If Everything Is Miscellaneous ...

Most of us have a "miscellaneous" drawer. We throw all sorts of things into it, leaving us with a jumble of objects that appear to have no clear relationship with one another.

In his book Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder (New York: Times Books, 2007), David

Weinberger argues that there are three orders of order. First Order is no organization at all. Second Order is the structure we bring to objects or information in a spatial world. Third Order exists in the digital environment. There the seemingly chaotic numbers of relationships and potential relationships that pieces of data can have with each other actually constitute an organizational principle. There are two commandments for Third Order: "Thou Shalt Include" and "Thou Shalt Postpone."

Inclusion, according to Weinberger, involves allowing objects in the digital Third Order to have whatever relationships with one another that they want. The more metadata the better, whether formal subject headings or, preferably, usergenerated tags. We want to be able to relate one thing to other things with the maximum of possible trails.