View from the South Sideline

View from the End Zone

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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.

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.