Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts

of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org

where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to

other information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mail at econtalk.org. We'd

love to hear from you. My guest today is David Weinberger, a research fellow at the Berkman

Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, and the author most recently of

everything is miscellaneous, the power of the new digital disorder. David, welcome to econ talk.

Now everything is miscellaneous is the story of how we organize digital information or failed

to organize it, how we customize information, and how the digital information universe is changing

the way we think and organize our thoughts. It's full of insights and trivia and charm. You

open the book with a story of a staples store that's actually a laboratory that staples uses to

make their stores better, and that laboratory store is a highly ordered physical space. Tell us the

challenges that staples face is and why those challenges of the physical world don't operate all

the time in the digital world. Staples is trying to be a good actor here. Usually the science

of merchandising of laying out a retail store is the science of using space against customers,

so they typically will put the most popular item in the back of the store in order to force you

to go to the end of the store so that you'll pass by all the delightful offers, and so your efforts

are being sorted, spaces being used against you. Staples is trying not to do that. It's trying to

act more like a website, although they don't quite put it that way, but at a website, if they keep

throwing up obstacles to getting what you want, you'll leave, whether it's a pop-up or badly organized

information, or you're looking for a printer, but first they make sure that you see all of the

specials on scissors and paper. I mean, that's not a well-organized website, so staples is trying

...