1 Information Archtecture at its finest

Today I watched a video of a man from ThemeZoom contradicting “The Master Plan”. He said the information architecture was all wrong, even though “The Master Plan” was endorsed by ThemeZoom previously. This article demonstrated really smart information architecture, rather than just another trick.

posted at 07:29 am on August 26, 2008 by Nuovo Labs

2 Communication and content, too!

It’s rare to find a genuinely insightful article amongst the general hubbub of the web these days, this was yet another humbling article from ALA. I’d like to see more articles like these.

I have just one thing to add. To take the metaphor in a different direction, I’d liken the cartographer to a set designer. A well-designed set may be necessary to make the play happen, but in the end of the night it’s the story that you tell that people will take away.

posted at 07:58 am on August 26, 2008 by Pete Nicholls

3 What happened to cartography?

We’re playing it fast and loose with the metaphors here.

Doesn’t this article propose that a web designer is a rhetorician, not a cartographer? It likens a website to Quintilian’s collective memory map – an imaginary construct with no physical form – not to a tangible, designed map. That tells me we’re making imaginary houses, not representations of those houses.

So what happened to cartography, which I understand to be the science and craft of making maps? Maps aren’t imaginary places, they’re representations of places, imaginary or otherwise. They invariably take some kind of fixed form.

And are we mapping memory or shaping social interaction? Because the idea of enabling social interaction inside a memory map strikes me as a terribly muddled metaphor.

posted at 08:33 am on August 26, 2008 by David Ramos

4 Thought Provoking

I posted on Zeldman.com about this earlier – so I’ll paraphrase ..

What a great unique and refreshing article on web design! We often think we’re doing things and building logical structures in an unprecendented fashion – we are pioneers and are paving the way, etc, etc … yet that article proves quite the opposite is the case.

I think a failure to see that there are greater forces at work than just the designer and client is what seems to lead to brand new sites being obsolete out of the box … I work as a consulting SEO mostly – and find my role changing more to one of evanglising the semantic web than ever before. Not a role I mind at all – just not something I saw coming 2 years ago.

Thanks for a insightful article!

Regards, Lee

posted at 09:59 am on August 26, 2008 by Lee Stuttaford

5 assqww

It’s rare to find a genuinely insightful article amongst the general hubbub of the web these days, this was yet another humbling article from ALA. I’d like to see more articles like these.

posted at 10:10 am on August 26, 2008 by moo jooly

6 Putting it into practice

Very inspiring :) How do you foresee putting it into practice?

Sounds like you’re advocating a user-defined architecture (sorry!) that evolves over time, otherwise the map you create for the current user interactions may soon become out-dated what with all the tectonic activity on the web these days!

Do you envisage sites as evolving within a type of tag cloud while providing fixed points of anchorage, for example, in your case a particular year or department?

posted at 01:20 pm on August 26, 2008 by Shahar Hesse

7 Untitled

As a geographer and webdesigner, I could not have explained this side of my work much better. A website is ontologically a map (even if it is hard to explain or understand). Thanks.

posted at 02:43 pm on August 26, 2008 by Nicolas Leduc

8 Oh, not enough!

I really appreciate this article. I love reading something lovely that makes me think.

What I’d really love to see, actually, is an expanded version of this paper that take s the issue deeper: what are the implications of changing the metaphor by which we define ourselves? How does this change in our approach change not only what we create, but the relationships that stem from its making? What do we stand to gain by this shift in vision? And, most importantly, how will this shift in vision change our understanding and perhaps practice of digital information sharing?

So, in your copious spare time ;) I’d love to see an expanded article. I could have kept reading this paper for several pages more. This was right up my alley; I loved it.

posted at 03:08 pm on August 26, 2008 by amber simmons

9 Emergence & diversification

Websites are also the emergent property of the activity that can be mapped. If you consider a publishing system like a blog, or youtube, then the physical (sic) website emerges over time as a by-product of its users activity.

Users come and go, publishing and commenting, etc. This leaves behind html pages, words, content. The website is ‘actually’ (and solely) made up of these artifacts and it’s their nature and texture that shapes future activity, which leaves more artifacts and so on.

In some cases it may be fruitful to consider mapping the activity your artifacts facilitate. However, to scale, you must consider the artifacts left by the activity facilitated by the artifacts left by… ad infinitum.

posted at 03:17 pm on August 26, 2008 by James Arthur

10 Cartographer eh?

Nice article I must say. Its not very often that someone discusses website architecture from a cartography point of view.
This article prompted me to run a check through my own website and trust me I felt as I was on a treasure hunt something. Did manage to correct some inconsistencies but the journey was way better.

posted at 03:27 pm on August 26, 2008 by Maneet Puri