Hungarian Mashup

I’m completely serious when I ask that someone do a mashup or remix of this music track.

Anyone musical willing to give it a go? I think it could be a new Internet meme.

Thanks to Simon for finding this one. It must have been a light dev day ;).

Everything is Miscellaneous

I met David Weinberger face-to-face last year at the Supernova conference (I’d previously chatted with him on a podcast about Open Spectrum), and he mentioned the book he was in the process of writing: Everything is Miscellaneous.

I’d read The Cluetrain Manifesto, and Small Pieces Loosely Joined, so I’ve been eagerly awaiting this next book. He’s very switched on when it comes to the Internet, and it’ll be amazing to see how his work applies to Scouta.

Here’s a blurb pinched from Amazon.

In a high-minded twist on the Internet-has-changed-everything book, Weinberger (Small Pieces Loosely Joined) joins the ranks of social thinkers striving to construct new theories around the success of Google and Wikipedia. Organization or, rather, lack of it, is the key: the author insists that “we have to get rid of the idea that there’s a best way of organizing the world.” Building on his earlier works’ discussions of the Internet-driven shift in power to users and consumers, Weinberger notes that “our homespun ways of maintaining order are going to break—they’re already breaking—in the digital world.” Today’s avalanche of fresh information, Weinberger writes, requires relinquishing control of how we organize pretty much everything; he envisions an ever-changing array of “useful, powerful and beautiful ways to make sense of our world.” Perhaps carried away by his thesis, the author gets into extended riffs on topics like the history of classification and the Dewey Decimal System. At the point where readers may want to turn his musings into strategies for living or doing business, he serves up intriguing but not exactly helpful epigrams about “the third order of order” and “useful miscellaneousness.” But the book’s call to embrace complexity will influence thinking about “the newly miscellanized world.”

If you’d like a larger snippet of what the new book will cover, Christopher Lydon interviewed David for his podcast: Open Source: Weinberger’s Miscellany.

We consider David an unofficial advisor to Scouta, and credit him as convincing us for the need to prioritize our Groups feature.

David is also hands-down the single funniest guy on a conference back-channel. If you’re ever at a conference with him, make sure you get to sample some of his humor–he was after all a comedy writer for Woody Allen.

Congratulations on getting to publication David!