Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger was written on a topic I’m interested in.... but his writing style made me completely uninterested in reading the book. Weinberger writes in a very fragmented way and also jumps from topic to topic. The book does have some main points but his random chatter throughout the book clutters them. Everything really is miscellaneous in this book. (This is in my opinion, sorry for not liking it).

From what I understood Weinberger’s main points are the three orders. The first order talks about physical order, for example, books on a bookshelf. In this order there is no catalog so you just have to look through and find what you want which may take a long time.

The second order is cataloging or indexing. This is a tool for the first order to make it more organized and easier to find. One example I though was interesting in the book was the Corbis photos. The photos were cataloged digitally with digital photos on the internet. With this kind of catalog of the contents of the collection it is much easier to find that flipping through each photo by hand like you would in the first order.

The third order is everything being miscellaneous. The third order is the internet. On the internet nothing is organized everything is stored on disks that no one quite knows where on. When you type in a keyword the information is pulled out of the randomness. Weinberger also talked a lot about tags because they tie randomness on the web together.

Overall, Weinberger did bring up some interesting issues that I had not thought about before like organization of the internet. When I build a website I think about my personal website organization. But websites in general are only connected by links to one another. Search sites like Google are what really makes the internet useful, without Google or Bing you would have to know that long address of some site on your own.

So what? The subject matter of this book is very important to DTC majors because we must be experts in digital technology and that includes its organization. The only way people really get to your site is if they click on a link from another site. As possible web designers we need to know how to organize on the internet so users can easily find the information they are looking for. The web is really one big mess of sites so you have to know how to make yours be found in all of it.