“Calling all designers, developers, information architects, project managers, writers, editors, marketers, and everyone else who makes websites. It is time once again to pool our information so as to begin sketching a true picture of the way our profession is practiced worldwide.”

“With the publication of his first book in 1962 at the age of 26, RSW began the singular passion of his life: making information understandable. He chaired the International Design in Aspen in 1972, the first Federal Design Assembly in 1973, followed by the National AIA Convention in 1976, before creating and chairing TED (Technology/Entertainment/Design) conferences from 1984-2002. He is the current Chair of the TEDMED Conferences. A B.Arch and M.Arch 1959 graduate with highest honors from the University of Pennsylvania, Mr. Wurman’s nearly half-century of achievements includes the publication of his best-selling book Information Anxiety and his award winning ACCESS Travel Guides. Each of his 81 books focus on some subject or idea that he personally had difficulty understanding.”

One of Michael Wesch’s new videos: “This video explores the changes in the way we find, store, create, critique, and share information. This video was created as a conversation starter, and works especially well when brainstorming with people about the near future and the skills needed in order to harness, evaluate, and create information effectively.”

“One-Sheeters are quick and easy marketing tools for information architects. They’re like mini brochures to advertise IA deliverables and promote the IA practice in your company. One-Sheeters help people envision what deliverables you produce and where they fit into a project. They’re quick to produce and easy for anyone to understand.”

“So, I spurred something of a shitstorm in my post where I commented on information architecture is sleeping. Most people focused on the wrong thing, the cancellation of a workshop, when what I was hoping to expose was the tendency towards isolation and insularity that the community seemed to be falling into. So, I’ve now returned from the 8th IA Summit, and I’m thinking of revising my statement.”

“I have been to every IA Summit (the first was in 2000), and I’m going to this one with more trepidation than any I have been to before. While I don’t accord with the sensationalist notion that “information architecture is dead,” I do fear that it is in a deep sleep. And I’m concerned that the leadership within the field of information architecture are doing little to nothing to really advance the field. For me, an acute sign of this, and the particular cause of my trepidation for this summit, was the cancellation of “Learning Interaction Design from Las Vegas” pre-conference session. This was to be given by three leaders in the field of user experience — Steve Portigal, Bill deRouchey, and my colleague at Adaptive Path, Dan Saffer. It was a brilliant concept — using the location of Las Vegas as material for a day-long workshop on user research and interaction design. Sadly, it fell victim to market forces.”

“At a recent gathering of CIOs, I was introduced, not as an information architect, interaction designer, or librarian, but as a futurist. I figure this affords me the latitude to make a prediction. Next year, after the bubble bursts, we will enter the era of Information Architecture 3.0. This won’t surprise Tim O’Reilly who slyly positioned the polar bear atop the #1 Google hit for Web 2.0 and commissioned the third edition just in time to clean up the mess. In fact, this future is self-evident in the undisciplined, unbalanced quest for sexy Ajaxian interaction at the expense of usability, findability, accessibility, and other qualities of the user experience.”

“Last week I set a personal record: started flamewars on four mailing lists. It would have been six or seven, but I realized I was edgy, and decided to not watch the mailing list folders for a few days until I cooled off. But I never cooled off. And I wondered why. I recalled a recent blogpost by Adam Greenfield (hilariously if inaccurately mocked by ok-cancel) and I found a clue. I think he, and Peterme, and Lou and Peter Morville… well, we’re all outgrowing our favorite pair of jeans: IA.”

“Something sunk in a couple of weekends as I attended DCamp. I am without a professional tribe. This realization has grown as I attend various industry events. I’m just not really grooving with the crowds I’m part of.”

“Given that IA as a profession is really only about 10yrs old (or at least, that’s the figure I hear bandied about), it makes sense that *most* IAs have a ‘past life’ of one kind or another. This has got me to thinking that there are probably about six different species of Information Architect, based on the kind of professional past life they’ve had (nor not).”

A nice group of templates, including the “Page Description Diagram Template… an incredibly enabling tool for planning or strategically designing pages without focusing on layout. These tend to be much more useful for content heavy sites or critically analysing which bits of content or functionality really belong on a given page.”

“The problem of where to file: Is it possible to construct the perfect classification system? A truly first-rate hierarchy would not only have all of the characteristics of FN’s hierarchy, but it would also manage to encode the hierarchy in such a way as to eliminate all ambiguity as to where an item might be found. FN comes pretty close… Nobody builds semantically pure hierarchies, it’s just too much work.”

“Something I’d like to see: reporting on IA failures, and what was learned from the carnage. Failure stories are a literary genre in and of themselves; even the most dispassionate, technical ones are hard to put down. That’s what makes them such great learning tools.”

“If the photo-sharing site Flickr is any indication, the world of digital photographers is dominated by cat people. Dog owners would probably object. But because of Flickr’s tagging system, which allows the photographers or other users to assign identifying tags to most photos on the service, we know that Flickr hosts 23,081 images tagged with ‘cat’ or ‘cats’ and only 17,463 with ‘dog’ or ‘dogs.’ Clearly, Flickr’s system was not set up to motivate a feline-canine supremacy contest. But it does illustrate the way thousands of the service’s members use tags to give some contextual meaning to more than 3.5 million pictures that might otherwise get lost in the shuffle.”

“In my new position I�ve got to think a bit differently than I�m used to. For the most part I really enjoy that. As you may know, or if you�ve read my stuff for any amount of time, I�m into questioning convention. At the end of the day, I�m also very practical, so I try things out, see what works, and what doesn�t and adjust my thinking and way of working based on that. Recently I�ve been thinking about Information Architecture conventions and processes. One of these is the traditional hierarchical site map used for many sites.”