In a SmartMobs blog post two days ago, Gerrit Visser pointed to a video debate in which David Weinberg was challenged by Andrew Keen on what he writes in his book Everything Is Miscellaneous. Walt Mossberg, Personal Technology Editor of the Wall Street Journal moderated. The video is over an hour long. I watched it and was impressed by Weinberger’s lucid and passionate presentation. I thought remarks that followed by Keen and Mossberg were off topic. For example, in his final stroke against Weinberger, Keen lamented that Wikipedia has an article that is comparably too short on the subject of “truth” when there is elsewhere a much longer article on a minor issue about truth. Weinberger had no time to respond, but I am sure would have explained that the longer article is the luxury of the miscellaneous world caused by open networks. Keen was missing the long tail that has newly allowed the elaboration of knowledge.

Interesting issues like these are emerging around the ideas in Everything Is Miscellaneous. Here is another one bubbling up on the book’s website:

I like what Michael Wolff says in his Vanity Fair piece about his new news site:

“The metaphor, for 150 years — from print to radio to network to cable — has been the front page: important stuff first. “It should have to do now with falling through something, or floating through the totality of information or of intersecting worlds and interests,” offers [Patrick] Spain, not a man wild with his metaphors. [VF, October, p. 126]”

I’ve been saying for a while, and I think in Everything Is Miscellaneous, that the new front page is distributed across our day and our network. Much of it comes through our inbox. It consists of people we know and people we don’t know recommending items for our interest.

So, I was disappointed by Wolff’s new site, Newser.com. It presents a view of the news that’s much less hierarchical than a typical front page, and it’s well-designed for quickly finding what matters to you (including through editorially curated links), but: (1) It assumes its nine top-level categories reflect how every reader views the world; (2) Where are our voices? Comments? Blogs? (3) I couldn’t let it arise from my social network (where that network includes people I don’t know but whose views interest me). It competes with Google News, not with the intersection of Digg and FaceBook, which is what I’m waiting for.