[Admit it, you were just about to accuse me of not knowing how to spell his name. But before you do that….]

This post is about a different Steven King, and about a film he produced in 1972, called Computer Networks, the Heralds of Resource Sharing. I’d heard of the film many years ago, in the early 1980s, but for the life of me I couldn’t find anyone who had a copy. And I’d forgotten all about it. Until yesterday.

Yesterday, John Howard (thanks! John) commented very briefly on a post I’d written on information filtering; all he did was leave me with a link to the wikipedia article on Postie. As he would expect me to, I read it again, and the relevance of Postel’s Law (or the Robustness Principle) to the discussion became clear.

And, as happens with these things, I read on. And wandered aimlessly around the article and its environs, in a way that one could not do with the physical construct of the information. And while wandering aimlessly I came across the precise video I’d been looking for, which features Jon Postel very briefly.

Unintended consequences of the blogosphere.

I’ve loaded it on to my VodPod, visible on my sidebar, and also left you a link to the Google video here. If you want to get a contemporaneous idea of what people expected to do with the ARPANET and early internet, it’s definitely worth watching. I found it spellbinding. But then I’m weird that way.

By the way, the video is around 26 minutes long, there appears to be about four minutes of “nothing” at the end. You have been warned.

I said I would post further on David Weinberger‘s Four Strategic Principles as outlined in his new book, Everything is Miscellaneous .

David’s first principle is to filter information on the way out, not on the way in. I’m still working on it, masticating it, there’s some work involved, but I like the early flavours I can taste. So I thought I’d share with you the kind of stuff that went through my head when I saw that sentence and read what followed. Humour me.

1. In order to filter on the way in, we need to have filters, filters which can act as anchors and frames and thereby corrupt the flow of information. We’ve learnt a lot about anchors and frames and their effect on predilections and prejudices and decision-making. With David’s first principle, we reduce the risk of this bias entering our classification processes too early.

2. I think it was economist Mihaly Polanyi  who talked about things that we know we know, things that we know we don’t know and things that we don’t know we don’t know. Again, filtering on the way in prevents us gathering the things that we don’t know we don’t know.

3. The act of filtering is itself considered necessary to solve a scale problem. We can’t process infinite volumes of things. But maybe now it’s okay to be a digital squirrel, given the trends in the costs of storage. [Sometimes I wonder why we ever delete things, since we can now store snapshots every time something changes. We need never throw away information]. Filtering on the way out becomes something that happens in a natural-selection way, based on people using some element of information, tagging it, collaboratively filtering it.

4. I like the idea (proposed by David) of there being no need to throw stuff away. You just have to not-find it. If you can’t find it you might as well have thrown it away, and if it all costs the same then who cares? Reminds me of the Douglas Adams definition of flying: jumping off a tall building and missing.

5. Collecting information this way is fine, but it has no value unless someone tends to it, someone looks after it. So maybe I shouldn’t be thinking ‘not-find’ and instead I should find ways of incentivising people to clean up their information. Maybe there is a Silent Spring for information. I somehow like thinking of bad DRM and proprietary tools, methods, structures and standards as weeds that strangle the life out of good information. But then I would, wouldn’t I? Walled gardens have the worst sort of weeds.

Just musing. Comments welcome.

I’m a weird kind of guy. I stopped reading David Weinberger’s blog for a week or so, I wanted to be able to finish reading his new book without seeing any of the reviews, and to write a review “unburdened by theory” and uninfluenced by what others said.

So it was only today that I came across his pointer to Andrew Hinton’s piece on Architectures for Conversation (ii): What Communities of Practice can mean for Information Architecture.

And in that piece, I came across this wonderful quote from Cory:

Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.

But that’s almost an aside. Andrew’s presentation is well worth a detailed look, and will be something I will blog on in some depth sometime soon. Currently I’m just enjoying catching up with what he’s been writing.

…is the title of David Weinberger’s new book. It’s a must-read, go get it now. David is a friend, someone I have immense respect for, but don’t let my bias come in the way. Go buy the book and read it for yourself.

What is it about? I won’t make the mistake of classifying it — otherwise I might as well not have read the book….. So think of these as tag-descriptors:

• It’s a paean to the power of the digital world
• It’s a lesson in the challenges of information discovery and retrieval
• It’s a history of tabulation and classification, sequinned with great anecdotes
• It’s a sequel to Small Pieces Loosely Joined; or maybe the Cluetrain Manifesto; or maybe The Social Life of Information
• It’s a series of blog posts on a common set of themes
• It’s a welcome addition to my library
• It’s what you make it

And no, it’s not a solution to the Mid-East crisis or Global Warming. It’s a book. It’s a very good book. And it is all about information, which is one reason why I love it.

David takes us on a fascinating journey through the history, geography and science of classifying information, interspersed with his wry sense of humour (e.g. defending the state of the space under the average bed: “There isn’t a part of our homes that is truly unordered, except perhaps under our beds, and for many of even that is the site of the spontaneous ordering of dust into bunnies.” Or the way he describes Mendeleev as “unburdened by theory”.).

While doing this, he keeps drawing both parallels as well as differences between the two prior physical orders of collection and classification and the new, emerging digital order. Anecdotes are plentiful, covering plants, species, elements, books and even subjects themselves.

Anyone who is serious about the digital world would do well to read the book; anyone interested in information should read the book; anyone who is interesting in taxonomy and ontology must study the book.

As his arguments come to a crescendo, David espouses four new strategic principles, each of which deserves a set of posts in itself:

• Filter on the way out
• Put each leaf on as many branches as possible
• Everything is metadata and everything can be a label
• Give up control

I found much to fascinate me, and I am currently going through my third “very slow” read. There are tidbits for everyone: the description of the arguments between Panizzi and Carlyle should stir memories for everyone who’s ever been involved in a “we will define a data structure for everything” project; the description of Schachter’s insights compress a great deal of learning into a very small space; the paragraphs devoted to the Linnean Society HQ have a H.W. Fowler-like sense of humour: “It makes sense to bury first- and second-order organisations such as [Linnaean classification] and the Bettmann Archive. Specimens made of atoms are fragile and need protection.”

It’s a good place to go to if you want to understand more about items as diverse, yet related, as tagging, collaborative filtering, listmania, “statistically interesting phrases” and so on.

One of the more intriguing ideas David comes up with is espoused in the following sentence: “Because it can’t be fixed, the Dewey Decimal System is caught in a problem endemic to large classification systems tied to the physical world.” Until I got under the hood of that sentence, I never really accepted the notion of “legacy classification” as being a meaningful problem. Reminds me of the problems in shifting between Julian and Gregorian calendars….or why QWERTY remains in use….

I was particularly taken with the stories related to S.R. Ranganathan and his Five Laws of Library Science (a term, incidentally, that he is credited with first using). Ranganathan’s Laws are:

• Books are for use
• Every reader his/her books
• Every book its readers
• Save the time of the reader; save the time of the library staff
• The library is a growing organism

When I first saw that, something strange stirred in me. I could imagine my maternal grandfather, Dr SV Anantakrishnan, saying just that, right down to the brusque to-the-point-ness. I was therefore completely unsurprised to find out that Ranganathan was, like my grandfather, also a Professor at Madras Christian College (where I holidayed, with my grandfather, every summer from 1961 to 1971 or so). So I will find out everything I can about the man who gave the world Colon Classification!

I was also intrigued by the way David made me understand something else that is happening, symptomatically shown in the way Wikipedia articles increase in length while Britannica articles shorten. I see something very opensource about that, and will comment in detail later.

For the unconvinced, here are some of my favourite quotes from the book:

We have to get rid of the idea that there’s a best way of organising the world.

The solution to the overabundance of information is more information.

How we draw lines can have dramatic effects on who has power and who does not.

The real problem is that any map of knowledge assumes that knowledge has a geography, that it has a top-down view, that it has a shape.

It’s not who is right and who is wrong. It’s how different points of view are negotiated, given context and embodied with passion and interest. Individuals thinking out loud have weight, and authority and expertise are losing some of their gravity.

It’s not what you know, and it’s not even who you know. It’s how much knowledge you give away. Hoarding knowledge diminishes your power.

Go buy the book. Even better, go read it.

Regular readers of this blog would know how much I care about the Three Is: doing the right thing about the Internet, Intellectual Property Rights and Identity. The weird thing about these issues is that they create conversation on both sides of the work-life fence. And, for some reason, they don’t attract the dogma and intolerance that characterise many political and religious conversations.

I dislike many of the terms used in these conversations: a perfect example is “content”, a word whose sound reminds me of fresh chalk squeaking on a glass-fronted blackboard. Now, one of the commonest phrases in which I hear that appalling word used is the following:

Content is king

And when I gently enquire of the speaker “Over what kingdom?” the usual answer I get is somewhere along these lines:

You don’t get it, do you? The content-owner rules, he owns the customer

The people who say that are right about one thing. I definitely do not get it.  People who choose to call themselves content-owners and pipe-owners (another term I deeply dislike despite Senator Stevens’ attempts) start squabbling over “ownership” of the customer.  Over the years, I’ve seen this manifest itself even within organisations, where power magically descends upon those who “own” the customer.

Pfui.

None of us owns the customer. If anything, the customer owns us. We seem to be taking a long time to understand this and to learn from it.