In my 20s I spent a couple of years working in management accounting for a large multinational. Now I know you think that must have been incredibly boring, but for me it was anything but. In the days when spreadsheets really were sheets of paper, I became an expert at correcting errors using Snopake (maximum two layers before you were writing on top of a gooey white mountain) or with a razor blade (maximum two corrections before you wore a hole in the paper). You people brought up on computers simply don't know you're born.

One of the drawbacks of working as an accountant is that you become obsessed with the concept of 'everything in its place and a right place for everything' (although actually, because of double-entry book-keeping, everthing in accounting actually has two places, but that's another story). It's a drawback because very little in life is inclined to conform to these rules and insists that its proper place is in a category of its own or in lots of categories all at once. Maybe that's why accountants always look so depressed.

Our insistence on trying to work within nice, neat, hierarchical, tree-like systems of classification has confounded me on more than one occasion in recent years. Take blended learning for example. If you want to create a formal, top-down learning intervention (yes, this is still the norm) and you're open minded about how it should be delivered (less normal), then in most organisations you're stuck. Do you take it to the main l&d department, where every solution involves a classroom, or do you venture into the e-learning area, where technology is the hammer and every training requirement is a nail? It sounds crazy, but very few enterprises have designers who are well versed in all modes of delivery and can objectively determine the best solution for each situation. Instead there's a simple binary system of classification - it's either a classroom problem or an e-learning one. Blended learning is messy - even when it doesn't include a range of informal elements - and is often therefore overlooked.

A second example relates to a series of courses I developed between 2003 and 2005 with a colleague of mine called David Kori. The series was titled Doing the Business and sought to teach managers and professionals how to communicate more effectively using sound design principles and harnessing the power of modern technology. We actually won awards for one of the titles in the series - Ten Ways to Avoid Death by PowerPoint - but never really achieved the sales we wanted. The problem was that our courses were neither pure soft skills (where technology rarely rears its ugly head) nor IT training (where good design in presentations, printed documents or web content never gets a mention). At least, that's our excuse.

It was from this perspective that I started reading David Weinberger's Everything is Miscellanous. If ever there was a case of preaching to the converted this was it. I had, anyway, already seen David's fabulous presentation on the subject, so I knew what to expect. In case you missed it, David's premise is that we "have to get rid of the idea that there's a best way of organising the world." Whatever constraints we might have experienced in the past "the digital world allows us to transcend the most fundamental rule of the real world: instead of everything having its place, it's better if things can get assigned multiple places simultaneously."


Tagging and other technologies free us from the necessity of deciding on a single system of classification, in which every object is assigned a single category. In iTunes, my music can be grouped by genre, by artist, by album or by star rating all at the same time. And by arranging tracks into playlists I can create any number of new catageories of my own choosing. Similarly, in my photo package, Adobe Photoshop Darkroom, I create order amongst the thousands of images by tagging the photos according to the people, places or events they represent. And, of course, this principle is massively extended online as users collaborate to create folksonomies to sort the millions of items to be found in flickr, del.icio.us, YouTube and endless other sites.

To those who have never really experienced the tyranny of traditional systems of classification, David Weinberger's book may seem to be stating the obvious. After all, the change is already under way and is probably irreversible. Nevertheless, changes of this magnitude are bound to threaten all sorts of vested interests and we need books like this to present the case powerfully and rationally to those who remain unconvinced.