Monday, 18 November 2002

What About Web Editors, And Writers, Though? Web Editor would have been another reasonable choice of job title, instead of Information Architect, perhaps, but I only saw one vacancy for that job. That was for someone to do writing and copyediting for a New Zealand government web site.       Come to think of it, vacancies for web writers have been hard to find, even in the heyday or bubble days of the Web. There is not enough awareness of how very different web writing is to other forms.       As the Hot Text guys state, “Writing for the Web transforms our old ideas of audience, structure, and style. When we immerse ourselves in the Internet, we see concepts that we have inherited from years of writing on paper begin to dissolve.” 5:05:01 PM    Add a comment.

... And That Is Partly Why I Got Into IA. Waste of that kind, and so many missed opportunities, is why I was so excited when the first edition of IAWWW appeared in 1997. Someone had been thinking about the same things, and what is more had put a name to it!       Also compelling was the fact that, as someone with experience of magazine editorial and film and advertising production, the concept of IA overlapped with many of the most essential roles in those spheres.       Having worked on a few web sites by then, I saw that someone must assume the editorial role. It was obvious that research, strategy, planning, scoping, storytelling, structure, and so on, were just not being carried out right under the old designer + programmer paradigm. 4:53:47 PM    Add a comment.

A Compelling Quote From Information Architecture for the WWW. On page 320 of IAWWW, second edition, by Peter Morville and Louis Rosenfeld, under the subheader Do We Really Need to Hire Professionals?, is this: We are continually amazed by the scale of business blunders caused by the false assumption that anyone can do this work. In our consulting experience with dozens of Fortune 500 companies, we have seen several situations where literally millions (if not tens of millions) of dollars have been wasted by web and intranet development teams that lack even a single professional information architect. … and they go on to discuss how various common corporate policies have failed to address the problem, in their opinion.       Cause to stop and think. Millions, for firms that could, possibly, have afforded to take these kinds of losses. What about the smaller guys who cannot take big hits? 4:47:05 PM    Add a comment.

Books For Review Just Arrived. Thanks to the kind folks at O’Reilly & Associates, three new books on the Web have arrived: Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference and HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide.       Have just quickly skimmed through Information Architecture, and it looks like this is the one of the three recently arrived IA books that is most oriented more towards the professional than lay people. 11:46:35 AM    Add a comment.