William Sittig: Hello, everybody.
Sorry for the delay; we've had some technical problems
and I thank you for your patience.
The only thing I can say is, I think it's going
to be a wonderful presentation.   So let's get started.

Welcome to today's program, featuring Peter Morville.
I'm Bill Sittig, Chief of the Library of Science and Technology
and Business Division, and this event is one in our series,
in which we learn from important writers and thinkers
in the various fields of science, technology and business.
And we're pleased today to be cosponsoring this program
with the Technology Policy Directorate.
Before I introduce today's speaker,
I want to mention our two remaining programs for the summer.
On August 11, we're going to have Barbara Haber, a noted writer
and librarian from Harvard, who is going to speak
about her lifetime career devoted
to promoting food history and women's history.
My staff is already gathering cookbooks from our collection,
and they're already preparing food from these books,
so that should be an enlightening program, as well as a tasty event.
And on September 11, we're having Thomas Grooms,
a local architectural historian who's going to give a lecture
on the architecture of Capitol Hill.
I hope you'll be able to attend both of these events.
I'd also like to take this opportunity to thank Carolyn Larson
of the Business Reference Section and Eric Delfino
of the Technology Policy Office for all their good efforts
in organizing today's program, and Betsy Miller and Mary Jane Kabolla
[ sp ]   for their assistance.

It's now my great pleasure to introduce today's speaker,
Peter Morville, who's standing right next to me.
Peter is president and founder of Semantic Studies,
a leading information architecture
and findabilities consulting firm in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
I'm racing through this, so I might miss some, I won't tell you
about his kindergarten and junior high school.
He hails from Manchester, England, and has a graduate degree
in Library Science from the University of Michigan,
where he serves on the faculty of the School of Information.
He's founder and past president
of the Information Architecture Institute and is a member
of the American Library Association.
Peter conducts seminars and workshops
in Information Architecture and Findability
and delivers keynotes at international events.
His work has been featured in major publications,
including Business Week, The Wall Street Journal,
Fortune and The Economist.   He's the author of four books,

his first three have become classics in the field.
His first, The Internet Searcher's Handbook, which he coauthored
with Louis Rosenfeld and Joseph Janes, was first published in 1996.
And the second, Information Architecture for the Worldwide Web,
which was co-written with Louis Rosenfeld, was published in 1998
and updated, greatly enlarged and released as Information Architecture
for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites in 2002.
The 1998 edition of Information Architecture was named Best Internet
Book of the Year by Amazon and the most useful book on web design
on the market by usability guru Jakob Nielsen.
The topic of today's book is Peter's most recent book,
Ambient Findability, which I have right here, which was published
by O'Reilly Media, Incorporated in 2005.
It's sometimes referred to as "the lemur book."
If you don't already own a copy,
it's for sale today right outside this book and Peter would be glad
to sign the book and talk with you right after this event.
In this book, he explores the large implications
of the information revolution, addressing such questions as,
with nearly 10 billion Web pages,
how do we assess credibility and decide who to trust?
How does the importance
of the keyword search affect the way we use language?
What is the future for librarians in a Web-dominated world?
Not only does he tackle complicated and technical issues,
but he does so in a lively and witty way.
Let me read you one very short paragraph from his first chapter.
"Findability is the biggest story on the Web today
and its reach will only grow as the tidal wave of channel convergence
and ubiquitous computing wash over our shores.
We will use the Web to navigate a physical world that sparkles
with embedded sensors and geospatial metadata even
as we diminish the need to move our bodies through space.
Mobile devices will unite our data streams in an evolving dance
of informed consumers seeking collective intelligence
and inspiration.
And in this ambient economy, findability will be a key source
of competitive advantage.   Finders keepers, losers weepers."

[ laughter ]
And now it's my honor to introduce the founding father
of information architecture, Peter Morville.
Peter.   [ applause ]

Peter Morville: Thank you for that introduction.
And I'm hoping everybody -- is this screen working now?
Male Speaker: Yeah.   Peter Morville: Okay, good.

Thank you for bearing with us during these technical challenges.
Let me just get this keyboard set up.
Okay. So I'm going to try to speak into the microphone,
but also try to kind of pay attention to the folks way
over there on that side and we'll see how we go.
As you already know, I've got a background
in library and information science.
Back in the mid-'90s, I fell in love with the World Wide Web.
And I've spent the last 12 years or so, helping to pioneer
and define this field that's become known as information architecture.
More recently, I've kind of branched out beyond that field,
exploring findability in the world of ubiquitous computing.
And my talk today is going to sort of follow that trajectory somewhat,
talk a little bit about the past and present,
things that are important today.
And then I'm going to branch off into the weird
and wacky future of ambient findability.
So you know, my expertise comes as a consultant working
with very large companies and government agencies
to organize their information, primarily on their Web sites
and intranets, so that people can find what they're looking for.
And you know, that's sort of the most concise definition
of information architecture I can come up with.
Of course, in the second edition we went overboard.
We provided four definitions.
And let me just sort of touch on a few points here.
So one is obviously, when we talk
about information architecture there's that metaphor,
drawing on our experience and understanding
of physical architecture and physical spaces.
And in the early days of the Web it was really important to use
that metaphor to help people understand issues, like, you know,
the frustration that comes with becoming "lost" in one
of these information spaces.
And the importance of planning ahead and creating blueprints and a plan
for these spaces before you start coding HTML.

I've always argued that information architecture is very much a balance
of art and science.
So there's a lot we've been able to learn from fields
like human computer interaction.
And by doing usability testing on our own products and systems,
we're able to learn what works and what doesn't work.
We're able to inject a little science into this process.
But at the end of the day, there are so many variables involved
in doing this work that it's impossible to test everything.
And so we have to rely on our professional judgment.
We have to bring some creativity to the challenge.


Information architecture has sort of grown into a profession on the Web,
but it's by no means limited to the Web.
We can think about organizing information
across any channel or media or format.
And it is an emerging discipline and community of practice.
There are information architects all around the world
who specialize in this field.
But at the same time, I always need to remind myself and others
that most of the information architecture is done by people
who are not information architects.
In fact, they may not even know the term.
And so there is a responsibility on us, as information architects,
to educate, to communicate, to help our clients and colleagues
to better understand how they can do a better job
of organizing information for shared information environments.
A few, sort of, lessons learned from my experience: one is the importance
of providing multiple ways to find the same information.
Now this is something that folks from the library
and information science world sort of take for granted.
It's something we learn when we go through school.
But this is sort of a continuing message that I've had to communicate
to clients to help them understand; a single taxonomy is not enough.
Depending on the type of user and the type of task,
different information systems, different organization schemes,
will work better or worse and so in this example --
and by the way is this working?   I just -- okay.

It doesn't sound loud to me.
So in this example from Stanford University,
we see in the top left sort of a loose topical organization scheme,
which is very often the most important way
to enable people to navigate.   But they don't stop there.

They provide just below that an audience-oriented scheme,
so that people can self-identify as students or faculty or alumni,
and get some good starting points.   It's not necessarily comprehensive

but it gives us some places to begin.
And in the middle, there is some organization
by department and school.
And towards the top, we see an alphabetical index
of sites and a search engine.   So this homepage really serves

as a navigation device providing multiple ways


Now, information architects, certainly early on,
talked a lot about browsing and designing navigation systems,
but at least as important is a design of search systems.
And this is an area where, again, there's a lot of education that has
to go on out there in the business and government sectors
to help technology folks to understand it's not just
about the software or the search engine,
that in order to solve the search problem, we need to look
at the system that's in place.
We need to sort of start with the query: what are people looking for
and what words do they use?
And what do they care more about, precision or recall,
just a few good things or all the relevant information?
We need to design search interfaces that let them understand,
what am I searching and how can I search?
There are huge opportunities in the content area.
First of all, to remove the rot, content that's redundant or outdated
or trivial, and most Web sites out there today are filled with bloat:
stuff that should never have been there
or should have been removed years ago.
It's not a sexy task to take on but reducing the amount of content
in your site can have a huge impact on usability.
And then we can use metadata and control vocabularies
to provide more precise ways of sorting
and filtering and navigating.
The search results interface is a tremendous opportunity.
When I do use analysis of -- sort of look at the usage statistics
and the search logs of my clients' Web sites, very often I'll find
that after the homepage, the search results interface is the number two
most frequently visited interface on the whole site.
And they put a tremendous amount of effort into designing that homepage
and almost none into the search results interface,
so I argue that's one of the biggest opportunities to improve a Web site,
is to really work on that results interface, the relevance ranking,
the presentation of metadata
and giving people different, sort of, next steps.
Once they enter their keyword search
and they don't quite get what they're looking for,
what are the good next steps.
Now, through my library science education, this one paper
by Marcia Bates of UCLA has always stuck in my head and sort
of guided the way that I think about information-seeking behavior
and the way that users really function
when they're looking for information.
And in this paper, Marcia sort of talks about the iterative
and interactive nature of searching.
It's not as simple as, enter a keyword into Google,
get your results and you're done.
Very often we enter a keyword, we get some results, we take a look
at a document, we realize we were actually using the wrong word.
We change what we're looking for, we keep going.
Maybe we find out about an expert in the field
and we ask them a question, maybe we get a book and we read
up on the topic and then we have some better tools
and better understanding with which to search.
And so for any information problem of real importance,
the information-seeking process is very much one of learning.
And I argue that in today's environment, knowledge workers,
the way that knowledge workers learn,
is very much dependent on the search process.
It's a huge part of how we go
about our continuing our lifelong education.
Now a few years ago, I started to get sick of the word usability.
[ laughter ]
Folks like Jakob Nielsen and Jared Spool
and the Usability Professionals Association did a wonderful job
in the 1990s of getting that word, usability, into everybody's heads.
And when I go in and consult with executives,
without fail when I ask them what are your goals for the redesign
of this site, they will say, we want it to be more usable.
And I'll say, great, what does that mean?
The word usability over the years has grown and grown
until it's almost become a, you know, a synonym for quality.
All right, we want a good Web site or a better Web site.
And so I created what I call this user-experience honeycomb,
to try to tease apart some of the other qualities
of the user experience that I think are important.
It's not meant to be comprehensive.
You could come up with other qualities,
but just to touch on these ones quickly.
I think that practitioners first of all, need to have the courage
to ask, is it useful, given our intimate knowledge of the medium
and the technology and what it's good for, we need to be willing
to push back on our clients and our bosses
and the folks writing requirements and say, you know,
I think I have a better idea for how we might achieve our goals here.
We still need to worry about usability and do testing
on our own products and systems.   But that's not enough.

It's not enough to optimize for efficiency.
We also need to strive for desirability.
And in fact, in Don Norman's latest book on emotion and design,
he talked about the notion that attractive things work better.
So desirability takes us into issues of image and identity and branding
and things that marketing folks are very concerned with.
And those are all very important issues.
Now findability is, of course, my passion.
And for anybody designing a Web site,
I invite you to ask three questions.
First, can people find your Web site.
Second, can your users find their way around your Web site.
And third, can your users, your customers, find your products
and services and content despite your Web site.
[ laughter ]
Okay. That third one may be the most important.
Accessibility: is your site accessible to people
with disabilities, okay, that's a very important area, I think.
My prediction is that, in the future, just as there is legislation
that sort of, requires that a, you know,
person in a wheelchair should be able to get into this room,
eventually we're going to see similar legislation
on the web that's going to sort of force this issue.
But it's an area where businesses
and government agencies should really be ahead of the curve.
And then credibility.
B.J. Fogg at Stanford University did some wonderful research a few years
back looking at what are the design elements
that influence whether people trust what you're telling them on the Web,
whether they believe you.   And sure enough, the visual design

and information architecture have a huge impact on credibility.
If your site looks professionally designed and well-organized,
people sort of say, well, you must know what you're talking about.
I can trust you.
And in the middle I include valuable.
Just to remind us that, while we're designing for the user experience,
we need to keep in mind the goals of our institution.
Right? So whether it's a business and we're focused
on advancing the bottom line, or perhaps a government agency:
are we advancing our mission in the way
that we design this user experience.
And what's nice about this honeycomb is, it gives us the ability
to sort of, tease apart these qualities of the user experience
but also to look at the ways in which they work together.
For instance, now we're -- I'll illustrate that here.
Now so we're -- we're all sort of familiar with the notion
that this is the Web's equivalent of location, location, location.
All right.
Where do you appear on a keyword search, you know, on a Google search
for the keyword that's important to your organization.
And we all understand, if you're not in the top few hits,
then you're going to get dramatically less traffic.
All right, so getting up high
in the search results increases your findability.
What's less obvious, but has been shown through research,
is that it also increases your credibility.
If you're high up there on a Google search, people tend to trust you.
They think you are the expert.
You must know what you're talking about.
I can give you my credit card information.
So findability and credibility are connected.
Now by the way, I gave this presentation, a version of it
at Harvard Business School last summer.
And they really didn't like this slide
because they didn't like being number two.
[ laughter ]
I'd like to just sort of touch on a brief case study and then kind
of launch off into the world of ambient findability.
A few years back, I was brought
in to help the National Cancer Institute do a redesign
of the cancer.gov Web site.
And when I came in, they had very much a traditional Web design
or user experience focus.
They wanted to improve the ability of users to get from the homepage
to the, sort of, key destination content.
And to their credit, they had done a wonderful job of analyzing
who are our users, and what are they doing here,
what are they looking for.
And they understood that the vast majority of their users were people
who had been recently diagnosed with cancer,
or their friends and family members.
And they were coming here, sort of, and very quickly navigating
to what they called their cancer type homepages.
Pages, you know, specifically about melanoma
or breast cancer and so forth.
Well, I started asking questions about, well,
how do people get here in the first place?
And they said don't worry about that.
If you search on "cancer" in Google or Yahoo then we're going to come
up as the number one or number two hit, so we're ok.
But I did worry about that, and I did a little bit of digging
and I found that, sure enough,
the general term "cancer" was the single most frequent search term.
But there were an awful lot of searches done
on specific types of cancer.
And when you added all those up, they accounted for more
than 70 percent of all searches.
And the problem was, and still is to some degree, when you do a search
on a specific cancer type, for many of those,
cancer.gov doesn't come up.
There's a lot of very focused sites, like melanoma.com that are sponsored
by pharmaceutical companies trying to push drugs and treatments.
And so, you know, here's a case where these folks have some
of the most authoritative and up-to-date information,
and yet people aren't finding it.
And I argued it's not your mission to create a good Web site.
It's your mission to connect your audience,
the citizens, with this information.
And so we need to look beyond the design of the Web site to issues
like search engine optimization.
And so we did a redesign, focused on information architectures as well
as findability, and the site won a number of awards.
It won a Webby Award.   It moved right to the top

of the American Customer Satisfaction index for e-Government.
And so I like to say that good things come
when you focus on findability.
Okay. So I'm going to switch gears now and talk about the future.
And I would argue that any architect, whether of physical
or digital spaces, should have one foot in the past
and one foot in the future.
We need to learn from the lessons of those who have gone before us.
But we also need to be looking to the future; where are things going?
In a small context, we're always designing our systems for tomorrow,
for six months, 12 months, 18 months from now.
And we're very often creating the legacy systems of tomorrow.
But in the bigger picture we should also be looking at, you know,
where are the trends taking us and how should we position ourselves
as individuals: looking at our careers,
and positioning our organizations strategically to take advantage
of these sort of bigger long-term trends.
And for me, findability has provided an interesting lens
through which to, sort of, explore the future.
So let me just sort of touch on these definitions
and then start sort of illustrating some
of what I see as ambient findability.
So findability is the quality of being locatable or navigable.
And we can look at this at both an object and a system level.
We can talk about findable objects,
whether it's a physical or digital object.
And we can ask, what are all the different ways
in which someone might be able to find this object,
and how can we make it more findable?
At the system level, we can talk
about to what degree does this environment support way-finding
or navigation or retrieval.
And you see here that I'm bringing together, you know,
the notions of way-finding and retrieval.
I see a convergence going on right at the moment.
Now ambient refers to surrounding or encircling or enveloping.
And in this kind of mobile wireless age, where information is
in the air literally, I think ambient is a nice term
for describing where we are.
So ambient findability describes what I would say is a fast emerging
world, in which we can find anyone or anything
from anywhere at any time.   And this is not necessarily a goal.

And there's a lot of scary privacy implications
that we're already starting to bump up against.
And we'll never quite reach the destination.
Perfect findability is impossible.   But we're sure as heck headed

in the general direction of ambient findability.
And there's a lot of interesting sort of, signposts along the way.
Now back in the good old days of the Middle Ages, we didn't have
that much information in published form.
And so books were chained to desks.
And if you borrowed a book and you didn't return it or you damaged it,
you didn't get some measly library fine, you were cursed forever.
[ laughter ]
And like I said, these were the good old days
when librarians had real power.   [ laughter ]

But nowadays, we're all painfully aware we live in the Information Age
and we suffer, you know, from information anxiety and overload.
We're creating absurd amounts
of information every year, and it only gets worse.
And so I think this quote is very important for the age we live in.
"A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention".
Or if you prefer the lowbrow version,
information is gushing towards your brain
like a firehose aimed at a teacup.   [ laughter ]

Now, folks in advertising and marketing might sort
of look at this as a challenge.
Well, we need to fight even harder for people's attention.
We need winking, blinking banner ads, and we need gas stations
that talk to us while we fill up our cars.
But I think that, you know, we should also sort of, you know,
ask a couple different questions, one practical and one philosophical,
you know, to those folks in advertising and marketing.
I say, in a world where your customers
and potential customers are so busy and distracted, you know,
shouldn't you be doing everything you can to make it easy for them
to find your information, your products and services,
when they're interested in finding it?
And then on a more philosophical level, you know,
what is this abundance of information doing?
What is -- you know, in a world where we can select our sources
and choose our news, how is this changing the way that we learn?
How is it changing the way that we make decisions?
Is it improving or, you know,
hurting our ability to make good decisions?
And it's only going to get weirder.
Okay. A couple years back, I was at a conference in Las Vegas,
and David Rose, the founder of Ambient Devices,
gave a wonderful show-and-tell talk about these,
sort of wacky wireless objects.   So what is the Ambient Orb?

I like to think of it as the lava lamp for the 21st Century.
It's an attractive orb, you can put it on your desk at home or at work
and via Web browser, you can customize it to pay attention
to various channels of information, whether it's the local weather
or traffic or your stock portfolio.   And you can instruct it.

You know when my stock starts to tank, as, you know,
happened last week, right?
And then, you know, start pulsing bright red and I'll know what to do.
[ laughter ]
The Ambient Pinwheel was a fun proof of concept.
They attach these pinwheels to people's e-mail inboxes.
So while you're working on a report or presentation,
as your inbox fills up, this pinwheel starts to spin faster
and faster, until you've got this hurricane force coming at you --
[ laughter ]
-- and you say, I better check e-mail and see who's looking for me.
Now what's interesting here is that we're starting to see the emergence
of alternate interfaces to digital networked information.
It's not just about the desktop, the laptop or even the smart phone.
There's going to be all kinds of weird ways
that we export information from these networks into our attention.
Yeah, let's see.   There are buttons here.

I don't know if they're connected to these ones or not.
Is that louder?   Okay. Even I can hear myself now.

[ laughter ]
Okay, I hope we're going to have some yays later.
[ laughter ]
Okay, so, we're also sort of entering this mobile age.
And you know, I've been a real fan of my Treo, which not only lets me,
you know, communicate with people as -- you know like a cell phone
and surf the web, but I can also check e-mail while I'm driving
down the highway at 75 miles an hour.
[ laughter ]
Peter Morville: But what's much more interesting to me,
is we are starting to see the convergence of these mobile devices
with geographic positioning systems and other kind
of location awareness services, that you know is in areas
that we've only begun to explore, but are all of the different ways
in which we're going to be able to leverage this ability
to have our devices know where we are.
And if we want to, to enable other people to know where we are.
And we're in the process of importing vast amounts
of information about the physical world into these digital networks.
Anybody who's played with Google Earth, for instance,
knows that there's a tremendous amount of metadata out there
about all of our physical, you know, our cities and all of the places,
restaurants, hotels, helicopter pads and so forth.
So we're dramatically increasing what we have access to.
Now, I was at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference earlier this
year in San Diego, and Bruce Sterling,
the science fiction author, gave a wonderful keynote presentation,
in which he argued that,
the Internet of objects will only be fully realized in, you know,
probably about 30 years from now.
And while I agree with Bruce that you know it's going to be 30 years
until he can lie in bed and Google his socks,
the Internet of objects is already becoming real,
in some specific instances.   Here is an example.

The Cisco Wireless Location Appliance allows you to tag
and track objects within a wireless network in hospitals,
or one of the first scenarios in which this is being explored.
And you know, in this example a hospital
in Michigan estimated they're saving about $28,000 a month
because they're not spending so much time searching for wheelchairs,
which I'd never known was a problem.   [ laughter ]

But apparently they get lost in closets and rooms.
And so, you know, we should all be thinking
about what are opportunities in our environments to tag
and track high value objects, speaking of which,
this is my favorite object for scaring people about the future.
This is a wristwatch that until recently you could buy
on Amazon.com.   And you buy it for your child.

It's got this key fob that allows you to lock it onto their wrist.
[ laughter ]
And then via the Web, you can track their location.
It's got a built-in GPS capability.
And this is a device that information architects have to love
because it even has a nifty bread crumbing feature
where we can sort of, you know, look at the path our child has traced
over the course of the day.
Now, what's interesting is, if you look on Amazon --
I mean, this product's been temporarily discontinued.
If you look at the customer comments, the customer feedback,
none of the comments are about, oh this kind of freaked me out,
you know, the privacy implications.
All the comments are complaints that it didn't work well enough.
[ laughter ]
Which makes sense, you're trying -- you know, people buy this to,
you know, enhance the safety of their children,
and yet GPS doesn't work indoors.
And the batteries don't last very long.
So it's interesting, there is a market for this kind of technology.
It's not quite perfected yet.
What I like is that this forces all of us to ask,
given that the technology is pretty much here, how do we want to use it?
So there's all sorts of weird privacy issues.
I'm not going to get into them right now.
I will recommend this book, The Transparent Society, by David Brinn,
which is a very provocative treatment of this topic.
And he argues the rich and powerful already have the ability
to track our every move.
And the only question is, do we want to be able to watch the watchers?
And I would add to that, do we want to be able to watch ourselves?
There's some really interesting possible applications,
where if we can track our own location and our own habits
and share our locations with friends and family,
we may have some interest there, you know,
beyond just watching the watchers.
But privacy is not the topic of today's talk.
The big question I have is, in a world of --
where we're building more and more haystacks and they are bigger
and bigger, how are we going to create bigger needles?
How -- in a world where, you know, there's millions
of similar documents or objects, how are we going
to describe the unique aboutness of this document or object.
You know, how are we going to deal with findability
in this massive environment and who's going to help us?
Well, it's not going to be Microsoft Bob --
[ laughter ]
-- or any of Bob's children or grandchildren.
Okay, I'm a big skeptic when it comes to the notion
of artificial intelligence solving mainstream information
retrieval problems.
And I don't think it's going to be information visualization either.
There's been a lot of money and a lot of media hype you know poured
into some really interesting companies,
some really smart people creating some really beautiful,
fun products that are just not very useful.
So who's going to help us?   [ laughter ]

The librarians, of course.   [ laughter ]

I wrote an article back in the '90s called "Revenge of the Librarians,"
in which I argued that the Internet would turn everybody
into a librarian.
And I think it's already happened, if you pay any attention
to the blogosphere and the world of social software,
you know that all these people can't shut up about metadata.
Right? Metadata has become sexy.   [ laughter ]

Now, you know, many of you will be familiar with tools
like del.icio.us, the social bookmarking service, or Flickr,
the photo tagging and sharing service.
And these sort of tools have inspired a movement that, you know,
is somewhat religious and political around this notion of free tagging.
All right, free the tag, uncontrol the vocabulary.
It has been this wonderful kind of, you know, excitement around,
you know, just let the users tag stuff
with whatever words that they want.
And we don't need those librarians with their controlled vocabularies
or those information architects.
David Weinberger, a friend of mine, in this kind of revolutionary zeal,
argued the old way creates a tree, the new rakes leaves together.
So the old way of the librarians was about hierarchy, a tree structure,
and the new way is about these wonderful, you know,
clusters of leaves that come together, you know, freely.
And I sort of said, you know,
I think that that is the perfect metaphor,
because we all know what happens to those wonderful piles
of leaves we shuffle through each fall.
They very quickly rot.   [ laughter ]

And they return to the ground where they become food for trees.
[ laughter ]   Which live a really long time.

Now what I'm getting at here, is not that we should throw away the new,
but that I think there's an opportunity to bring them together.
And I think Stewart Brand in his book, How Buildings Learn,
and in other books provides a hint at how we might do this.
In his notion of pace layering, what Stewart argues is
that in any complex adaptive system, it's important
that the different layers are able to evolve or change
at different rates or paces.
And so you know, I would say that the folksonomies
and the tagging systems are very fashionable and fast-moving,
and they help us to learn
about people's changing interests and vocabularies.
But we need to have a feedback loop that draws that, you know,
some of the most important insights, down into the layers
of controlled vocabularies and hierarchy
and more stable long-living systems.   So what's the future going to be?

Well, I think -- I'm willing to predict that 10 years from now,
we'll all still be entering a keyword into a search box
to start our finding experience.   And John Batelle argues in his book

that the search has become the new interface of commerce,
and I would add of government as well.
But does that mean the end of browsing and the end
of information architecture?
Not at all, because at the end of that search,
we're faced with a page like this on Amazon.
All right.
And there's no company in the world that has, sort of,
done more to explore providing different ways to browse
and navigate and sort and filter your information.
And so we're going to move from the search experience
to the browse experience and back, just as we have for a long time.
I'm going to skip ahead in the interest of time here.
So one of the most interesting things about Google, to me,
is not just that they've done a nice job with search
but they are continuing to push the envelope in terms
of moving beyond the Web: Google book search, Google Earth, right,
bringing new domains of information into the realm of what's searchable.
Podzingers, a service I learned about earlier this year,
that uses automatic speech to text technology to translate podcasts
and now other sorts of audio and video content,
and this interface is really interesting when,
not only can you click on the CNN News update here,
but you could also click on any of those words that appear
in the excerpt below and start playing the podcast
from that very point.
When I saw this it just, a light bulb went off and I thought,
it's only going to be a matter of a few years until all audio
and video content is rendered searchable.
That's going to be a tremendous new sort
of domain of content to deal with.
Okay. Social software, social network analysis,
is another area I think is really interesting, the relationship
between people and content.   We use content to find people.

We use people to find content.
Yahoo is exploring this idea with the notion of social search.
That's, you know, part of their strategy behind why they bought
Flickr and del.icio.us, they're trying to leverage who you know
into your searching experience.
And I'm not sure if it's going to work


The Wikipedia is a provocative new invention.
And it's also -- and we could probably spend hours discussing the
issue of authority.
You know, it's also interesting information architecture comes
up when you talk about the Wikipedia.
People say, hey, you know,
we can just let the users organize information.
We don't need to do it ourselves.
And yet the Wikipedia has a very familiar sort of inverted
"L" navigation wrapped around the center content.
That is very traditional information architecture.
So I see the Wikipedia in that sense as a nice blending of old and new.
And we're already moving beyond the web.
The Semapedia allows you to attach, sort of, basically links
to physical objects -- physical spaces
that then link you into Wikipedia content.
So we're starting to see the bridging
of physical and digital experiences.
And this is going to be a really interesting area.
I'm going to skip ahead here and sort of wrap up with the story
of the three stonecutters.   This is a story that Peter Drucker,

the management consultant, used to tell.
And I like to think of him as the other Peter.
[ laughter ]
And in this story there's, you know, a man wandering
through the wilderness and he comes upon a quarry.
And he's not really sure what's going on and so he walks
up to the first stonecutter and he says, what are you doing?
And this guy says, I'm just here making a living.
Says, okay.
He walks up to another guy and this guy's really intensely focused,
head down, you know, he says, so what are you doing?
And this guy can't even, you know, take the time to look up
and he just says, I'm doing the best job of stonecutting in the country,
and I'm a professional and I'm a perfectionist.
Well he walks up to this third guy and he says, what are you doing?
And this guy takes the time to stand up and with a bit of a glint
in his eye he says, I'm building a cathedral.
All right.
He has the sort of ability to see the broader context
and to be inspired by what he's contributing to.
And I think that those of us in the world of information and libraries
and Internet design should be doing the same.
And I've always thought of libraries as more
than just repositories of information.
I've thought of them as cathedrals of knowledge that sort of lift us up
and inspire us to share information and just to sort of celebrate the,
you know, creativity and the knowledge sharing
that we have done and continue to do.
And I think that that's going to remain very important
as we move forward in this sort of digital age.

So with that, I'm going to wrap up.
I don't think we have time for questions but I want
to really thank you for coming and I will be outside signing books
and happy to answer one-on-one questions then.
So thanks all very much.   [ applause ]

Okay. Male Speaker: That was wonderful.
Peter Morville: Thanks.   Male Speaker: Thank you so much.

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