Can't Wait to Read This Book

I have heard about this book by David Weinberger (his blog here) and I want to check it out -- Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. Interview w/ R.U. Sirius here. Excerpts:

You know, in a library, a physical book has to go on only one shelf under one category. That’s not a natural restriction; a single book is about many different things. But even when you try to make up for that restriction with the catalog card, which is a very reduced form of meta-data for the book, the size of the card is dictated by the inconvenience of atoms. The size of the card means that you can’t put in very many of those references. But on the web, everybody can put in his or her own references. We can have hundreds or millions of references and links and connections of meaning linked to a single resource. There’s no limit. So, in some ways, the web reflects better the complexity of the linked nature of the world...

...Taxonomies are power. With a centralized top-down taxonomy, one problem is that somebody gets to say what you are. And lots of people will inevitably disagree with the categorization. A really bad example of this is what happened to a popular musician living under apartheid in South Africa, By the time he was fifty, he had become a different race five times because the law had changed. And once, he had to leave his wife and family because of it. So taxonomy is power. It’s not always that gross. But let’s say you’re trying to decide where Scientology or Jews For Jesus or Baha’i goes in the category of religions. Are they at the same level as the big ones? Power resides in that decision. Now that we can create local clusters of meaning, local taxonomies, categorizations — a lot of that power dissipates. That’s a good thing.

Good Items for Friday

Like I said, I just got back from another business trip the other day. I feel like going inside of a cave, pulling a rock in front of me, and not coming out for three days.

Items:

• I'm trying to figure out how to do tag clouds. Anyone know any simple code to paste into Blogger? Here's the Wiki page, here's a blog devoted to the subject, here's a tagging tool, and here's a tagline generator.
• Non-Wikipedia wiki encyclopediae: Conservapedia, Encyclopedia Dramatica, Wookiepedia.
• Only 46 days left to vote for your favorite Star Wars stamp!



• New Orson Welles movie! Excerpt: Welles spent at least five years during the 1970s working on "The Other Side of the Wind," which stars John Huston as an aging filmmaker directing what turns out to be his final movie. Huston's character dies in a car crash before he finishes his film, and Welles's story unfolds in flashback after the death of the central character, a device Welles previously employed in "Citizen Kane," considered by many to be the greatest film ever made. Before he died, Welles claimed that the shooting of "The Other Side of the Wind" was almost complete, and the filmmaker is known to have edited between 40 minutes and 50 minutes of the work, excerpts of which have occasionally been screened at Welles retrospectives. But the negatives were entombed in France against Welles's wishes after he accepted funding for the movie from an Iranian financier, Mehdi Bousheri, the brother-in-law of the former Shah. Bousheri invested a reported $1 million in the film during its drawn-out production, but the negatives became trapped in the vault of his Paris-based film company in the legal fallout of the Iranian revolution of 1979. Rumors of embezzlement of funding by a Spanish producer also surround the movie. Welles managed to smuggle a working copy of his film out of Paris, but was denied access to the original negatives for the last 10 years of his life… …"The Other Side of the Wind" was expected to be Welles's most ambitious movie, utilizing innovative shooting and editing techniques new to filmmaking in the early 1970s. Although he denied any autobiographical resonance, it also appears to be Welles's most personal film, with commentators who have read the screenplay suggesting that it contains a series of thinly-veiled caricatures of people who angered the director during his career.