The Lack Of Time

Introduction:
The idea of breaking away from traditional sorting and storage is an interesting one. In Everything Is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger he leads us into a discussion about it by first explaining the old system of organization and storage. This is storage in the physical. His example of this is a staples store. He talks about how staples use a special planning store to attempt to overcome the traditional limitations of the physical. This seems like and odd way to approach the subject. Most people never thing about how a store is put together beyond the obvious practices of storing the things we want far from the entrance. So by using the example of a staples store to lead into a discussion of the storage of digital media seems a bit like telling someone how scoring works in a baseball game as a preface to explain scoring in a soccer game.

That being said, the intro was interesting to read. I had no idea that there were stores out there like staples who do not try to trick their customers into buying more then they intended. This is a refreshing idea and I can see how it my pay off in the long run. When I go to a store like WalMart I almost always come out with more then I intended. I know this and often avoid WalMart for this reason. Keeping me out of their store is not was walmart intended when they started this system but it has been the result. The one part of the introduction I really did like was the idea that everything but the things you are looking for in a store a just things that are in your way. I have never thought about it this way and found doing so to be an enjoyable exercise.

Chapter1:
I find it difficult not to rally against the view points of the author in this chapter.He discusses how we need to change the way we interact with large amounts of information. He talks about how those interacting with data, for instance the iTunes store have more choices then are available to those who shop physically. It is hard for me to think about data on a computer as random. I have worked with computes for years and know that computers a machines of order. Almost everywhere large amounts of data are stored you will find a database. These databases are what allow consumes, such as those on Itunes, to find what they are looking for. These databases are the essence of order. They make it possible to store vast and almost unimaginable amounts of data. Itunes offers is users a search feature that lets them search its music database. With that being said data basses work very well up to a point. Once a database becomes two large or sloppy it quickly becomes useless. I will use flckr as an example of what I mean. The author mentions this site and states that it has around a million photos uploaded every day. So lets say I was browsing flikr last week. I found an image that I like. It was two dogs playing in the snow. I now want to find that image again to show to a friend. I search for "two dogs play in the snow" on flikr and get 10,000 picture results. Because all the images are stored in a database it is easy for flickr to pull up all the pictures relating to my search terms. However the picture I want was tagged the individual who up loaded it and as such the dogs names were included instead of the fact that they were dogs. They labeled the picture "Tiny and Big Jim play in the snow". Searching for dogs playing in the snow will never return this picture. It is for all practical purposes lost to you. This is similar to the problem the Bettman photo archive has. When there is too much information finding one piece information can be very difficult.

Chapter 2:
I enjoyed chapter two. The idea of the alphabet as an arbitrary order is very interesting. Large data stores use a similar system for ordering and such. They use what is called a primary key. The primary key is the most important part of data storage in our modern age. It is a number assigned to each database entry that is completely unique to that entry. In this way it is able to keep all the data entries strait and separate from one another. The public would almost never see an entries primary key because they don't need to. It is purely for exact organization of data on the computers. He goes on to talk about natural joints. This does not make a lot of sense to me. I don't really understand what they have to do with data storage. It was an interesting chapter, I really liked the explanation of the how the periodic chart of elements came to be. I really did not understand what impact this had on data storage. Perhaps it was to drive home the point that the same information can be stored more then once in our modern age and still make perfect sense due to context. The entire point of the afore mentioned public primary keys is to allow for the same data to be entered more then once. Because each piece of information has its own primary key you are able to keep the two data entries distinct from one another.