“In order to get maximum value from this ever-growing collection of ideas and information, in a real sense you have to un-manage it. It’s by un-managing it, by allowing everybody who touches it to add to the connections, to add their own links, ideas, reviews, bad ideas, good ideas, insights—that’s how the collection grows. Just as with the Web itself, it cannot scale sufficiently if it’s too centrally managed.”

-David Weinberger

David Weinberger, who I had the pleasure of meeting at FastForward’s San Diego confab earlier this year, and who’s work has graced these pages (Hylton provides a list here), recently discussed his latest book, Everything is Miscellaneous, with the editors at KnowledgeWorld.

David says we are entering a Miscellaneous Economy, enabled via technology, which is providing us with rich two-way knowledge and interaction. As he put it: “with the digital miscellaneous, we find all sorts of ways that the things are alike, all sorts of connections and relationships. We’re doing that together. We’re doing it over the course of time. The digital miscellaneous pile is getting richer and richer with connections, meanings, significant relationships.”

David says that the Miscellaneous Economy is evolving out of the Web of relationships that is developing as a result of social networking technology. “It can be as ordinary as a link,” he explained. “A person links one page to another because she sees some relationship between them. Tags are another expression of a relationship. The semantic Web does this also. All of these relationships are preserved and are available to help us find what we want. The miscellaneous becomes rich with potential, with multiple layers of meaning and a near infinite number of ways of organizing it.”

What’s the meaning to business? David provides three ways in which businesses can profit from the Miscellaneous Economy:

1) Businesses can let customers organize information: “Under the traditional way of organizing, which works very well for physical objects, the business decides what is the best way to organize and categorize its stuff, and what are the right paths through it. …What you think of as a survival backpack may be to a customer a good graduation gift or the perfect shape to carry her new video camera. For another customer, it may be reminiscent of the backpack he had when he was in the Boy Scouts. You enable your customers to find the information that they want far more efficiently if you allow them to participate in the categorizing and organizing of it. And especially if you allow them to do it together.”

2) Businesses can uncover previously unseen relationships: “By using tools that allow that information to be broken out of its assigned categories, you will discover relationships you didn’t know were there. You’re going to spur innovation, you’re going to discover efficiencies and you’re going to enable people across your organization to find other people who share their passions.”

3) Information mashups: “You’ll also get more use out of your information because your information makes more sense when it’s mashed up with other information. Not infrequently it happens that by allowing information over here that looks like it shouldn’t have anything to do with that other information over there, we discover what we never expected to discover.”