is currently about, although it may undergo drastic revision... september 20 , 2005 relativism and the net: moral and cultural relativism used to be a lot easier. the communications revolution of the past century has thrown into our face the fact that people have very different ways of understanding the world and different sets of values. we know this because magazines show us pictures of them, and on tv they're busy either behaving in their quaint ways or yelling at us. this new awareness of the diversity of our world has helped exacerbate our culture's depressing relativism. there's something wrong with relativism... liking pomo: try as i might, i can't get past the high bs quotient of so many postmodern essays. last week — or was it two weeks ago? — i went to ars electronica in linz, austria, an eclectic festival of electronic arts with an url that, unfortunately, i keep mentally parsing as www.arselectronica.com. quite a fascinating set of people, and much more artsy than the usual set of literal-minded bitheads i spend time with. but, about half of the presentations set me onto a psychological merry-go-round ride during which most of me screams, "this is total bullcrap!" while a little voice tries to calm me down, insisting that these are very, very smart people so there has to be a brass ring here somewhere... my book: progress report (or: how i spent my summer "vacation"): i'm working away on everything is miscellaneous. here's what i'm up to. i've been working all summer on everything is miscellaneous. it's due into the publisher in july '06, making next summer seem like right around the corner. my how time flies when you have a deadline. i did a heck of a lot of research these past few months, some of it entailing entering a physical library. yes, there are still some around, and yes, the good parts still smell of dried leaves and mold. i also did a whole bunch of writing and just slightly less un-writing. (some refer to this as "rewriting," but it feels more penelope-esque to me than that.) here's where the book stands at the moment, and please remember that any and all of it is likely to be unwritten tomorrow... [now includes excerpts!] walking the walk: the beebster is doing some good stuff with knowledge management what i'm playing: brothers in arms is overhyped. painkiller is underhyped. bogus contest: net madlibs june 20 , 2005 all i have to do now is write the mofo. times books is publishing everything is miscellaneous. here's what a book auction is like... times books has agreed to publish my book everything is miscellaneous. i have one year to write it. assuming that the writing goes all right — and i am contractually obligated to make sure it does — it will be published in winter/early spring of 2007. seems like forever, doesn't it? i can promise that it won't feel that way to me as i watch the deadline rushing toward me like an angry bull. no, i'm not keeping up with your blog. it's time to drop the expectation that i've read yours and you've read mine. i would like to. i really would. i like it and i like you. but we're now well past the point where we can keep up with all the blogs worth reading from the people worth keeping up with. i just can't do it any more. i've been faking it for a while. may 3 , 2005 why i'm a pessoptimist —the right to connect: let's not be too quick to compromise. i'm confused. on the one hand, i'm a raving tony robbins optimist. on the other hand, i'm a lessigian pessimist. the other day i figured out how i can contain such a contradiction. it's very simple. everything bad is very very good: steve johnson's new book finds the value in pop culture i just finished steve johnson's new book, everything bad is good for you. it's going to be a best-seller if there's any justice in the world. [hint: there isn't.] i've been reading steve's stuff for some time now and i think i've discovered what makes his writing style so good: he thinks well. he turns corners and pulls you with him. it's the kind of unexpected unfolding that makes narratives work, but steve does it purely in the realm of ideas. he writes so well because he's so damn smart. (also, he just writes so damn well.) walking the walk: the beeb rulz cool tool: at last, multi-page faxing in windows! woohoo! what i'm playing: half life 2 is the greatest game ever. march 3 , 2005 trees and tags - an introduction: what are taxonomies, tags, faceted classification, folksonomies...? and do they matter? the narrative that tells of the first man and woman encountering the tree of knowledge focuses on its tempting fruit. but after we took the bite, we apparently looked up and got the idea that knowledge is shaped like the tree's branching structure: big concepts contain smaller ones that contain smaller ones yet. now autumn has come to the forest of knowledge... my life as a berkperson: i've been at the harvard berkman center since last summer and i think i'm beginning to understand what it's about. before i applied for a berkman fellowship, i had to ask john palfrey and ethan zuckerman, neither of whom i knew, a whole bunch of damn fool questions. i had no living sense of what it meant to be a berkman fellow. do you drink sherry at 4? just how witty is the banter? would i get a discount on ascots? i've been a fellow since july. here's what it's like... larry summers and the web as world: the blogosphere practically demands that harvard-related bloggers say something — something! — about their president's comments...and that's evidence that the web is a world, not just a medium what's most interesting to me is the fact that as a blogger and a member of the harvard community (fellows are not faculty members) i felt that i should say something about it. the blogosphere is becoming a moral space... january 28, 2005 trees vs. leaves: tagging may be shaking the leaves off of taxonomic trees, affecting not only how we organize ideas and information but how we think about organization itself. del.icio.us kicked "tagging" into gear by giving us a reason to tag stuff. it's a bookmarking site: if you come across a page you on the web that you want to remember, you post the url to your personal page at del.icio.us. on the way, you tag it with a word or two that will help you find it among the mass of bookmarks you accumulate. the kicker is that everyone else can see not only what you've bookmarked but all the bookmarks that share a particular tag... bridge blogging: a new effort tries to break through the national boundaries implicit in the blogosphere. my friends ethan zuckerman and rebecca mackinnon, have, with others, started an initiative called globalvoices that aims at helping the blogosphere break through its natural tendency to cluster into groups that are too easily alike. globalvoices asks: what can we do to get the rest of the world's voices heard?.. links: some funnish stuff. bogus contest: wikipedia topics. october 15, 2004 the future of facts (and the rise of fact servers): are facts going to become as cheap and uninteresting as styrofoam peanuts? the wikipedia had to freeze the george w. bush entry a few weeks ago because people were altering it to suit their political viewpoints at an alarming rate. so, the editors pared the page down to the non-controversial "core" of facts. there was still a lot of information there — much more than merely "he was born, he drank, he became president" — and occasional acknowledgements of controversies, such as whether bush satisfactorily completed his national guard service. but, most interesting to me, towards the top, on the right, the wikipedia ran one of the staples of its biographical entries: a fact box. i find this two-tiered view of facts, quite common in reference works, fascinating. and in the context of a bottom-up work such as the wikipedia, in the midst of a dust-up over what constitutes a factual account of the life of w, you have to ask: what's happening to facts?... the end of data: in the new world of classification and categorization, data and metadata are indistinguishable. there used to be a real difference between data and metadata. data was the suitcase and metadata was the name tag on it. data was the folder and metadata was its label. data was the contents of the book and metadata was the dewey decimal number on its spine. but, in the third age of order everything is becoming metadata... walking the walk: o'reilly's foo camp is brilliant marketing in which the product is never mentioned cool tool: open source audacity sounds good what i'm playing: far cry email: how much of an anti-semitic misogynist was melvil dewey? bogus contest: name the metadata bundles discussed in "the end of data" article browse back issues... note to self and others warning it's been a looong time since i pruned and updated anything beyond this point. i'll get too it sooner or later. definitely later. the cluetrain manifesto by rick levine, christopher locke, doc searls and me first it was a web site (www.cluetrain.com), then it was a book (from perseus). we wrote it because it seemed to us that most businesses and the media were missing the obvious point about the web: we're not there for a new shopping experience but to connect with one another. the web is a conversation. we're drawn to it because at long last we get to talk in our own voice. and stuff like that. (you can read the book online for free here.)   special collections hyperlinked km journal we cover knowledge management too damn much in joho. if you don't believe us, check this list of articles we've run.   the rageboy chronicles chris rageboy!" locke is the official scourge of joho (as well as being the editor of entropy gradient reversals). you can catch up on the latest skirmishes and learn the strange history of the web's most esoteric 'zine-based water balloon fight. the best of joho our staff picks its favorite episodes special offers just paste these special, glow-in-the-dark chiclets onto your home page and reap the transcendent rewards of being so cool that you spell it "kewl"! but, be warned: don't break the chain! the last person to do so ended up as a senior executive at lycos. special issues! publisher's overstock! now and then we run high-value collectors quality special issues on topics we think will try the patience of even the most saturnine reader. here are some of the more recent ones. the longing why is our culture on fire about the web when we can't even say what it's for? a desire so fervent must express a deep longing, a spiritual longing. in fact, we embrace the web with such enthusiasm because we hope it will enable us to end the contract we've implicitly signed that says we'll give up our human, individual voice in exchange for the illusion of living in a managed world. the web returns our human voice. that's what we long for. down with reality! the person staffing the ticket desk asks me: "do you have an electronic ticket or a real ticket?" two thousand years of philosophy, and this is what it comes down to. "reality" is a value judgment... business and time we're seeing an important shift in the nature— not just the pace— of business time. we're moving from a type of heroic chunkiness in which projects are private until published, to a collaborative rhythm in which much more is exposed to public view, for longer, and deadlines are not as important as readiness. the hyperlinked metaphysics of the web our culture has had a container-based metaphysics: space and time are containers within which events occur, and things are only truly real if they're self-contained. the web, on the other hand, presents us with a hyperlinked metaphysics that is transcendent and fundamentally spiritual.   npr commentaries for a list of my commentaries for national public radio's all things considered, click here   some sites i like greaterdemocracy.org: some leftish thinking to which i sometimes contribute. netparadox: telcommunications imperatives from the net's point of view. egr (entropy gradient reversals): chris "rageboy" locke rants, rages, and abuses his readers - and knows more about more than anyone i know. doc searls' weblog: a cluetrain co-author's delightful, insightful bits. chris locke's weblog. your daily rageboy. lockergnome: daily email newsletter chockablock with windows goodies, tips and chris pirillo's enthusiasm the wohl report: amy wohl's weekly insights into the industry she's advised for, well, decades. km world: the hang-out for the knowledge management "industry" intranet design mag tons of useful information the tweney report a gutsy 'zine from dylan tweney the gilbane report news briefs from the "e-content" industry rise of the stupid network david isenberg explains why the telcos ought to wise up.   contact info david weinberger self@evident.com 617.738.8323   "the hyperlinked organization" is a trademark of open text corp. whom we thank for granting evident marketing, inc. permission to use this felicitous phrase. for other trademark information about this site, please visit our preemptive trademarks™™ page.

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