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Over at KMWorld, you can read a great interview with David Weinberger, author of the new book, Everything Is Miscellaneous.
I haven’t read his book yet, but some of the insights contained in the interview are very dear to my own heart:
“…if your business depends upon information, as all businesses do, then by using tools that allow that information to be broken out of its assigned categories, you will discover relationships you didn’t know were there. You’re going to spur innovation, you’re going to discover efficiencies and you’re going to enable people across your organization to find other people who share their passions…”
Within the enterprise, Our traditional approach to information management (if you like, the “Enterprise 1.0 thinking”) is that “Whoever owned the information organized the information.”
Why? The answer comes from paper, perhaps still the primary information medium for the worlds information. Paper could only exist in one place, at one time. It wasn’t possible for the consumer of the information to determine how they wanted to consume, classify, or present it. And so, a whole discipline of information management sprung up around the way that we classified physically finite things. That Dewey bloke has a lot to answer for…
But digital information is different. It can be re-purposed, redesigned, and integrated into all kinds of different contexts. It can exist in multiple (or infinite) places at once. As an example, I’m pretty sure my elementary school librarian wouldn’t have let me rip all the pages out of my choose your own adventure novel so that I could lay them all down and make a story map of the path I chose – but I could easily do that with digital information, and in real time, without affecting the thirty other people who were also reading the novel. Surely then I could figure out how to avoid being eaten by that pesky snowman…
This one crucial difference – the ability for digital information to be stored once, and then represented in many user definable, varied contexts is perhaps the most exciting notion amidst the Enterprise 2.0 hooplah.
(Turn to page 4. )
2 Comments
Lindsay
D’uh Gordo – turn to the back of the book, find the ending you like, note which page it was on, flick through (backwards) until you find the “turn to page x” reference. note which page *that* was on. Rinse and repeat until you get to the front of the book.
Sure – you have to assemble the backwards story in your head the right way around – but who can’t do that?
02 Dec 2007 05:12 pm
Laurel Papworth
*laughs* that’s funny Lindsay. If one ‘consumes’ media, then you eat dessert first?
04 Dec 2007 03:12 pm
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