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The Think blog, All Points Blog, Very Spatial and GIS Monitor have mentioned the On Point downloadable radio show aired on January 3rd. From the Think summary: "Tom Ashbrook, the host will be interviewing Mike Liebhold of the Institute for the Future, Christopher Allen from Counts Media/Yellow Arrow, and Peter Morville who wrote Ambient Findability from O'Reilly."

Jesse writes "A VerySpatial Podcast's 1/2 year anniversary episode features an interview with Peter Morville, author of the book Ambient Findability published by O'Reilly Press. Visit http://veryspatial.com/podcast.php to download Episode 26."

Direction Mag host a review of Ambient Findability by Peter Morville. From the review: "[...] the book is not so much about knowing the location of people or items in the real world and its implications, but rather about the challenge of finding information. [...] The book includes many big, important topics to ponder (or not). What is information? Morville suggests that we not worry about it too much. How do people deal with too much information? They don't bother to go looking, per Calvin Mooers. What is the Semantic Web? Is it useful? What of taxonomies, ontologies, and folksonomies? These last few topics will take some time to ponder, but Morville does a fine job making sense of what can seem like overwhelming and distant ideas." You can also hear Peter Morville in this great Very Spatial interview.

Yesterday's GeoTec opening keynote was given by Peter Morville. Here's some notes I took during his great speech revolving around information architecture and ambient findability (which is also the names of Peter's books). The main concepts when it comes to information, of course including geospatial information, form Peter's honeycomb: usable, useful, desirable, valuable, findable, credible, accessible. Peter quoted Herbert Simon, nobel prize of economy, who said "A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention". He told us the most important and visited page on a website, after the actual homepage, is the search results page, which generally receives little attention from the site's designers/managers. He also discussed the revenge of librarians, claiming librarians are key players not only to archive information, but to propel information into our future. The concept of pace layering was also discussed: some elements evolves faster than others and this has a direct impact on information management ((quicker) fashion, commerce, art, ..., governance, culture, nature (slower)). Above everything, Peter's speech was to the point, clear and supported with adequate explanations and examples. Hear Peter Morville interviewed a few months ago by Very Spatial or read Ambient findability's review. There's also the Cartography blog covering his first day at GeoTec.

The third edition of O'Reilly's Information Architecture is now available for order. From Peter Morville's blog: "And yet, unlearn we must, for technology relentlessly transforms the playing field, changing not just the answers but the questions as well. In a post-Ajaxian Web 2.0 world of wikis, folksonomies, and mashups, how do we structure for co-creation? How do we document the rich interfaces of web applications? How do we design for multiple platforms and mobile devices? What has changed, and what remains the same?" Update: 11/29 22:43 GMT by S :There's now a full discussion on the third edition by Peter.

The Geowanking list links to an interesting 12-pages Wired article named The whole Earth cataloged: how Google Maps is changing the way we see the world [pdf, 1.75Mb]. The second part of the article is focusing on hyperlocal. From the article: "Today the power still lies in the hands of the mapmakers. The only difference is that we’re all mapmakers now, which means geography has entered the complex freefor- all of the information age, where ever-more-sophisticated technology is better able to reflect the world’s rich, chaotic complexity." This clearly reminds me of Ambiant Findability.