Finnish, Elvis, Cover, Outsider, Alone Music

What makes Weinberger’s book fun is its accessibility. He writes about things we know in ways we have experienced them, like an observational comedian: he’s the Jerry Seinfeld of philosopher futurists (or whatever we decide to call him: infolosipher, futurosophist).

I will bring up my biggest contention first, and it’s not a problem with the book or Weinberger’s ideas (is there a difference) but with his lack of acknowledgement of a simple solution to one of the problematics he describes with one of the ubiquitous catalogues he describes: iTunes. My biggest cataloging problem is with my music collection, and iTunes has offered the possibility of multiple-genre labeling and failed to deliver.

Weinberger describes the hope a ‘social process’ of labeling photographs (13) to aid in our personal organization and later describes Flickr as the very tool (or forum) for exactly that. He calls this social process third-order organizing (after grouping (first-order) and labeling (second-order)) and seems to hail it indirectly as a thorough and cost-effective, though not perfect new system for organizing all of our bit-based, non-atom-possessing (digital and non-physical) information. Tagging (95) seems like a democratic way to assign searchable keywords to all of our public stuff: the more contextualization we have for any data, the better we can find it, know it, and use it.

I have many problem with and praises for this type of system, but I’d like to return to my primary contention, which, again, is with Weinberger’s failure to address iTunes inability for a single song to have multiple genre. He addresses labeling for personal use, shared use, public use, and for archiving, but he doesn’t integrate the social tagging power of Delicious to the potentials of extensive personal cataloging for libraries like iTunes. I can create innumerable genre in iTunes, just as the National Library catalogers create and reword the hundreds of thousands of categories they define, but I cannot tag a song for multiple terms the way Corbis can label their digital images archive; so for me Eilart Pilarm exists as “Odd” and not “Finnish, Elvis, Cover, Outsider, Alone Music.” Unfortunately, iTunes allows for just one branch for a leaf, and I find that to be a travesty. And I’m interested in the problems that could arise with Weinberger’s “smart leaves” concept (presumably derived from the “Smart Playlist” in iTunes and the “Smart Mailbox” in Apple Mail (because I have just one filter through which I experience technology)). Does anyone see any negative ramifications? The only negative thing I read in these six chapters was that it is easier to leave useless data where it is than to filter it.

Here is half of a sentence I wrote that I couldn’t find a place for:
the arbitrary (and ironically social) constructs of categorization that formulate our concepts of similarity

Ps. One of the possible predictive labels is "Everythign is Miscellaneous". Is that irony sweet or sad? Discuss.