In which I argue that the field of Information Architecture doesn’t fit anymore.

Continue Reading: Thoughts on the Impending Death of Information Architecture

I read an interesting quote from this short bio of Douglas Merrill, VP of Engineering at Google: There are no lasting technical solutions to social problems, and most interesting problems are social problems. “The particular tools and systems we give [people] yield certain kinds of problems,” he says. Merrill sees it as his job to […]

Continue Reading: How to Get Over People Breaking Your Design

Email, chat, and other messaging tools are converging…and most people don’t seem to mind. So it seems that Danah Boyd got into the same trouble I got into when I said that social networks were killing email. She wrote a whole post explaining why she claims email is dead: “Do young people have email accounts? […]

Continue Reading: On The Convergence of Email and Chat (Google and Apple [and Yahoo] Get It)

Tim Berners-Lee: “People have, since it started, complained about the fact that there is junk on the web. And as a universal medium, of course, it is important that the web itself doesn’t try to decide what is publishable. The way quality works on the web is through links. It works because reputable writers make […]

Continue Reading: A Fundamental Truth of the Web

A common question I get, when people find out what I do, is “How do I get on the first page of results on Google?”. This is the goal of lots of people, from relatives with web sites to small-business owners to huge organizations to bloggers. They want to be in that first window of […]

Continue Reading: Social problems need social design

Top-of-mind was just sold for $1.65 Billion dollars. That’s the amount Google paid for the social video site YouTube, which owns the top-of-mind space for the word “video” in the minds of the populace.

When I think of the word “video”, I immediately think of Youtube. When people want to upload “video”, they immediately think of YouTube. When people talk about where they saw the latest episode of the Daily Show, they talk about YouTube. When advertisers think of “video”, it’s all YouTube.

YouTube is what people think about when they think of the word “video”…

Continue Reading: YouTube and the Importance of Top-of-Mind

Ok, so this is something completely different. Instead of the usual joshness, I’ve invited my friend Bill (and my former professor at RPI) to guest post because he’s writing a really cool book and wants to get feedback on some early parts of it. Before I show you the content, however, let me set the stage a bit…

Last week, in part 4 of my discussion with Luke Wroblewski, the topic of writing and design came up. I compared writing to design, because I think there are striking similarities between the two: they each involve the selection and organization of content for effective communication of ideas. I was discussing this later with Bill, and he shared with me an even more extreme idea. Now, if there’s one thing that I know about Bill, it’s that there’s a lot more to his writing than can be gotten in an initial skimming. He’ll send me something, I’ll read it, and then weeks later I’ll realize how it got into my psyche…I’ve assimilated the thoughts almost without knowing it. So, with that, here’s a brief overview of the book he’s working on. And by the way, solid, enlightening feedback is mandatory… 🙂

Continue Reading: Writing as IT

Is Google about engineering and Yahoo about design?

Continue Reading: Google and Yahoo Design Throwdown

For those interested in tagging, I’m giving a live virtual seminar (webcast) next Thursday (July 27): Users as Information Architects: Is Tagging Right for your Site? This is the second seminar we’ve given at UIE, and we’re really excited by the response and feedback generated by the first.

I’m focusing this talk on the idea that tagging might help designers organize huge amounts of information by letting their users do it for them. Heresy! You say. Well, in some places it might turn out that tagging beats IA hands down. In others, a traditional IA still works best.

However, if you’ve read The Del.icio.us Lesson, you know that it isn’t as simple as it seems at first glance. So I’ll be talking about the ins and outs of tagging, where it seems to work well, and where it doesn’t work.

Interestingly, both Amazon and Google seem to have tagging wrong…

Why the popular opinion that Google succeeds despite bad design is wrong.

Continue Reading: Does Google Succeed Despite Bad Design?