reading notes

by Peter Morville
ISBN: 0596007655

This book reads like the world’s longest, possibly most jargon-filled and randomly illustrated blog post.

I probably shouldn’t say that about a book written by one of the fathers of Information Architecture (Morville is co-author of the polar bear book) but then, maybe I should. Depending upon your point of view, it isn’t a bad thing to say.

An excited energy permeates Morville’s writing — imagine, if you don’t have a passionate geek in your life, a small child tugging at your sleeve for your attention — which propels the reader along. Morville’s biggest excitement is right there in the subtitle: what we find changes who we become. Other key points he makes along the way include:

• 3 Ds of findability: definition, distinction, difference
• “transmedia information literacy is a core life skill”
• “vital importance of empathy for the user”

Morville repeats his ‘words’ mantra (“Words and labels. Words as links. Keywords.”) more than once, and even mentions Flickr and del.icio.us, before he says tags. Maybe this is a minor nit to pick, because whether or not he was using the word he was talking about the concept, but it irritated me. (Also of interest on the tagging front, Livia Labate has tagged the bibliography using del.icio.us.)

I thought it was interesting that Morville picked up the concept of “pace layering” in Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn in the context of web design. It is a tantalizingly small section in the most compelling chapter in the book, “The Sociosemantic Web.” It is is also an example of what I mean when I say that reading the book is like reading blog posts — you get hits of good information, with plenty of pointers elsewhere for following up, but it is a bit short on the follow through. The format can work exceedingly well for blogs because of the immediacy of embedded links, but it can come across as clunky or choppy in dead tree form.

Toward the end of this chapter Morville makes another key point when he says, “With respect to aboutness, the social campaign of linking overwhelms the semantic content of the page.” He goes on to not that:

This reflects a fundamental shift in power from author to reader and from authority to popularity that is only just beginning to make waves outside the blogosphere.

I believe Morville is right about shifts in power, but I think the lines are fuzzier than he indicates. With more and more people interacting online(posting Flickr photos, leaving comments, editing wikis, adding ratings and reviews, blogging) the distinction between author as content creator and reader as content consumer is blurring. Authority and popularity aren’t necessarily at opposite ends of a quality spectrum. Technorati measures a blog’s authority in terms of inbound links, which could also be considered an indicator of popularity, but the whole thing is the subject of debate among bloggers and blog readers. I think what we are seeing is not so much a shift from authority to popularity as a redistribution of authority: we all have the power to become experts now.

If you enjoy reading blogs, or are interested in what all the jargon-filled fuss is about, or in the future of search, or simply want to see what has happened (or not) in library science and information architecture since the polar bear book, pick up a copy of what is already being referred to as “the lemur book.”

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 19th, 2006 at 10:47 pm and is filed under nonfiction.