Spotlight customer reviews:
|
Customer Rating:  
Summary: The Importance of Findability
Comment: "Ambient Findability" is a boundary-crossing book...well-written, insightful and eye-opening, this is a book worth reading.
This book addresses how individuals find information in a world of information overload. Peter Morville walks the reader through the potential implications of a world in which any information can be found on any topic from any location.
I recommend this thought-provoking book to all readers.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Well, THAT was weird...
Comment: This book is an interesting follow-up to Information Architecture for the World Wide Web by the same author. This time, instead of focusing on the nuts and bolts of IA, the author spoke about the nature of findability itself.
Morville shares research and anecdotes from business, history, library science, anthropology, and neurobiology in his quest for the perfect system where everything in the world is instinctively easy to locate. Can we ever achieve ambient findability? And what would the world look like in such a place? What are the social and political ramifications of findability? Will it be big brother, or will the very concept of unquestionable authority wither and die?
Recent manifestations such as Google, Wikipedia, and blogger watchdogs suggest the latter is more likely...
Ironically, the more information we have, the less likely anybody is to use it. Obtaining information is very painful, even if the data is easy to find. The relatively unknown Mooers law states:
"An information retrieval system will tend to NOT be used whenever it is more painful and troublesome for a customer to have information than for him not to have it." -- Calvin Mooers
Meaning, if I have a problem, I can either look up the answer, or ask somebody for help. If I ask somebody, then they might do all my work for me, which is good for me. However, if I look up the answer online, then I have to read it, understand it, and implement the solution myself. Not only must I confront my own ignorance, but its a lot more work.
Stupid Google.
Along the same lines, it's insufficient for information merely to be available and findable... it must also be believable, useful, and tailored to the audience so its easy to absorb. That's the top-to-bottom challenge, and very few people understand it. This book doesn't give much practical advice about absorbability, but it covers findability needs and existing technology quite well. The rest is up to you.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Another Rambling Book from O'Reilly
Comment: Like most O'Reilly books, the credentials of the author are impeccable, and the concept is current and relavant.
However, like most techincal publishing houses, O'Reilly does not have enough editors fluent in enough technical areas of expertise to impose order on its authors. The result is that they produce excellent texts for those already familiar with the subject, and dreadful experiences for those hoping for something other than a "Dummies" book.
"Ambient Findability" is no different. The subject is broad, the concepts are deep, and the order is completely lacking. O'Reilly seemed to have exercised no editorial restraint in the publishing of this book - it is andectoal, rambling and repetitive in parts, and generally jumps around (much like the subject of the book), without any common touch points.
The main point of the book is that information is grouped in structured and not so structured ways on the web, and being able to "find" information is predicated on how it is percieved by other parts of the web. This already is a vast ocean of space to cover. 180 pages with a lot of graphics is bound to be light, but add on rambling discourse, and you can only swallow 20-30 pages at a time, before bed.
I really believe the author is a great mind on this subject. He could do much better w/ a well disciplined editor.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A philosophy book, not a how-to book . . .
Comment: . . . . But what a great philosophy book it is!
This may be the only O'Reilly book I have ever read that changed some of my basic notions about things I thought I understood, not at a "how to code this or that" level but at a "how the world works" level.
The book presents itself as a thoughtful ramble through some issues around finding and retrieving content that a person might wish to have. And it does a very good job of laying out the landscape, identifying pitfalls, and pointing out unpredictable successes (and failures).
But the real beauty of this book is its own internal organization. The author starts with tangible physical location and navigation, and then moves onto to fluently-written descriptions of virtual location and navigation. The book is thought-provoking and fairly balanced in presenting the perspectives of people who feel strongly about these issues while disagreeing vehemently with one another.
This volume offers no easy solutions, but it illuminates a landscape that needs desperately to be better understood by more people, and it does so in a readable, accessible way. I learned some things, I unlearned some things, and I had a heck of a good time doing so. Will it make me a better information architect? I hope so, but it certainly made me a more thoughtful one.
Customer Rating:
Summary: I am very interested in this kind of topic, BUT could not get into this
Comment: This felt like a long college senior thesis. Rambling, unfocused and without real-world applicability.
|
|
|
