Evan Carroll Experience Designer

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.