The phrase information architecture (although it is, I suppose, what I do) always conjures up an image of information architecture as building materials that need to be assembled properly in order to function.

Perhaps this is a good analogy — and perhaps it’s not. In some sense, information is a bunch of building blocks we can assemble and tear down as we need to. But we can also recombine it many ways that we wouldn’t normally think of when it comes to bricks, wood and steel.

When we talk about information architecture, there’s often an argument either for user-level tagging (which is so often, and so unfortunately, called folksonomy) and a rigid, centrally-controlled hierarchy of terms (taxonomy).

The arguments on both sides hinge around how much control you should give end users over how their information is organized (since they’re usually the ones creating most of this stuff). Some would say that increased control by the end user is an inevitable reality, since a growing amount of content can’t all be sorted by a central authority.

These ideas about participation and distributed content architecture are best exemplified with some examples. The examples below come from O’Reilly’s 2005 description of what Web 2.0 actually is.

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While wading through my daily dose of spam (which originally never plagued my Gmail account, but now has risen to approximately 50 spam a day), I started thinking about the quality of information. How do we gauge the value of something that there is so much of out there?

How can we filter out the good from the bad — and prevent users from missing that one important message that went into the junk mail folder? First though, I decided to look at some statistics about spam.

The famous Akismet spam filter (which filters WordPress spam) has caught a total of 2,171,905,896 spam comments so far. According to Akismet, this accounts for 94% of all comments left on blogs. Taking a look at the the diagram below (which is borrowed from the good folks at Akismet), we can see that legitimate messages make up a tiny portion of all comments.

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On the way home from visiting some friends at a cottage on the weekend, I had the opportunity to listen to Richard Senett (here’s another interesting profile of him) discussing work, life and sociology in general on the CBC’s Ideas radio program.

One of the recurring themes in the discussion was the fractured nature of work life. Sennett argues that because employees once worked for a single employer for most of their lives, this acted as a driver for sensemaking for that employee.

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Once again, I’ve decided to recalibrate things here a little bit at the site. The site had had the same look for a few months now, and I wasn’t quite as happy with it as when I first changed themes.

I’ve come up with what I think is a cleaner, less obtrusive theme (which I think makes it easier to browse through articles, as well as to find what you’re looking for).

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I have to admit, I’m a sucker for a good metaphor. A good metaphor just has a way of wrapping things up neatly — and is a great way to start a discussion. I came across a few interesting ones today that I want to share.

First of all, there’s chronic organizational knowledgeitis. You have to really read the post to fully appreciate what Patrick is getting at, but it’s a very apt metaphor for any knowledge organization. Treat the disease, not the symptoms.

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