Peter Morville

In this final 2 minute segment (download iPod compatible, 10MB), Peter tells us what he hopes to accomplish in the next twelve months. As might be suggested from the rest of the conversation, he continues to consider the future evolution of user experience and is targeting a book at the nexus of user experience and strategy.

We hope to speak to Peter again in the future. For those of you interested in finding out more about user experience, our new series with Lou Rosenfeld provides some insight into another leader's attempts to move the field forward. Our search engine optimization series with Linda Girard provides insights into how a whole industry has sprung up around Google's domination of the search space.

In this fourteen and a half minute podcast (download iPod compatible, 76MB), Peter Morville and I discuss the veritable explosion in user contributions that has taken place in the past few years. Noted examples include flickr, a photo sharing site, and youtube, the video sharing site. A recurring issue with media files in particular is how to organize the material so that people can find it. Peter has long been an advocate of using professionals in this role. However, the mass of data is so great that professionals can only classify a small portion of it, leading to various attempts to harness non-professionals. Thomas Vander Wal termed this effort to harness amateur classification "folksonomy", for taxonomy created by folk.

We run through several issues:

• Users don't seem to want to help classify all data. Amazon's attempt to harness user classification for its inventory failed.
• However, Library Thing, which uses Amazon's book data has succeeded, perhaps because users feel they are primarily performing a service for themselves.
• Luis Van Ahn has explored ways to get users to consistently classify image data in ways that they find fun and will do for free.

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.

Additional Links

• You can watch Peter's presentation at Google on Ambient Findability here.
• Peter and I began our conversation in this post.

In this 10 minute podcast (download iPod compatible, 52MB), Peter Morville and I kick off an interview with an overall theme of how to organize information on the web. Peter is one of the founders of the field of Information Architecture, having co-written the seminal Information Architecture for the World Wide Web now in its third edition, as well as Ambient Findability recently showcased in the Google tech seminar series. Self-deprecatingly, he describes himself as just a "crazy librarian".

In this segment, we discuss the state of modern libraries and how the Internet has transformed them. Some highlights:

• Peter first felt the world wide web would transform libraries in 1993, a time when it was still possible to find all of the world's web pages indexed on a single root page in Switzerland.
• Library traffic is up. More people use libraries.
• However traditional measures of library health are down. In particular, book circulation has plummeted.
• Libraries are moving toward something they refer to as Library 2.0 that essentially tries to enhance the library's role as a local access point for the global knowledge network.

In our next segment, we'll discuss the role authoring books has played in helping Peter shape the field of Information Architecture.

Additional Links

• In the podcast, we mention something called Web 2.0 which might be thought in an overly simplified form as web sites that capitalize on audience-generated content.