Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become

Have you ever stopped to think about how "information" and the ability to find it has changed our lives? Ambient Findability by Peter Morville takes you down a thought-provoking path as to what it all means... Contents: Lost and Found; A Brief History of Wayfinding; Information Interaction; Intertwingled; Push and Pull; The Sociosemantic Web; Inspired Decisions; Index First off, this isn't a book along the lines of "follow these steps to increase your search engine ranking". In fact, if you're just looking for some quick hit suggestions on how to make your site easier to find, don't buy the book. It'd be a waste of your time. But if you're ready to really think about what "searching" means, read on. Morville examines how a number of trends have converged to make it possible to find out just about anything regardless of where you are and when you're looking for it. Wi-fi has made it possible to have search engine access outside the home or office. Google's massive indexing ability has allowed us to find things that would never be found otherwise. GPS, cell phones, and other technical marvels have made us locate-able regardless of where we (or the searcher) are. All this "ambient findability" changes who we are both as individuals and as a part of society. And with the continuing advance of smaller chips, more bandwidth, and integration of RFID into everyday products, this convergence of information exchange and interaction only promises to get deeper and more pervasive. As stated in the book... The future is already here, but it's just not evenly distributed yet... I'm a little surprised I liked this book as much as I did. As I've stated in the past, I tend to avoid philosophical musings and gravitate towards practical "how do I" titles. But this one snared me. It's well written to begin with, and I think the subject matter was one that I was already interested in. It's the type of book that you should read slowly and think about as you go. When you understand how we've arrived at our current destination, it tends to make you have a greater appreciation for things we (or at least I) have taken for granted. If you're ready for something that will make you think and ponder, Ambient Findability should make an appearance on your "need to read" list...

Wow, wow, holy cow....I am rushing to finish up a book on Information Operations: All Information, All Languages, All the Time, and I am so very pleased to have gotten to this absolute gem of a book before closing out. Compared to the other 200 or so books I have reviewed--including such gems at ATTENTION, Real-Time, Early Warning, and so on, this is clearly a "top ten" read in the literature on information art & science. Halfway through the book I was torn by a sense of anguish (the U.S. Intelligence Community and the beltway bandits that suck money out of the taxpayers pocket through them have no idea how to implement the ideas in this book) and joy (beyond Google, through Wikis and other collective intelligence endeavors facilitated by open source software, relevant findability is possible). This is a truly gripping book that addresses what may be the most important challenge of this century in a compelling, easy to read, yet intellectually deep and elegant manner. The author is a true guru who understands that in the age of a mega-information-explosion (not just in quantity, but in languages, mediums, and nuances) the creation of wealth is going to depend on information being useful, usable, desireable, findable, accessible, credible, and valuable (page 109). Especially important in the first half of the book are the author's focus on Mooers (not to be confused with Moores) who said in 1959 that users will make do with what information they have when it becomes too inconvenient to go after better information. This is key. At the same time, he focuses on the difference between precision and recall, and provides devasting documentation of the failure of recall (1 in 5 at best) when systems scale up, as well as the diminuition of precision. Bottom line: all these beltway bandits planning exobyte and petabyte databases have absolutely no idea how to actually help the end-user find the needle in the haystack. This author does. The book is without question "Ref A" for the content side of Information Operations. On page 61 I am just ripped out of my chair and on to my feet by the author's discussion of Marcia Bates and her focus on an integrated model of information seeking that integrates aesthetic, biological, historical, psychological, social, and "even" spiritual layers of understanding. This is bleeding edge good stuff, with nuances that secret intelligence world is not going to understand for years. There is a solid discussion of geocoding and locationally aware devices, and I am very pleased to see the author recognize the work of four of my personal heroes, Stewart Brand, Bruce Sterling, Kevin Kelly, and Howard Rheingold. Halfway through the book he discusses the capture of life experiences, and the real possibility that beyond today's information explosion might lie an exo-explosion of digital data coming from wired individuals feeding what they see and hear and feel into "the web". The opportunities for psycho-social diag

I was pleased as punch to discover the book Ambient Findability yesterday. In fact, I devoured most of the book last night, resulting in dreams about metadata! Maybe not the best bedtime reading. Peter is the author of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, another excellent O'Reilly book. This tome runs a surprising gamut of topics, from crime statistics to health care to folksonomies, and though it sometimes meanders, it's the best treatment yet in a printed volume of the many factors swirling about today's Internet. For example, Peter actually goes so far as to diagram different information interactions, such as the difference between a taxonomy and a folksonomy. He illustrates the consumer decision-making process and buying process. He explains why sometimes worrying about the findability of your website (in a search engine, for example) might actually be of a greater concern than the organization of the site itself. And he shows how sites like del.icio.us and Flickr reveal the incredible power of tagging. As the Web becomes an ever-larger part of our everyday lives, we realize that the humble profession of web design is growing all the time, requiring ever-more understanding of the world around us, crossing discipline after discipline. This is the kind of book that makes us really excited about the future, and about our chosen profession!

Morville's work is the most appropriate follow-on to the usability concepts so well promoted by Steven Krug in his Don't Make Me Think and Jakob Nielsen in Designing Web Usability. "Findability," Morville argues, is a necessary component in the success and propagation of an idea or detail or fact. Business and non-profits alike will benefit from understanding the value of findability. Obviously, findability serves more than just internet marketers and hucksters. Morville offers an example of a nonprofit medical research agency and how the findability -- in this case, the search engine ranking of their web content -- affected people's ability to get authoritative, quality information on the web. "[T]he [web development] team", Morville writes, "had to look beyond the narrow goals of web site design, to see their role in advancing the broader mission of disseminating [...] information to people in need." Morville could have asked "if a remarkable idea springs up in the forest, but it doesn't show up in the first page of Google search results, is it really all that remarkable?" But findability is more than that, and there's a lot more to the book. Morville discusses findability in depth, considering both its current and possible future implications. Eventually, of course, findability will butt up against our notions of privacy, and Morville explores that as well. Though the book will serve information architects, software designers building anything related to web content management, web designers, marketers, and PR flacks well, its real gift is to the teachers, researchers, librarians, and public servants who handle so much valuable data that must (or, in some cases, must not) be findable.