David Weinberger on everything being miscellaneous
David Weinberger, the author of a new book Everything is Miscellaneous spoke at Google regarding categorization in the digital age. While the physical store has to make a quick decision regarding product placement, i.e. “New Books”, “Bargain Books”, “Romance”, etc., a virtual store can have multiple pathways of getting to the information, therefore allowing the casual browser to go into some categories like “Products between $300 and $400″ or “Products manufactured on African continent”.
In a nutshell he seems to be thrilled with user-driven categorization patterns, like those exhibited in Del.icio.us or Flickr, and thinks this is the wave of the future - produce content, allow others to categorize it for their own purposes, allow the rest to derive value from this user-driven categorization.
Somebody from Google Toolbar team at the end of the video asks Weinberger regarding proper defaults, as with toolbar there are always discussions on how to originally group the buttons - by frequency of usage, by their actions, by the sites they relate to. Moreover, it seems that a slim minority of users actually reconfigures the toolbar buttons. His answer was basically to try to introduce the value not only in customizations to the toolbar, but also in allowing others to benefit from this customization.