Boxes and Arrows has a review of Dave Weinberger's book Small Pieces, Loosely Joined.
My interest in this book is fairly high at the moment (ordered, haven't read it yet), because I'm just starting to 'get' the importance of the 'loosely joined' part. We spend a lot of time talking about developing, implementing, and managing systems on the web--content management systems, knowledge management systems, communication systems.... But excepting, possibly, Yahoo, people don't want one place to go. Or, really they want their place to go, a place that has the best of everything they want, and most important all the contacts they need to build their own social and knowledge network.
One reason people like Google so much is because it doesn't just give them pages with random appearances of important words, it gives them important pages as determined by PageRank. And, and this is important, it doen't attempt to control the information or even how the information shows up.
The Web, says David Weinberger, is about more than just inforamtion retrieval and e-commerce (well, yeah, this is what I was fumbling around trying to say above).
What's really important about the Web? Words? Buying stuff? Using words to buy stuff?
Some of Weinberger's thoughts on the subject:
Deb,
I really appreciated your blog. I've installed MT and have been playing with it as well. I'm thinking RSS may have some real implications for E-extension, etc.
I've just finished reading "Small Pieces Loosely Joined". I can't say it contained anything profound, but it was definitely a good read. It helped me organize my own thoughts much better. It helped me to understand why some things we have tried have worked wonderfully, and why others have failed. There were lots of "of course" sorts of moments found in the book. It's an easy read, and I would most definitely recommend it to others.
Posted by: Kevin Gamble on September 24, 2002 01:14 PM