Tag: IA

Next generation tag clouds

Joe Lamantia recently published a two–part essay on tag clouds. He’s managed to create a nice primer on tagging from an IA’s point of view. His tone of voice is a bit academic, which may turn you off, but his predictions of future directions for tagging and tag clouds are spot on quite interesting.

A while ago I tried to come to grips with the tagging phenomenon in a series of posts on open.info.nl (in Dutch). The last one was on facetted tagging. Lamantia briefly mentions this as a new direction, but doesn’t really describe how he imagines this would work.

I’m in the planning phase of a facetted tagging demo, and still not sure how to approach it: should content editors specify the facets within which content users can tag, or should the facets be tags as well. In other words – how far should we go in relinquishing control over metadata?

Yahoo! opens up some more

Some great new resources are now available, courtesy of everyone’s favorite web 2.0 company: Yahoo!

The Design Pattern Library contains a whole bunch of patters for user interface designers to use and abuse. Martijn van Welie finally has some competition.

Of more interest to developers is the UI Library, containing “a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications”. These code examples are frequently linked to from the pattern library.

I must say, these look like some excellent additions to the current body of knowledge available to designers and developers. Thanks a bunch Yahoo!

However, my paranoid mind can’t help but think: what’s the catch?

Via Jeremy Zawodny.

Euro IA Summit 2005 report

While my notes are collecting dust on my hard drive, someone else finally got around to writing up a report of last year’s European IA Summit. As James Kalbach writes in his article on Boxes and Arrows:

“We should be intensely interested in documenting these summits… Does IA really want to deliver a wheelbarrow of PowerPoint slides in ten years as the body of its work?”

A good overview of a memorable event then. I’m already looking forward to the next one.

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Keynote Speech – Andrew Dillon – Euro IA Summit 2005

Here’s my notes from Andrew Dillon’s keynote at the Euro IA Summit:

Big IA has a future; little IA does not. Geen IA vs. UX – niet jezelf definiëren aan de hand van wat je niet bent. Data is stored, information is experienced. Design to leverage natural tendencies. Dingen hoeven niet direct bruikbaar te zijn. Web 2.0: van iets wat gemaakt is, naar iets wat je zelf maakt… User: from recipient to participant, co-owner and co-designer. User Human. UX design – niet: this is how I like it. Weg bewegen van craft-based werk, geen consistente kwaliteit, geen systematiek in werk, weinig vooruitgang, bedreigd door snelle veranderingen in omgeving. Ambiguity has it’s merits. You don’t have to strictly define it (IA). No more heroes, some people may even think Jakob Nielsen’s a liability… Organisation, curation and interaction of information. Curation is a problem. The architectures are our theories. Findability is the new usability – but where’s the architecture in that? Beyond navigation: patterning, wrapping, anchoring, emergent structure. ‘Virus of the mind’; information breeds. Cohill, 1991, information architecture & the design project – IA as a new kind of project manager. Real design: respect experience – augment life. Usability is a design value, like accessibility.

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This year the first European Information Architecture Summit will be held in Brussels, Belgium on October 15-16. I’ll be there to present a poster together with Almar van der Krogt on an interesting navigation concept we developed for a large marketing website. If you’re an IA, or are involved in the structuring of information for online media, then this is definitely the event for you!

Update: added the tag ‘Euro IA Summit 2005’

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