EIM & RSS Feed

Like others mentioned, EIM did not keep my attention for very long. To be frank, I have little interest in knowing how things are organized in general so it was hard stay focused throughout his repetitive examples. However, I did find some of his examples interesting. In particular, he mentioned that the Library of Congress owns “29 million books” (p. 15) yet the internet adds over “7 million pages a day” (p. 16). I can only imagine how many more catalogers the Library of Congress would have to hire if they had to keep up with this much content. We’d almost have to start a draft for catalogers instead of soldiers.

I never realized how complex of a role organizational decisions have played throughout our history from the first order of order through the third. The third order was certainly the most interesting for me. I did enjoy learning about Berners-Lee and his development of the World Wide Web. “There is no dorm room, divorce, or political scandal as messy as the World Wide Web” (p. 189); it’s interesting how Berners-Lee had the foresight to know that “messiness” would work well in the third order.

For me, one of Weinberger’s primary points is -- in the digital world experts are no longer needed to sort through data for us. Weinberger sums it up brilliantly by stating, “The world is too diverse for any single classification system to work for everyone in every culture at every time” (p. 57).

I believe another point made in the book is that the Web has provided us with more information than ever before, and, due to easier access we are more likely to search for information and find what we need. There was a similar idea conveyed in the article that I was assigned to do an annotated bibliography on during class, “Three Tweets for the Web”, where the author states, in part, “The mass migration… to the Web has brought one important development: We have begun paying more attention to information” (p. 2).

I searched through my RSS feeds to find a relevant article. Per CNN: Technology, I learned that Google is considering a music service similar to iTunes. The articles states, “ ‘Google Music’ would be a cloud-based subscription service with the ability to stream directly to Android mobile devices” (p.1). I’m curious to know how many categorized options “Google Music” will have, and how will they allow us to customize the search and organization of music? Will they come up with different user-based organization methods than iTunes? Will Google be able to capture any of the market that Apple’s iTunes holds, which according to Weinberger is “more than 70%” (p. 9). I have an Android phone so this will be interesting to monitor.