Peter talks about how writing "Information Architecture for the World Wide Web" and "Ambient Findability" have impacted how he thinks about Information Architecture.
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In this 10 minute podcast (download iPod compatible, 51MB), Peter Morville and I discuss how he has moved from a consulting and implementation role at the beginning of his career to one of thought leadership. This transformation has largely come about through authoring two books, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web and Ambient Findability. This last book has been the subject of some recent notoriety and deals with issues of search and visibility beyond our current understanding of the Internet. As Peter mentions, things change when you can google your house and find out things about it.
The transformation Peter describes is not unlike the situation Jimmy Hsiao mentions when going from the US to China. In Jimmy's case, he talks about adapting US-created technology for completely different end-user behavior patterns in a different culture. In Peter's case, he is talking about changing a culture (in this case, the one in the US) by introducing completely new ways of doing things. The interesting point of convergence is that one of Peter's examples, mobile phone based services, seems to correspond to the situation Jimmy describes as already existing in China.
In our next episode with Peter, we will discuss how the transformation he foresees will be impacted by user participation, currently a hot topic that goes under the heading of Web 2.0.
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