Everything is Miscellaneous

Do you remember the days when door-to-door salesmen would invite themselves into your home in order to persuade you to buy Encyclopaedias that would be out-of-date by the time you finished making the monthly payments?

You have most probably heard of and used the online encyclopedia Wikipedi a and I can guarantee that no salesmen knocked on your door to tell you about it, the reason being that this is a FREE encyclopedia and you will have heard about it through word of mouth.

What I find remarkable about this encyclopedia is not that it is free but that anyone can edit it. 20 years ago, would you have believed that we would have free access to an encyclopedia that WE could edit?

There are numerous business issues raised by the "Wik ipedia" phenomenon. The obvious one is that a very lucrative business, supplying knowledge in hard-backed volumes, can be replaced by something that takes up no space at all in our homes and burns no holes in our pockets. Other issues are a little more subtle but just as relevant: who controls the classification of knowledge? Who decides the validity of ideas and concepts and above all, their inter- relationships?

In the physical world we are restricted by the principle that "Everything has to go somewhere: it can only go in one place" and this limitation was projected onto the classification and ordering of knowledge. People in power took the liberty of deciding where information was placed and, crucially, whether it had a place at all.The internet has allowed us to break free and to an extent, make our own decisons about the worthiness of information and connections.

You may be part of a traditional organisational hierarchy where the CEO has a vested interest in remaining aloof and inaccessible to the workers on the lower rungs. This kind of structure, just like the Encyclopedia Brittanica, is doomed for failure. The Internet Revolution gives us the freedom to create our OWN networks and choose our OWN place in the world.

Think about all the social connections you have made since you became an active participant in the Internet Revolution. I guess that, like myself, you are no longer in the little classified box which your job title or business title gave you before you ventured into cyberspace?

"Everything is Miscellaneous" by David Weinberger is a very interesting video which illustrates the breakdown of the established order of ordering. He explains how methods of categorisation designed for physical objects fail when it is possible to put things in multiple categories at once.

How does the principle "Everything has to go somewhere: It can only go in one place." impact your life?

How deeply has the Internet Revolution allowed you and your business to break free from that physical limitation?