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.

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.