David Weinberger ist einer der großen Idealisten des World Wide Web. Gemeinsam mit Rick Levine, Christopher Locke und Doc Searls veröffentlichte er 1999 das Cluetrain Manifest. In Anlehnung an Martin Luther formulierten die vier Autoren 95 Thesen, die eine kritische Anleitung für die Schaffung eines demokratischen Verhältnis von Unternehmen und UserInnen in der New Economy des Internet sind.

In seinem 2002 erschienen Buch „Small Pieces Loosley Joined“ bringt Weinberger seine Vision des WWW so auf den Punkt: “The web is enabling us to rediscover what we’ve always known about being human: we are connected creatures in a connected world about which we care passionately.”

Wer nach einer Einführung in Weinbergers “Unified Theory of the Web” sucht, dem empfehle ich die Kids Version von Small Pieces Loosely Joined.
Titel: What the Web is For. Erforderliches Zeitbudget: Eine Kaffepause. Zu erwartender Erlebnishorizont: Die digitale Sendung mit der Maus.

Den Lesefaulen (die es auf diesem Blog schwer genug haben) ist dieses Videointerview aus dem vom Handelsblatt gesponsorten Blog elektrischer Reporter gewidmet:

Das für mich wichtigste Statement des Interviews, macht Weinberger auf die Frage: Wie begegnet man dem Phänomen des Information Overload? – Weinberger: “The cure for information overload is more information.”

Was Weinberger damit meint, ist, dass in einer Zeit wo die Informationsflut explodiert, es mehr denn je darauf ankommt, Informationen über die Information zu produzieren, also sog. Metainformation. Möglich wird dies durch die Digitalisierung von Information. Die Folge ist, dass Informationen zur selben Zeit an mehereren Orten zugleich sein können, und zudem unterschiedlich miteinander kombiniert werden können. Weinberger dazu: „We have to get rid of the idea that there’s a best way of organizing the world.”Daß dahinter ein Business Modell liegt, in dem so ziemlich alle Prinzipien des Lifestyle-Advertising-Konzepts zusammenlaufen, und das weit über die simple Kategorisierung einiger Tags hinausgeht, erläutert Weinberger in einem Aufsatz zu seinem aktuellen Buch “Everything Is Miscellaneous“ auf amazon.de:

The Flocking of Information: An Amazon.com Exclusive Essay by David Weinberger

As businesses go miscellaneous, information gets chopped into smaller and smaller pieces. But it also escapes its leash–adding to a pile that can be sorted and arranged by anyone with a Web browser and a Net connection. In fact, information exhibits bird-like “flocking behavior,” joining with other information that adds value to it, creating swarms that help customers and, ultimately, the businesses from which the information initially escaped.

For example, Wize.com is a customer review site founded in 2005 by entrepreneur Doug Baker. The site provides reviews for everything from computers and MP3 players to coffee makers and baby strollers. But why do we need another place for reviews? If you’re using the Web to research what digital camera to buy for your father-in-law, you probably feel there are far too many sites out there already. By the time you have scrolled through one store’s customer reviews for each candidate camera and then cross-referenced the positive and the negative with the expert reviews at each of your bookmarked consumer magazines, you have to start the process again just to remember what people said. Wize in fact aims at exactly that problem. It pulls together reviews from many outside sources and aggregates them into three piles: user reviews, expert reviews (with links to the online publications), and the general “buzz.” (For shoppers looking for a quick read on a product, Wize assigns an overall ranking.) When Wize reports that 97 percent of users love the Nikon D200 camera, it includes links to the online stores where the user reviews are posted, so customers are driven back to the businesses to spend their money.

Zillow.com does something similar for real estate. The people behind Expedia.com, Rich Barton and Lloyd Frink, were looking for a new business idea–and were in the market for new homes. After hunting for information, they found that most of it was locked into the multiple listings sites of the National Association of Realtors. Now Zillow takes those listings and mashes them up with additional information that can help a potential purchaser find exactly what she wants. The most dramatic mashup right now is the “heat map” that uses swaths of color to let you tell at a glance what are the most expensive and most affordable areas. At some point, though, Zillow or one of its emerging competitors will mash up listing information with school ratings, crime maps, and aircraft flight patterns.

Wize and Zillow make money by selling advertising, but their value is in the way their sites aggregate the miscellaneous–letting lots of independent sources flock together, all in one place.

We’re seeing the same trend in industry after industry, including music, travel, and the news media. Information gets released into the wild (sometimes against a company’s will), where it joins up with other information, and the act of aggregating adds value. Companies lose some control, but they gain market presence and smarter customers. The companies that are succeeding in the new digital skies are the ones that allow their customers to add their own information and the aggregators to mix it up, because whether or not information wants to be free, it sure wants to flock.

David Weinberger auf amazon.de

Sowohl Wize wie Zillow.com bieten viele weiterführende Informationen zu ihren konkreten Business-Modellen und Tools, die sich meiner Ansicht nach auf viele andere Branchen übersetzen lassen. Lohnt sich also, drauf zu klicken.