Everything is Miscellaneous, great read

by on May 4, 2007

On my way here I read most of Everything is Miscellaneous: The power of the new digital disorder, David Weinberger’s new book. It’s a good read, highly recommended. I got it for free, though, so keep that in mind. But I’m definitely giving this to my son’s teacher who told him never to use Wikipedia. It does a good job of laying out the pros and cons of Wikipedia. I learned a ton from the book and that’s good enough for me. Gotta run, the plane is loading.

Oh, heck, got 30 more seconds. Can I do another book review? Let’s try. This week I read “the New Influencers” by Paul Gillin. This is a great followup to our own book, Naked Conversations. Teaches you how news is built on blogs and other places now. Also recommended. OK, they are loading now, gotta run.

  • TP
    "Pros and Cons of wikipedia" - wikipedia is an amazing resource, and is the number 1 problem in google's mind these days.

    I read somewhere that one third of google's traffic exits from google to a wikipedia link.

    the question is who will own the worlds information? google or wikipedia? i have noticed that these days my tendency is to goto wikipedia if i need to look up something and not google (esp. when i am looking for some structured info. abt a topic)

    BTW - this is a first comment ! (atleast when i posted)

    see: http://fo.unta.in/?p=26
  • Karen
    Robert, Wikipedia is an invaluable source of information but all students should expect to learn to distinguish primary from secondary information sources. If the teacher says don't use Wikipedia, it's pretty simple. It's not an acceptable resource in your son's class.
  • Karen: I agree with you there. It's just that Wikipedia is often more accurate than the sources that ARE approved for use in the classroom. So, by removing it from potential sources the teacher has decided not to teach, but rather protect other academians.
  • I just starting diving in to Made To Stick last night.

    So far I'd recommend it.

    http://www.amazon.com/Made-Stick-Ideas-Survive-...
  • Ben
    I never read books whose reviewers cannot muster a more enthuiastic response than "It's a good read." That's very lame, and extremely cliched. It shows they could not find anything more interesting to say about the book.
  • Ben: or maybe I was in Cancun and the beach looked a lot more enticing than taking the time to write a great book review. I highly recommend reading Shelley Powers' review instead. http://burningbird.net/semanticweb/misc/
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