Obvious thought of the day:

Messiness is disorder where place is the basis of order. E.g., if your top drawer is the place for socks, having socks in your living room floor is messy. Places order space by putting like next to like, a one-dimensional way of organizing.

Digital space, unlike physical space, does not demand that we pick one dominant trait — one way of being alike — over all others; data about two products that differ only in color may be stored in your database in non-contiguous RAM, and you don’t care. In this environment, things do not need to be placed at all; they only need to be found. So give things unique IDs — e.g., the BBC’s SMEF for content, Life Science IDs, CommonLanguage‘s telecom identifiers — and they will be radically messy (miscellaneous) but not disordered. Rather, they are ready to be ordered on demand, differently each time depending on the user’s needs and assumptions.

Now I have to go pick up my socks. [Technorati tags: taxonomy EverythingIsMiscellaneous]

Categories: Uncategorized dw