[finders] Social Information Architecture

[finders at findability.org]

April 18, 2007: Social Information Architecture

http://www.findability.org/archives/000166.php

With nods to Stewart, Matt, my uxagons, and the epic threat of lost bees,
Gene Smith has created his own social software honeycomb.

Gene's social software building blocks and social information architecture
are jam-packed with sweet ideas and well worth a waggle dance.

Strange Connections

I'm headed to the AIIP Annual Conference in Minneapolis later this week to
give a talk and receive an award, so I've been reading about Roger Summit
and the birth of Dialog. Here's an excerpt:

"Recursion. In my view of an interactive system, information retrieval
should be thought of as a process, not as a probe (as is the case with batch
systems). With the exception of simple, explicit searches, the searcher is
neither completely aware of what is contained in the database, nor confident
of just which words to use in the query to elicit a desired response.
Because of this, there needs to be a high degree of interaction between the
searcher and the database to gain the desired outcome."

In my view, today's search systems have ample room for improvement when it
comes to information interaction. Our technology has come so far, and yet
the basic challenges of language and representation ceaselessly recur.