xBlog: The original visual thinking weblog

“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).”

“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.”

“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.”

“1. Build brand integrity: One of the things I love to hate about traditional agencies is the degree to which they misunderstand brand. Landor defines brand as, ‘The sum of all the characteristics, tangible and intangible, that make the offer unique.’ Itís a definition so broad as to be nearly meaningless, which leaves room for agencies to overlook the most important component, a customerís interaction with the offering…”

“Many jobs that before were only performed in established economies ñ including white collar jobs ñ are moving to transitional economies: from Western Europe to Eastern Europe, from North America to Asia. Alternately called ‘outsourcing’ or ‘offshoring’ this trend is accelerating faster than most of us realize.”