It seems that I’ve spent more time customizing my blog than actually writing it, although I have been keeping some private entries about my experience at IBM. They will be used to write a final review of my field experience.
But in other news: I recently read an article from Technical Communication by Abe Crystal, a PhD student at Carolina and presently a colleague at IBM. His article “Facets are Fundamental” makes an excellent point about he direction in which IA needs to move in order to continue to meet users’ needs. Presently, many IA professionals note that a faceted interface is built upon a solid, static organization scheme. Abe asserts that we should lose the static interface and allow the menu should be completely driven by facets. This sounds like it has real potential. I also appreciate the distinction between attributes and facets. While this is highly debated and I might even argue that they are both facets, this distinction is indeed important. While attributes are easily observed from an object, facets are more abstract and need to be created through a human sense-making process. It seems to be more challenging to choose metadata terms for the facets, which may be a challenge to consistency in a large-scale environment. It will be interesting to see where the field moves in the next few years. Additionally, his article seems to be quite relevant to my work at IBM, so I will be diving into it deeper in the next few days.
My colleague, Anne, asked me Monday to write a review of “Everything is Miscellaneous” for her. She’s editing the summer edition of the SILS Galley. So here goes, and feel free to comment.
Trained as a philosopher and a former gag writer for the Woody Allen comic strip, David Weinberger provides, in his own words an “argument against organization” and possibly even more controversial “an argument against Aristotle.” Weinberger says that there’s not one way to organize the universe, as Aristotle tried to do, and nothing can belong in only one place, so it’s miscellaneous. Wait, before we decide that his work is counter to everything we hold to be true, realize his disorder is about putting things everywhere they belong. In his latest book, Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, he presents three orders of organization describing how in the beginning things, constrained as atoms, could be in one and only one place. Later developments, or the “Second Order” brought metadata (remember the card catalog?) and the ability to place the content in one place but point to it via even more physical objects arranged in probably a maximum of three different ways. The “Third Order,” the “Digital Disorder” allows content and its metadata to exist everywhere it is logical and enables findability from all angles. While this may not be new to you, Weinberger certainly treats the web in a new light and makes some interesting connections along the way. Classified in the ‘futurology” genre among others on Wikipedia, this book is a tribute to library science, a wake-up call to businesses and an exhilarating read for anyone who navigates the web.
My first round of blogging ended in a few posts that held no collective knowledge and more resembled a complaint box than anything else. Version 2.0 called the soapbox, was supposed to be a log of my profound thoughts. It wasn’t much more than a rendering of a cool graphic I did for a tee shirt. So now, 3.0 is going to be something, but my hopes are to create a space where I can organize my thoughts about information. It’s a broad scope, but information is going to be my livelihood. Currently, I am set to graduate in May with a Bachelor of Science in Information Science and I am working on a summer team at IBM in Raleigh, addressing classification issues in their Systems Information Center. I’ve just completed reading David Weinberger’s “Everything is Miscellaneous” and I absolutely loved it. I think it is a must read for anyone who seeks to understand the current state of what he calls the “digital disorder” or the mess of information that the web has created. I think I am going to devote an entire post to this book sometime in the neat future. I’ve planned Peter Morville’s “Ambient Findability” as my next read. I gained much respect for Morville after studying his “Information Architecture for the World Wide Web Third Edition” shortly after beginning at IBM. The “Polar Bear 3.0″ as he likes to call it is, in my opinion, one of the more definitive Information Architecture books on the market and he along with co-author Louis Rosenfield, have had much emphasis on our work at IBM. My coworker is set to finish “Ambient Findability” this weekend and I am eager to swap “Everything is Miscellaneous” with him tomorrow. I am also going to find a good name for my blog.
In closing here, I have a few additional thoughts from writing this piece. First, I am quite impressed with Blogger’s new autosave feature. It appears to be a nice Ajax or Ajax-esque implementation. Also, I think findability should join the Webster I am getting tired of telling Word and now Blogger that it is indeed the word I want to use. At least I can change the settings in Word to include it in my personal dictionary. Lastly, shortly after this post I am going to add a tag cloud to my template and maybe even a nice spiffy graphic for the header. I am most interesting in seeing my tagging habits, however. Maybe what I write about the most will guide me to an appropriate title for this outlet. What a concept! Titles that actually reflect what the content is about. It’s good to be back home from the beach, where the internet was spotty and back to my exciting work at IBM tomorrow.
