Monthly Archives: March 2006

I was IM’ing with my cousin in India, showing her to use del.icio.us. She just started her first job as a researcher and needs to keep track of various research services she uses. I explained to her all about tags, and how you can see what others thought of same url. After she had saved a few urls and some oohs and aahs over tags and watching others, she asks – “and how do I remember this url? it is really hard to remember!”

What delicious irony in that the url we use to remember our other urls is so hard to remember. Its almost as if some of the mental energy freed up by offloading all other urls is taken up by remembering how to spell del.icio.us. Its the del.icio.us tax! I for one am glad to pay it.

I am posting this from the airport – heading to Vancouver for the IA Summit just as soon as the airplane starts boarding. This is my first time at Vancouver which I am very much looking forward to. And apart from any talks that I might attend, IA Summit is a time for meeting friends and catching up. Its the conference I know the most people at and feel the most home at.

I have two events that I will be participating in. One is a panel on Tagging and Beyond: Personal, Social and Collaborative Information Architecture. I will be participating with people whose views I respect a great deal: Gene Smith, Danah Boyd, Scott Golder and Mimi Yin. I will be talking about the issues I talked about at SXSW.

My other event is a talk. I submitted it as “Sorting in an age of tagging“, but its subtitle could be “A Social Manifesto for Information Architecture” or “The missing chapter in the Polar Bear book”. I am still putting the talk together, but mostly I want to talk about how the “social” is such a crucial part of information architecture, and how the web is not just about designers creation information structures that users navigate, but also about groups of people creating a social reality together. Their exploration and play happens in these worlds that they create and inhabit. How does the role of the designer change? What are the information architecture problems and solutions?

For once I am planning to blog from the conference. So wait for some posts on the weekend.

Just heading off to the airport to catch a flight to Austin. This is my first time at SXSW. Really excited to go there finally. I will be participating in a panel on Tagging. The panel is on Sunday March 12th, 11.30 AM to 12.30 PM in Ballroom E.

Other participants are
Don Turnbull, Univ of Texas at Austin
Adina Levin, Socialtext
Prentiss Riddle, Shadows.com
Thomas Vander Wal, InfoCloud Solutions Inc

Don Turnbull, Univ of Texas at Austin

I am going to talk about tagging as the intersection of the personal and the social. And how tagging approximates the wisdom of crowds better than many other social systems on the web. And some things that designers of tagging systems should keep in mind.

Come by and say hello if you are headed there as well. I will probably be feeling a litle lost since I have not been there before!