This morning at Fast Forward 08, Dave Weinberger warmed up to a Sade song by the rock band. I told him beforehand that it was the first time I saw him in a suit and tie. He said it was his first new suit in 15 years. I like Dave a lot and he usually has good stuff to say. The band did the Stones - No Satisfaction - as Dave came back on the stage to speak. He said we are ending the age of information and this is a good thing. There is too much information now. He used the term informalization. Information is not a living thing with consciousness but people, like Ray Kurzweil, are entertaining that idea which Dave said is nuts. I am reminded of Sartre writing that images are not things with independent properties but acts that cannot be separated from their context. Knowledge is also an independent thing that can be separated from its context and retain real meaning.

I loved his pictures. He said there are two orders of stuff in the physical world. First the real stuff that can be organized and stored. Then there is metadata that makes it easier to find stuff but we lose a lot of information. Now with the digital the old restrictions do not hold. You can have multiple sets of metadata and multiple people can create this metadata. Metadata I now what we know and data is what we want to find.

Now nothing is easier to create than connections. The web is a counter to too much informalization. The web is links and the opposite of information. Links are social and not something for a machine. (but machines can analyze and make “meaning” out of links - not sure what he means here) Dave does say users own the order of stuff now whereas in the past the suppliers owned the order.

The Library of Congress has recently posted 1000s of photos from WW2 to let users of Flickr to help categorize these and have conversations about the photos. You can add more tags than the 75 Flickr tag limit through the comment fields. Now you can include everything and let users help to make sense of it so you go beyond sound bites. We have a richer world and now we can enjoy it. This is a nice message.