Ambient Findability

norburym writes "Peter Morville is an information architect, an advocate of expanding the boundaries of librarianship in an Internet age and the voice of ambient findability. In this new book from O'Reilly, Morville expands on a theme he's been discussing for several years: we live in an age where computers and the Internet are changing how we access information. Digital networks are available everywhere. As users, we have computers, PDAs, GPS units, smartphones, software and other network technologies that enable constant and mobile connectivity. As Morville writes, ambient findability is "a realm in which we can find anyone or anything from anywhere at anytime" and his book is a thought provoking chronicle of the advent of that goal." Read the rest of Mary's review. Ambient Findability author Peter Morville pages 204 publisher O'Reilly Media rating 9 reviewer Mary Norbury-Glaser ISBN 0596007655 summary Information retrieval in an age of ubiquitous computing.

Ambient Findability is divided into seven sections that track the journey from simply defining what the author means by findability through a history of man's search for location awareness in both the physical environment and in the cyber world; how we interact with information through documents, language, and systems of retrieval; intertwingularity and findable objects; the balance between push (advertising) and pull (information retrieval); being a Web designer and a user advocate; metadata and physical data in the context of findability; and the ability to make informed decisions based on open source and emerging technology.

A core definition offered by the author in Chapter 1 is for findability: "the quality of being locatable or navigable; the degree to which a particular object is easy to discover or locate; the degree to which a system or environment supports navigation and retrieval." Morville discusses how well various websites perform in providing information desired by the user and how successful sites cater to mass customization. Businesses and non-profits that aim to reduce search time and improve findability of their site contents will gain marketplace advantage.

Chapter 2 is an interesting and informative introduction to the history of wayfinding through lessons learned from various animal species (exocentric and egocentric navigation, echolocation, etc.) to how humans have adapted landmarks or created tools to aid in navigation and exploration (lighthouses, compasses, sextants, maps, etc.) and further how architects and urban planners can effectively design built environments. The logical extension of this discussion is how the wayfinding techniques developed in the physical world have translated to the digital realm. In this discussion, we see how we have translated our spatial metaphors to the web.

This leads directly to the next chapter, on how people interact with information. Morville tackles the difficult task of defining information and considers the concept of relevance in relationship to the information we seek to retrieve from the Internet and how the inherent ambiguity of language negatively impacts any system of information retrieval. To top this off, the author reminds us that users themselves introduce added complexity and complication to how people seek information. He cites several research studies and literature on the subject and suggests that there is value in integrating both push and pull in how we interact with information systems.

Chapter 4 deals with the topic of intertwingularity (a combination of "intertwined" and "mingled") or the idea that things are connected together in a complex and nonlinear way. In terms of the Internet and ubiquitous computing, this translates into our ability to connect to disparate bits of data not only from computers but also from mobile devices and other ambient devices (GPS, EZPass, pagers, RFIDs) that are truly pervasive throughout society. Morville takes us through part two of wayfinding with descriptions of GPS technology, interactive mapping and photographic confluence sites, tracking using GPS and cellular communication, RFID, webcams, and of course the convergence of technology as wearable computing (sunglasses that can be used with cell phones and MP3 devices, Bluetooth enabled garments, cameras embedded in glasses, etc.) becomes more common and affordable.

Morville then leads us neatly back to the idea of push and pull. In chapter 5, he discusses the necessary flow toward balance and uses the example of Google, which successfully intertwingles unobtrusive targeted ads with search results. Design and marketing, as the author notes, are not enemies. Yet finding the balance is tricky and not a simple task. Morville describes his "user experience honeycomb" model which combines the key issues that designers should consider when creating a website that optimizes findability and therefore enhances user experience: useful, usable, desirable, findable, accessible, credible, and valuable. He concludes the chapter with hacks that improve web findability: adopting search engine optimization techniques (avoid drop down menus, image maps, frames, etc.; use RSS feeds with backlinks; embrace web standards; determine and include keywords and phrases in visible body text, links, headers, tags, etc.), and personalization (examples include Yahoo! using individual profiles to customize sports scores and stock information, the Weather Channel using zip codes for local weather, and Google Alerts letting users track keywords in news and web sites).

In chapter 6, "The Sociosemantic Web," Morville outlines the controversy surrounding an article, "The Semantic Web," that appeared in May 2001 in the Scientific American. The authors of the article propose an ambitious "road map for future Web design" that subsequently fueled a debate between W3C Semantic Web members and social software supporters. The debate leads to a discussion about how well metadata can be normalized in an environment such as the Web. Morville uses this debate as an introduction to a history and structural description of metadata. He describes the formulation of taxonomies and the use of controlled vocabularies to enable findability. Of course, web sites are not simply hierarchical; they are complexly grouped which brings us to the idea of folksonomies where users tag objects with one or more keywords that become shared. Folksonomies are obviously not great for findability since they fail at semantic relationships and hierarchy. However, all forms of structure (folksonomies, ontologies, and taxonomies) can co-exist on the Web to describe metadata and the differences between data and metadata are becoming less distinct. Amazon is a perfect example of this: traditional publication and topic details and concordance are documented along with customer reviews and rankings. Amazon also has the option to "search inside this book" which makes the pages and even the text itself become metadata.

The final chapter of the book delves into how we are ultimately capable of making informed decisions through the power of the Internet: the sheer volume and variety of sources available to us and the ease of access enable us to take charge of decisions we would normally trust to those professionals outside of our narrow realm of expertise. We decide which information to believe in. Morville considers information literacy and digital librarianship and proffers the idea that libraries and the Internet have common principles of maintaining free expression, privacy, free and equal access, and intellectual freedom.

Tim O'Reilly is well known for expanding the boundaries of technology in print and through conferences like the Emerging Technology Conference, the Web 2.0 Conference, and the Open Source Convention held in both the US and in Europe. His agenda has never been to fill convention halls with attendees who fit a lowest common denominator; his aim has been to bring together people who not only think smart but who also have the ability to think outside the normal boundaries of their particular field of interest (Robert J. Lang, Freeman Dyson, James Gosling, among others) and who therefore inspire innovation. With the publication of Ambient Findability, O'Reilly Media continues this tradition of giving readers an opportunity to experience the visionary writing of people like Peter Morville.

Read Ambient Findability if: you are interested in expanding your business or nonprofit through its presence on the Internet; you are a librarian and want to grow into the nontraditional environment of the Web; you are a Web designer and want to optimize the findability of your sites on the Internet; you are a user and want to enhance your searching experience. Read this book if you are a teacher, a student, a writer, a parent...in short, if you use a computer or a handheld or a GPS or a smartphone or any type of technology that connects you to the world, then you should read this book. Peter Morville's Ambient Findability will amaze and delight you. It will give you new insight into how ubiquitous computing is affecting how we find and use information and how we, as users, can and will shape the future of how data is stored and retrieved.

Mary Norbury-Glaser is IT Director at the Barbara Davis Center, an affiliate center at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver."

You can purchase Ambient Findability from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Comments

Which market is most important to us?

[dada21]

This book and the review uses way too many catch phrases: findability, intertwingularity, Folksonomies, metadata, smartphone, backlinks. Talk about overload.

Nonetheless, as the Internet becomes more available in even the lives of the poorest (in the US at least), will the need for libraries and physical stores of information even be needed? I've been "connected" wirelessly to the web now for over 3 years, and last month I upgraded my wireless connection to T-Mobile's EDGE network (150kbps downloads practically everywhere I go).

With Google's ability to aggregate not just information but opinions, reviews and similar items/services into one easy-to-access page, there are many services we won't really need around. This weekend I saw the demo of the GPS+XM traffic-nav solution in helping me avoid traffic jams ahead and find quicker ways for me to get to my destination. WIth that device I won't need news radio at all (I already receive weather updates to my wireless PDA). A few weeks ago I met with a company that is working on RFID check-out lanes for a grocery store (fill up your cart, walk out) and it seems that they're less than 6 months away from being "ready" -- they're just waiting for manufacturers to include the RFID tags needed to get the system working.

I'm ordering this book -- I had thought about writing something similar a few years ago. In one of my jobs as an IT consultant, I find myself providing more services regarding these new technologies, especially to CEOs and top level managers. It is an easy sell especially when you look at the time saved for people making the top tier incomes. The great part about the movement for cheaper goods is that we see all these products trickle down to even the lower class worker.

The last few paragraphs of the review are enlightening: TIm O'Reilly doesn't try to fill convention halls with the lowest common denominator. This is intriguing to me because I've always had a difficulty in figuring out which market I should attack the hardest: The rare (and wealthy) CEO wannabe-geek who wants to have all the toys first, even if it doesn't help him become more productive? The common CEO who sees that technology can help him become more productive, but he can't pay as much as the guy with the desire to have everything the earliest? The common user, who will eventually come to use technology when it is either forced on them, or when they finally get around to see the value that the technology brings to every-man? I'm not jealous of O'Reilly's ability to pack conventions with the top level geeks, but it is interesting that he even has a market. How many of his readers actually understand what he's saying though, and how correct has he been in previous years?

Lastly, how many geeks here have an intense amount of new technology knowledge, but find themselves unable to sell that knowledge for an income? Is the super-geek becoming more common, or less common? I find a lot of geeks just out of college aren't truly information whores, they're just ex-jocks with a tiny bit of tech know how.

Re:Which market is most important to us?

[bigpicture]

This "information and communication" age is certainly proving to be disruptive, as every new age seems to be. This also poses questions about viable occupations and industries. For instance will authoring and publishing still be viable? When the automobile age came in, what happened to all the horse and carriage industries and occupations, including the blacksmiths?

In fact any kind of "reproduction and distribution" business model is now coming under some sort of pressure. Just look at the music and movie industry, since easy "reproduction and distribution" is now in the hands of the masses, will the music and movie industry not have to rethink if "reproduction and distribution" is still part of, and included in, "their" business model. Or is their present "control by threat" business model socially acceptable?

But mixed up in all of this mess is: now that we have the technology, how do we guarantee easy excess to information for everyone? And if mountains of information was available to the masses would it really cause better life and business decisions, and more productivity?

Re:Which market is most important to us?

[mjackson14609]

This book and the review uses way too many catch phrases: findability, intertwingularity, Folksonomies, metadata, smartphone, backlinks.

Ted Nelson remarked that "everything is deeply intertwingled" way back in the original Computer Lib / Dream Machines, so "intertwingularity" at least should look familiar.

Re:Which market is most important to us?

[Yartrebo]

As far as I'm concerned, the great technical breakthroughs (HTTP, P2P, gargantuan secondary storage, wireless networks, laptops, etc) have already been discovered and quite well refined.

What needs to catch up are our legal and social systems. Copyright essentially makes most information not available on demand. What is available on demand generally must be done using proprietary and fragmented systems. Patents and DRM mean that many protocols and formats (such as DVDs and console video games) cannot be accessed in an open way.

As a society, we do not value open information enough. Creating a database (say, something like Lexis Nexus), should be an academic undertaking funded by the public (say, like wikipedia) and should be public domain or copylefted. A single P2P network should be capable of handling music, video, novels, programs, etc efficiently once legalized. Wikis could store repositories for engineering information, encyclopedic information, etc.

Re:Which market is most important to us?

[Anonymous Coward]

This book and the review uses way too many catch phrases: findability, intertwingularity, Folksonomies, metadata, smartphone, backlinks.

Some of those count as jargon, not catch phrases. Jargon has a specific place in technical or professional literature. As a librarian, I had no problems reading and understanding the terms metadata, folksonomies, taxonomies, and ontologies, and the weird term to me (intertwingularity) was explained. Since the book seems to be about information organization, retrieval and presentation, such use is appropriate. Those terms have certain specific meanings.

To put it in computer terms, it's like you're complaining about the use of the term "operating system" when someone is talking about a computer. Sure, you could call it "software that performs basic tasks, such as recognizing input from the keyboard, sending output to the display screen, keeping track of files and directories on the disk, and controlling peripheral devices such as disk drives and printers, as well as securing access to system resources and providing a platform upon which application software can be run." But isn't "operating system" a lot shorter and easier for those in the profession?

Nonetheless, as the Internet becomes more available in even the lives of the poorest (in the US at least), will the need for libraries and physical stores of information even be needed?

Most computer users in my library have computers at home, too. We're providing more and more services via the Internet, and yet the number of people coming to the library each day is greater than almost ever before. I can't say that's true for every library, but it is for each that I've worked in. The physical space for meetings or study, free access to information and entertainment, and help with using computers and peripherals and with locating information can all eb attractions.

But no, you can't come to my computer classes in your undies.

Re:Which market is most important to us?

[JamesOfTheDesert]

I'm maybe a half through the book, and I might just send it back to the library tomorrow. For a book ostensibly about finding information, I have a hard time finding any in this book.

Yes, there are sme interesting nuggets, but so far it is too much fluff and padding.

I suggest reading some of this in your local bookstore, or grabbing a copy from the library, before plunking down any cash for it.

Re:Which market is most important to us?

[lahi]

Your "Freudian slip" is interesting, because it hints at a far more serious issue. The important question is not how to guarantee easy access to information, we have that, more or less, today. The problem is that with this - precisely expressed - easy information excess, finding the relevant information in time, and keeping the irrelevant information out, becomes harder, not easier.

There are many sub-issues. I'd like to point out just two:

The first issue is that when not all information is digitized, the analog data already in our collective possession will tend to be ignored, and the digital data will be preferred. So a lazy search will show only the digital results, and omit relevant analog results, which would only have been found by harder work.

The second is that while digitally stored information is much easier to copy, it is also much easier to destroy. And a lot of information which would in the past have been rendered in a form that was self-contained and easily transferred physically is now stored in very few copies on harddisks which are volatile. Two examples of this are personal correspondence and photo albums.

The first problem (should it be called "digital boundary"?) can perhaps be postponed by digitizing more, and by digitally published reference works referring the off-line data, although this may actually compound the overall problem in the long run. There is an interesting sf story by Hal Draper(1961): _Ms fnd in a lbry_ on this matter.

The second problem can be "solved" by easier reproduction, distribution and archiving, however that again compounds the overall problem. Also, you may have mixed feelings about having the erotic snapshots you took of your wife last night safely stored at archive.org.

Speaking of which: The wayback machine is attractive, but delusive, as it doesn't really store everything, yet gives the impression that it does. Many websites are dynamic in a way which prevents proper archival. And even if you can archive individual websites, it is exponentially more difficult (=impossible) to archive the relations between websites. I "think" and remember "spatially", and I often would like to be able to go into one of the first libraries I visited, the way it was on the particular day I visited it. If I could do that, I might for instance be able to find a particular sf novel, which I know I have read, but can no longer remember the name of, by picking it from the shelf on which I know I found it.

Ultimately, the externalisation and sharing of human memory is what made civilization what it is today, but it may eventually turn out to also be the doom of civilization.

-Lasse

Re:Which market is most important to us?

[bigpicture]

From you comments it seems that you may be connected to this issue by profession or occupation. This reliable storing and access to information, particularly as the information becomes more historic, is a very real issue.

Some of the information repositories such as libraries are trying to digitalize all of their records, and provide some kind of referencing. The problem is the using of some sort of format that will be a global standard, and that there will be something around that can read this format in a hundred years. Note what is going on in Massachusetts. Then there is all of the copyright issues that seem to be in need of sorting out, because of saving something to different media. Look at the Google literary reference services issue, and the attempt to step around the legal land mines associated with this.

Then there is the storage media itself, how will it decompose or otherwise degrade over time, or what are its risks of destruction. The library at Alexandria did burn after all, and a lot of historic information was forever lost.

Re:Which market is most important to us?

[Eivind]

The second is that while digitally stored information is much easier to copy, it is also much easier to destroy. And a lot of information which would in the past have been rendered in a form that was self-contained and easily transferred physically is now stored in very few copies on harddisks which are volatile. Two examples of this are personal correspondence and photo albums.

Yes, it's easy to destroy individual copies of digitally stored works. But I tend to think that this is more than counteracted by two other forces, one as you say -- it's easy to duplicate -- *VERY* easy. Secondly, which you seem to ignore, it's also easy to keep.

With this I mean that physical correspondence (for example) takes up physical space. I know, I used to be a regular (as in daily) letter-writer over a period of around a decade. It takes up drawers and drawers and drawers, and thus it's tempting to throw away the (usually) single copy of a work simply to save up space. This is even more so for documents that you attach no notsalgic memories to.

My email, say from 1997 on the other hand... I never even considered throwing it away, why should I ? The storage needed, including the extra demands on my backups etc is so utterly trivial it's not even worth mentioning. My total email from 1997 takes up around 2 MB, 20% of that if I bother compressing it. That is like 1000 messages of 2KB each on the average. compressed that is 0.00013% of the capacity of my disc. The expected value of that archive can be *VERY* low and it's still not worth it deleting it.

Ontop of that, all of that information existed in 2 copies, one at the sender and one at the recipient. (that's typically *not* the case by private snailmail correspondence, each end will have only "half" of the conversation) Sure, lots of that will be deleted and/or lost over the decade, but I bet even if I where to loose it, I'd be able to reconstruct half or perhaps even 3 quarters of it. Where I to loose/destroy my physical letters, they'd basically all be gone.

Find ANYTHING?!?!?!

[Anonymous Coward]

So why can't I find a decent Chinese restaurant outside of Chinatown?

Animals in color

[plasticsquirrel]

Interestingly, although admittedly a small point, the book seems to be the first O'Reilly animal book to be colored in. I really like the new look, and I hope it continues.

Cant find me

[Timesprout]

I shut off my mobile, email, IM and unplug my land line when I feel like being incommunicado, takes all of 10 secs.

Re:Cant find me

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a rock, I am an Island,...

I need no cell, IM, nor PDA,
I tie up the land line... with my 56K modem.
No one can get through,
if no one can call me, I'll have nothing left to do.

I am a rock, I am an Island,...

Re:Cant find me

[kfg]

As users, we have computers,. . .

Ok, so guess my desk has Ambient Findability within 50 ft. or so.

. . . PDAs, GPS units, smartphones . . .

The bloody hell we do. If I had that sort of shit I'd have Ambient Findability and I like to flat out fucking disappear from time to time, thank you very much.

Digital networks are available everywhere.

Either this guy never leaves Ann Arbor or he walks around with an Al Franken satellite dish on his head.

KFG

I think I get it, but...

[Cuthbert Calculus]

...am I the only one who had to get out the dictionary to wayfind the intertwingularity of some of these sociosemantic words? A few of the folksonomies seem to have only ambient findability.

Re:I think I get it, but...

[User 956]

...am I the only one who had to get out the dictionary to wayfind the intertwingularity of some of these sociosemantic words?

Dictionary? Those words are perfectly cromulent.

WTF...

[GWSuperfan]

is "Ambient Findablility?"

"Ambient Findability is divided into seven sections that track the journey from simply defining what the author means by findability through a history of man's search for location awareness in both the physical environment and in the cyber world"

Again- "Huh?" So, I have to read the stupid book just to find out generally what it's about? Is it just me, or does that sound retarded?

And while we're at it- let's stop making up meaningless words and phrases. If it's truly a new concept, that's one thing. Otherwise, unless it's in a dictionary, I just wish peoplw would use words and phrases that *are*

Re:WTF...

[IAAP]

And while we're at it- let's stop making up meaningless words and phrases.

And what? Put an end to all marketing departments around the world?!? Are you mad?! Think of the children of those marketeers!

Re:WTF...

[kfg]

Is it just me, or does that sound retarded?

If you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance. . .

Personally, it sounds to me like this guy drank Hubbard's past its expiration date Kool-Aid and I really don't want to become an Findabilityologist, ambient or otherwise.

KFG

My God, where do you find the time?

[Anonymous Coward]

As a /.er with a 4 digit uid, I must ask you: where do you find the time to both work and post to every damn /. story with long winded comments like this? I realize today is a national holiday in the US, but give me a break! You do this during normal business hours too! If my boss caught me /.ing every day all day long I'd be fired pronto...

Re:My God, where do you find the time?

[dada21]

I'm in the car right now, on a 3 hour drive to another state. The person driving me is jamming to the radio, so I'm on my laptop, banging away on some research and reading the 6 or 7 forums I tend to read daily. Most of my posts on slashdot are performed either in the car, waiting on the tarmac, or sitting in an office waiting for a meeting to take place :)

Re:My God, where do you find the time?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I'm just bitching I guess. I modded you "Overrated" while modding up a good reply to you. I guess that was a bit too harsh. Anyway, safe driving!

Re:My God, where do you find the time?

[djupedal]

'...banging away on some research.'

You almost had me, until I got to that part.

Let us summarize and see how we can write the same content, with a bit less wind:

"Nonetheless, as the Internet becomes more available in even the lives of the poorest (in the US at least), will the need for libraries and physical stores of information even be needed? ...With Google's ability to aggregate not just information but opinions, reviews and similar items/services into one easy-to-access page, there are many services we won't really need around.... A few weeks ago I met with a company that is working on RFID check-out lanes for a grocery store (fill up your cart, walk out) and it seems that they're less than 6 months away from being "ready" -- they're just waiting for manufacturers to include the RFID tags needed to get the system working.

You don't seem to know the RFID market very well, or you'd know the stall-out is due to other issues...

I'm ordering this book -- I had thought about writing something similar a few years ago. In one of my jobs as an IT consultant, I find myself providing more services regarding these new technologies, especially to CEOs and top level managers. ...This is intriguing to me because I've always had a difficulty in figuring out which market I should attack the hardest: The rare (and wealthy) CEO wannabe-geek who wants to have all the toys first, even if it doesn't help him become more productive? The common CEO who sees that technology can help him become more productive, but he can't pay as much as the guy with the desire to have everything the earliest? The common user, who will eventually come to use technology when it is either forced on them, or when they finally get around to see the value that the technology brings to every-man?

Some consultant...how about 'all of the above', since today, everyone is a 'geek', and the concept of a stand-alone figure has been laid aside years past.

...I find a lot of geeks just out of college aren't truly information whores, they're just ex-jocks with a tiny bit of tech know how."

BTW, you forgot to mention that being able to type with more than one finger means being able to post long-winded, er I mean, salient, comments, that dimwits tend to find impressive. As for holiday, business hours etc., your critic failed to recall that posters can chime in from other countries...duh.

Re:My God, where do you find the time?

[dada21]

You don't seem to know the RFID market very well, or you'd know the stall-out is due to other issues...

It surw is, which is why this guy is stalled -- but this is his risky endeavor.

Some consultant...how about 'all of the above', since today, everyone is a 'geek', and the concept of a stand-alone figure has been laid aside years past.

If you believe that, you're missing some big opportunities.

BTW, you forgot to mention that being able to type with more than one finger means being able to post long-winded, er I mean, salient, comments, that dimwits tend to find impressive. As for holiday, business hours etc., your critic failed to recall that posters can chime in from other countries...duh.

Heh. I'm typing on my PDA very quickly (type-assist predictive). I'm in a restaurant now, waiting for my food. I just took a pic for my blog I'll post in an hour. Checking e-mail, replying to posta, all on the go. I call it a productive use of downtime.

Hiding information is more important than sharing

[ajs]

One of the paradoxes of information and language sciences is that any means of communication is valued by humans as much for its ability to hide or withold infromation as to share and navigate it. This is how we form social cliques, and otherwise identify those who are "us" vs. those who are "them". Witness the use of 1337 speak, the near religious fervor with which certain file formats are espoused, debates over programming langauges, etc. If there were a truly comprehensive way to share information without any ambiguity in a searchable, locatable way, you can expect that within a year there would be a dozen variants of it aimed at introducing ambiguity and uncertainty. Moreover that ambiguity would be cherished by devoted sets of users who felt that it was more important than the rest of the medium.

Library science?

[HooliganIntellectual]

What's the difference between these buzzwords and what librarians have been doing for the last 100 years?

Re:Library science?

[StudMuffin]

Very little - except for the addition of global accessibility that the Internet provides... In fact, Peter is a graduate of the University of Michigan School of Information (which until recently was the "School of Information and Library Science). We still teach more traditional librarianship (I am an adjunct faculty member and teach at the school, as does Peter) and, in fact, blend the traditional librarianship/archives management role with the new technologies and access vectors that electronic technologies provide to the information retrieval space.

So - your comment is insightful - the difference, really, is in creating appropriate metaphors to expand the traditional librarianship role into the newer methods of information storage and retrieval.

Ambient Findability is the best work...

[Anonymous Coward]

...Eno has done in decades.

Another Review...

[quasarkitten]

Here is another review from Digital Web Magazine

All of the People All of the Time

[Quirk]

First, as has been noted, the catchphrases are as ambiently findable, whatever that means.

Second being able to find everything about everything isn't a good thing. Bertrand Russell pointed out that one is better served becoming intimately knowledgeable of a handfull of books on any given subject than to have a passing familiarity with all available material on the subject at hand.To know a subject one has to have a foundation from which to work. The hallmark of a journey workperson is a fundamental understanding of the principles that inform the work.

Ambient Findability seems to me to be yet another guide for the social gadfly, catchphrases abound, and, the ever aspiring social/corporate climber can jump on or off board any bandwagon by instanteously accessing the prevalent catchphrases served up in a pablum formula that allows for quick regurgitation.

The best thing that can be said for such approaches is that they draw off the pop culture adulators and papprazzi, allowing easier navigation for those who know their stuff and where they're going.

serendipity

[rheotaxis]

Good review, I'm going to find this book someday, perhaps. A findable book means a book that can be found, and I can find lots by serendipity, i.e. just random walks through the physical stacks, and picking books off the shelf without looking at the title, author, or call number first. Sometimes, I have visions of which stack and shelf to visit just before I arrive at the library, in which case the randomness can be questioned. No matter what, I always find a book, sometimes one I might never find by more rational methods, sometimes books that later prove very meaningful in some way. What part of the mind is helping me find these books? I recommend everyone try it, let your whole psyche guide you to new found freedom.

The Irony

[Chemisor]

The irony here is that while it is becoming easier and easier to find stuff, every year there is less and less stuff worth finding.

Re:The Irony

[Amouth]

for some reason all the google links for this book are either reviews and/or wanting me to buy it.. for some reason i can't seem to find the second Par on Page 3 .. why to go for helping out.. i find that ironic.. i mean if you are going to write a book about the topic atleast let the book adhear to the topic..

Re:The Irony

[delong]

The irony here is that while it is becoming easier and easier to find stuff, every year there is less and less stuff worth finding

The irony is that it is becoming harder and harder to get your content found in a sea of content. Electronic academic journals are finding this phenomenon a bit hard to overcome. Content overload is as much a problem for the future as content obscurity was in the past.

Re:The Irony

[Jeng]

Unless the stuff that was worth finding yesterday is disappearing then no there is not less stuff worth finding. There will always be more, and more, and more.

The signal to noise ratio may seem high, but that may just be because that over time the noise of yesterday dies down and the signal starts getting though.

To really find out whats worth finding today, wait a couple weeks and it will come though much clearer.

Re:The Irony

[dforsey]

  Remember.... when everyone has a voice, you have to shout to be heard.

Re:The Irony

[dforsey]

... and once everyone is shouting...?

The benefits go to free and open societies

[cryfreedomlove]

The benefits of ambient findability will be exploited most successfully by societies who do not attempt to restrict the ability of the average citizens to use the ambient findability. The societies that allow free and open access will improve the lives of all of their citizens at a faster rate than those that do not. A government like the one currently running the show in Iran will continue to have a hard time controlling the hearts and minds of their citizens. Citizens of open societies in Europe and the United States will have to remain vigilant against new ham handed restrictions that are intended to keep us safe.

Re:Hey! Eat me!

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks, you were delicious. :-)

Overdefining the obvious

[techno-vampire]

A core definition offered by the author in Chapter 1 is for findability: "the quality of being locatable or navigable; the degree to which a particular object is easy to discover or locate; the degree to which a system or environment supports navigation and retrieval."

Or written clearly, "Findability: how easy or hard it is to locate what you need."

Judging by the review, this book is filled with overqualified obfuscated definitions of simple concepts that have never needed names before and don't now. I doubt I'll ever need to read this blinding glimpse of the obvious.

I Very Nearly Went 'Scanners' Here...!

[RobotRunAmok]

an information architect, an advocate of expanding the boundaries of librarianship in an Internet age and the voice of ambient findability

Jeeus-H-Christ-On-A-Crutch!! All that needed was one "paradigm shift" and my head would have exploded!!

Taco, time to start putting some warning labels on these reviews, whaddya think?

Re:I Very Nearly Went 'Scanners' Here...!

[jc42]

Jeeus-H-Christ-On-A-Crutch!!

BTW, does anyone know where the 'H' came from as Jesus' middle initial?

I read somewhere that it stands for "Haploid".

Bookwriting == Findability

[rewinn]

The best way to increase the findability of something is to write a book about it:

• Amazon book reviews
• Slashdot threads
• $$$ for the author!

Morville the obvious

[penguin-collective]

These kinds products are already appearing; the limits right now are cost, standardization, and battery life, not the imagination of designers.

Morville's book is another instance of people without an original idea trying to pass themselves off as innovators, complete with the obligatory buzzwords and neologisms.

Re:Morville the obvious

[StudMuffin]

Unfortunately, you are terribly mistaken. Moreville, along with Rosenfeld and others, have pushed the Information Architecture aspects of the web from the very beginning. What Moreville et al are attempting to do, IMHO, is standardize the taxonomies that designers use when creating systems with ambient findability in mind.

Re:Morville the obvious

[penguin-collective]

Unfortunately, you are terribly mistaken. Moreville, along with Rosenfeld and others, have pushed the Information Architecture aspects of the web from the very beginning.

<sarcasm>Wow, all the way back in the mid-90's. I mean, people had no idea before then how to organize information, and taxonomies and ontologies just didn't exist before then.</sarcasm>

Re:Morville the obvious

[StudMuffin]

Of course people knew how to organize information - on paper or in isolated monolithic computer systems. However, the web was a whole 'nuther animal. It is a mistaken assumption to believe that the 'old skool' methods of archiving and retrieval work in a highly distributed, taxonomy adverse environment such as the Intarwebs.

Re:Hiding information is more important than shari

[Anonymous Coward]

Um. What?

intertwingularity.com

[isnoop]

Hmm, now that sounds like a catchy domain name...

ahhhh

[DarkClown]

survival of the species is everybody's business.

Chapter One (PDF)

[morville]

You can read Chapter One for free and decide for yourself. That is, if you're not afraid of learning some new words.

I loved the book

[Infonaut]

Judging by the review, this book is filled with overqualified obfuscated definitions of simple concepts that have never needed names before and don't now. I doubt I'll ever need to read this blinding glimpse of the obvious.

I finished the book a few days ago. For me it was a difficult book to put down - I powered through it quickly because I was so absorbed by it. The review didn't really get to the heart of why the book is so good. In my opinion, Morville excels at explaining complex interactions and bringing important questions to light. He does this by starting out with clear definitions of the terms he is investigating. For example, the term *findability* is about more than finding what you're looking for; it's also about discovering information objects which you were not explicitly looking for, but that provide the information you need. Some of the concepts may not need names, but having terms to define concepts makes it easier to discuss them.

Morville's discussion of the marriage of the physical and virtual worlds through geocaching and tagging is particularly illuminating, as is his comparison of taxonomies, ontologies, and folksonomies. These are not just academic terms; they have great bearing on how information is organized and found. I also found the inquiry into what constitutes a document to be very thought-provoking.

Ambient Findability is not a book full of answers. It outlines how we find data, how technology is changing that process, and what opportunities and dangers await us in the future. The topics Morville raises affect much more than just commerce, and his plea for information literacy is an important warning. Technology is only half of the equation, and it can create new problems even as it solves old ones.

If you want a receipe book for SEO, this won't really help you very much. If you want to know how people find information and how human behavior affects information technology and vice-versa, you'll probably enjoy this book.

Interesting

[wk633]

But pretty empty from a technical point of view. I don't feel like I have any more knowledge after reading it.

Ambient Findability

[sunderland56]

The title is obviously spam. No need to read it, just delete.

give me a fucking break

[toolateforbedtime]

this was discussed, in detail, in 1995... Look for the transcripts of the Internet Society conference in Prague, the Czech Republic.

Re:Hiding information is more important than shari

[toolateforbedtime]

Completely agreed. Humans need privacy, and the social tokens implicit in being able to share information selectively. The Net tries to negate this; to the extent that is does negate this, we will witness the rise of 'sharable but not completely public' means of communication. It's an interesting paradox... each of us desires to know everything that is going on around us, but desires to show little of what we actually tell others. References: The Death of Privacy, David Brin Arisotos, William Jon Williams War of the Worlds (if read deeply enough), W.G.Wells

I'm waiting for the sequel...

[insurgio]

Trance Findability

Deeply Intertwingled with Ted Nelson

[billstewart]

This is the first time I've heard somebody other than Ted Nelson or people that I know were once Xanadudes using the word "Intertwingled". It was such a nice hippie cosmic term, but the 70s called and said we should give it back and make up our own pseudolexicons for our own millenium...

On a more technical point, one of the unforeseen problems with Xanadu was privacy, which is also a major problem with Ambient Findability - in a worldwide information network with deep two-way linking, where quoting worked by transclusion instead of either copying or URLs pointing to complete documents, and copyright payments could be made to original authors of transcluded material, it turns out to be very hard to preserve privacy about what you're reading or writing. With Findability, some of the risks would be blatantly obvious even without a Bush Administration in power, but there's also a lot of more subtle risks, e.g. knowing who walked by a given building because there's a cookie on their mobile that got tweaked when it looked up the temperature of the decaf coffee at the Starbucks on the ground floor while they were getting money from the bank machine, and also queried the arrival time of the next bus, then hopped on the bus, which drove by three more Starbucks (one of which was out of decaf), queried the next-bus timer at the bus-stop by the medical marijuana clinic every five minutes for the next 20, and queried the Starbucks status again on the way back.

Privacy doesn't appear to have been mentioned

[billstewart]

Some kinds of information hiding are important for the information providers, which probably does improve information findability for the user, but it's also important for the users to be able to hide information about themselves, especially when data-mining is becoming increasingly practical, inexpensive, and popular with marketers and governments.

There's some information hiding that can happen by accident, but way too much of it requires explicit thought and planning, and doesn't happen if it's not planned for. For instance, the designs of cookies and HTTP-REFERER interact in ways that make it easy for a central banner-ad service to track your reading across multiple sites, and most kinds of back-linking just increase that effect. But there's no mention of it in the article - does the book address it, or does the book pay more attention to _maximizing_ the ability to do data-mining? That turns out to have been a serious problem with Ted Nelson's Xanadu architecture - if everything is transcluded instead of just copied or one-way-linked to, and you can track between readers and authors to support copyright payments, then it's possible to track who's reading what across the entire network with just a Simple Matter of Programming.

My standard practice with online mapping programs is not to use a precise address, especially for both ends of a trip. Bad enough they've got my IP address, but there's no need for them to have my exact street address, when around the corner or the next town over is usually close enough. My ZIP code is almost always 90210 (though sometimes that's a problem - Apple iTunes keeps telling me about events at the Beverly Hills Apple Store, which isn't helpful :-), my birth year is usually the example year on websites that have one, and there are other things that don't need to know real information about me either.

But it only gets worse as mobile devices start Ambiently Finding things - your cellphone tells you when the next bus is going to arrive, creating a log entry at the bus-finder's service, and as you ride down the street it's checking the temperature of the decaf coffee at every Starbucks you go by (creating log entries, but not necessarily alerting the baristas at Fourth&Brannan that they'll need to brew more before you arrive), inventorying the 50ml Irish Whisky mini-bottles at the liquor store acros the street from Starbucks, creating another log entry, refusing to accept a pushed coupon ad attempt from the Old Navy store the bus goes by. And that's not even counting what happens as RFIDs become widely used - every shoestore you walk by starts telling you your Birkenstocks are due for a retread, but the Homeland Security Terrorism Reduction Data Entry system (aka traffic light controller) decides that you obviously must be a leftist so it takes your photograph with the redlight-camera.

Re:Web 2.0? Pffffttttt....

[Anonymous Coward]

Troll? How the hell is that a troll? Off-topic maybe, but not even close to being a Troll. /. mods on crack again.

I'll say what we're all thinking...

[tlambert]

I'll say what we're all thinking...

I'm all for it... as long as I'm not the "anyone" being found anywhere, anytime.

Personally, I'm too damn wired as it is, and this bozo wants to make my life worse by enabling anyone to interupt me at anywhere, anytime. No thank you.

-- Terry

I liked it

[rakerman]

I liked the book, although it is mostly a conceptual exercise, it more sort of peters out at the end rather than coming to any grand conclusions or giving many solid prescriptions.

Plus which, having read it gives me a great excuse to work "ambient findability" into conversations. Nothing livens up a meeting like interjecting "hmm, but do we need to consider the principles of ambient findability here?"

Re:Hiding information is more important than shari

[JakartaDean]

Interesting idea, but I'm not sure I agree. Aren't the internet and a general surfeit of data making such distinctions both harder and less relevant? Filtering has become critical, I agree, but hoarding information is much, much harder these days. In days past middle managers could make a comfortable living acting as information gatekeepers; today anyone foolish enough to try would soon be out on the street.

I agree that inside knowledge can be a part of what makes cliques, but only a part. However, in the workplace, I think openness is here to stay.

Horse & Buggy makers, move over

[argStyopa]

...is an information architect, an advocate of expanding the boundaries of librarianship in an Internet age...

Perhaps it's just me, but I find the attempts by librarians to stay 'relevant', while understandable, to be just a little bit pathetic.

Like the "crusade" by the librarians against the Patriot act (which, if you think about it sounded more like the result of some wierd Illuminati internal fight) a few years ago, librarians (like newspapers, and mass-media conglomerates) seem to think that they had some sort of a role as a gatekeeper to information. Guardianship & responsibility seems to have morphed into a sense of ownership. They had the meta-information, so to speak, about where information could be found. Now whether it's out of simple self-interest or some more elevated emotion, librarians seem to see themselves as some sort of special secular 'priestly' class - which is patently absurd in so many, many ways. The point of the internet is that for a reasonably intelligent person the internet doesn't NEED a gatekeeper, it doesn't NEED interpretation. Yes, there is a wealth of information out there. But thanks to search engines and human ingenuity the requirement to have an 'information specialist' just seems more and more of an anachronism.

While their role hasn't disappeared entirely, I find it less and less relevant. When's the last time you asked a librarian a question? Not to say that they're not busy: there are many people for whom it's simpler and more comfortable to ask a librarian than to type a question into Google. So perhaps the horse- and buggy maker analogy is imprecise, are librarians going to be relegated to the role of Leader Dogs for the internet-incapable?

Respectfully, I Disagree

[NickFortune]

One of the paradoxes of information and language sciences is that any means of communication is valued by humans as much for its ability to hide or withold infromation as to share and navigate it.

Well, hiding information is easy - you just don't publish it. Harder is restricting access to published information, although encryption seems to suffice for most purposes. The problem doesn't really get interesting until you need to hide the fact that the data exists at all. This is the Filesharer's Dilemma: how to make the latest Britney available to everyone, whist nevertheless keeping the RIAA from finding out.

But having identified the problem, it would be hard to make the case that such data hiding is more important than making the data available in the first place. It's an interesting question certainly, but it doesn't even arise until the communication channel exists. Therefore, I'd have to consider it as of secondary importance.

As for cliques and data hiding, I think you're barking up the wrong tree here. Cliques, as I see it, depend upon a shared recognition signal; a combination of ways of dressing, habits of speech and other cues that we use to signal our support for the shared memeset that ultimately defines the clique. In this sense, a clique is created by publishing information - the recognition signal rather than by hiding it.

1337 speak is a perfect example. Granted, the form began life as an attempted solution to the Filesharer's Dilemma, but that usage is easily countered by adding the 1337-forms of keywords to the searchers lexicons. Nowadays, I'd hazard that 1337 is a clique recognition signal, generally indicating that the writer wishes to be considered as part of the data underground subculture, whatever that might mean to them.

"a realm in which we can find anyone or anything "

[TheLoneGundam]

Except - information created a long time ago, which no one sees profit or value in digitizing. Ever tried looking up WW II or earlier service or military medical records? How about historical research - there's an incredible daily diary of a person living in Providence (Rhode Island, US) in the 1600s or 1700s; there are books written pre-Civil War that have a more accurate representation of people's thoughts and opinions than histories written in the twentieth century (notice I don't say the facts are necessarily more accurate, that's a different topic)... none of these sources, which can be valuable to individuals and which are care for by librarians, is easily searchable, and in many cases they are on deteriorating media. I hope projects like Gutenberg and Google Print manage to get to a lot of these before they're lost.

I know, we're all looking toward the future here, but we need to bring the past along with us (and for interesting takes on this I refer you to "A Canticle For Liebowitz" in the science fiction genre or "How The Irish Saved Civilization" for those more interested in history).

Well, yes and no ...

[jc42]

Perhaps it's just me, but I find the attempts by librarians to stay 'relevant', while understandable, to be just a little bit pathetic.

It's not you; that definitely comes across. But "librarian" isn't a monolithic borg-like population. Some of them have taken to the internet as a great new extension of their traditional role. The city library a mile from where I live has a room full of internet terminals; the "card catalog" has been electronic for 20 years and online for 10 years. And so on.

When's the last time you asked a librarian a question?

Probably not long. The problem here is: On the Internet, nobody can tell you're a librarian.

Actually, I have knowingly communicated with a number of librarians, via email, in the past couple of months. This was as part of several ongoing efforts to turn local archives of paper into electronic forms.

One of these is the Village Music Project, which has a collection of personal notebooks of local working musicians' in the past three centuries or so, converting them to a form that's easily usable (by mostly free, open-source software) by musicians who are interested in that sort of thing. The director of the project has complained about being terminally busy, partly due to such things as an effort to preserve and make available online the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, a similar effort based on Cecil Sharpe's life work.

There are a zillion efforts like this going on right now, and librarians are deeply involved in many of them. This shouldn't be a surprise, since librarian training does include a lot of the techniques needed for such efforts. Only the medium has changed, not the information. And our new medium has the ability to organize stuff in ways that weren't possible before, while not invalidating any of the older organizing techniques.