Peter Lurie has a long-ish post called “Why the Web Will Win the Culture Wars for the Left: Deconstructing Hyperlinks” in which he explains the way in which hyperlinks embody deconstructionist views. Given that I used “deconstruct” twice in a sentence describing the piece, it is remarkably clear.

Peter thinks hyperlinks contain an implicit politics: “The Web is a postmodernist tool that inevitably produces a postmodernist perspective.” I think so, too, although I’m not quite as optimistic. There are too many ways the Net could go wrong.

FWIW, Peter and I are thinking along the same lines. Small Pieces Loosely Joined was on a very similar theme, and he should like (or possibly find very annoying) the end of Everything Is Miscellaneous, which argues that we are now building for one another a messy infrastructure of meaning…

(Thanks to Terry Heaton for the link.) [Tags: hyperlinks peter_laurie philosophy postmodernism]

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I was a guest on Dennis Prager‘s conservative radio talk show yesterday. I was supposed to be talking about Everything is Miscellaneous, but the conversation, not surprisingly, turned to whether the Net’s end run around authority is good for the left, right, or both. I thought Prager conducted a very good interview; I’m less happy with my responses.

I’m having trouble telling exactly what the permalink is for the podcast, but try here. If not, look for the June 14, 2007 show. I start at 10:20 and go to 23:36. (By the way, he introduces me as an “Internet advisor to Howard Dean.” Because time was short, I didn’t correct him to say that I was a volunteer Internet advisor to the Dean campaign, which is closer to the truth. I doubt very much that Dean would remember me.)

Supernova, a conference I’m going to and will be speaking at (debating Andrew Keen, among other things), is posting brief videos of people answering the question “What is the new network.” My response and Andrew Rasiej’s are here.

[Tags: dennis_prager supernova2007 everything_is_miscellaneous]

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David Isenberg tells a story about how a wine’s story makes it taste better. It’s a good reminder that the only products that are only products are products we don’t care much about.

Let me put that differently.

I came to like wine late in life, mainly because for most of my life I had only had really bad wine. Grape juice gone bad. Wine one pucker away from vinegar. Wine that made you appreciate the fine taste of Lavoris. Then, I had a client in the mid 1990s who wined and dined customers, ordering from the bottom of the wine list. The light bulb in the wine cellar went on. I still can’t tell identify a wine’s type without reading the bottle (although I usually can distinguish red from white), and my tastes are in the $10-$15/bottle range. But I like it. A lot. And it’s for one basic reason: The taste of wine is so damn complex. Drinking a good glass of wine is like thinking.

So, David’s story about the taste of a bottle being enhanced by the narrative around it pleases me. [Tags: wine david_isenberg everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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The other day, “All Things Considered” ran a commentary of mine on the value of digital messiness. [Tags: npr everything_is_miscellaneous taxonomy folksonomy]

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The latest in the Harvard Berkman-Wired Miscellaneous Podcasts series of interviews is up. I talk with my old friend Paul English, founder of Kayak.com (a travel site that kicks butt) about making a business out of other companies’ information. But Paul is also deeply involved in health care issues in developing nations where aggregating information can have benefits even more important than saving you $20 on your flight.

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Wired has posted the latest in the Miscellaneous Podcast series I’ve been doing, sponsored by the Berkman Center and Wired. This one is an interview with Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia. We talk about the role of rules in building knowledge socially as oppopsed to just letting things work out. How important is consistency in the rules as opposed to making decisions that are highly sensitive to the particularities of the case?

We also talk about the effect of slicing topics up into lots of linked pieces. And how Wikipedia looks from the point of view of a Muppet. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous wikipedia jimmy_wales knowledge ]

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My book is the subject of a discussion at the Well, with me as the interviewee.

Here’s the RSS feed. The site is here, but only has the first nine posts up.

You can read it for free. Only subscribers can comment. [Tags: the_well everything_is_miscellaneous taxonomy folksonomy tagging ]

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Harvard Business Review has started posting its “Forethought” articles — the op-ed style columns at the beginning of the issue. That means the one of mine they published this month — If You Love Your Information, Set It Free — is available online. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous hbr ]

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Tom Matrullo’s got a helpful post about opening up JSTOR, a digitized archive of scholarlship. Tom registers “puzzlement that anyone would take all sorts of pains to firewall knowledge — knowledge mainly produced by scholars at not-for-profit institutions of higher learning devoted to bringing light into our world.”

Damn right it’s frustrating. And there’s lot’s going on trying to free the knowledge. On the one hand, we have the economic hurdles, which Tom’s post explains. On the other, we have at least a sense of how much smarter our species could become if enabled open acess to scholarship. Someday…

(Thanks to Frank Paynter for the pointer.) [Tags: open_access knowledge universities tom_matrullo berkman jstor everything_is_miscellaneous]

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It’s Linnaeus’ 300th birthday today, and Wired.com is celebrating with a terrific article by Kristen Philipkoski.

The article also has a sidebar I wrote about Linnaeus, as well as 4-5 pages about Linnaeus from my book [Tags: linnaeus taxonomy wired everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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