Name: Ambient Findability
ISBN: 9780596007652

Ambient Findability

How do you find your way in an age of information overload? How can you filter streams of complex information to pull out only what you want? Why does it matter how information is structured when Google seems to magically bring up the right answer to your questions? What does it mean to be "findable" in this day and age? This eye-opening new book examines the convergence of information and connectivity. Written by Peter Morville, author of the groundbreaking Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, the book defines our current age as a state of unlimited findability. In other words, anyone can find anything at any time. Complete navigability. Morville discusses the Internet, GIS, and other network technologies that are coming together to make unlimited findability possible. He explores how the melding of these innovations impacts society, since Web access is now a standard requirement for successful people and businesses. But before he does that, Morville looks back at the history of wayfinding and human evolution, suggesting that our fear of being lost has driven us to create maps, charts, and now, the mobile Internet. The book's central thesis is that information literacy, information architecture, and usability are all critical components of this new world order. Hand in hand with that is the contention that only by planning and designing the best possible software, devices, and Internet, will we be able to maintain this connectivity in the future.

What Hacker News says

mindcrimeMay 2017

Gosh, there's so many. But these come to mind:

1. Neuromancer - William Gibson

2. Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson

3. Hackers - Heroes of the Computer Revolution - Steven Levy

4. How to Measure Anything - Douglas Hubbard

5. Godel, Escher, Bach - Douglas Hofstadter

6. The Pragmatic Programmer - Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas

7. The Soul of a New Machine - Tracy Kidder

8. Code - Charles Petzold

9. The Shockwave Rider - John Brunner

10. Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become Book - Peter Morville

11. Don't Make Me Think - Steve Krug

12. The Design of Everyday Things - Donald A. Norman

13. The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering - Fred Brooks

14. Decline and Fall of the American Programmer - Ed Yourdon

15. Cube Farm - Bill Blunden

16. The Philip K. Dick Reader

17. The Cuckoo's Egg - Clifford Stoll

18. The Prince - Niccolò Machiavelli

19. The 48 Laws of Power - Robert Greene

20. The Atrocity Archives - Charles Stross

21. Business @ the Speed of Thought: Using a Digital Nervous System - Bill Gates

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mindcrimeOct 2015

I'm sure there are many, but a few that jump to mind, in no particular order, and spanning both fiction and non-fiction:

The Selfish Gene - Dawkins

A New Kind of Science - Wolfram

The Singularity is Near - Kurzweil

Gödel, Escher, Bach - Hofstadter

Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies - Hofstadter

Atlas Shrugged - Rand

The Fountainhead - Rand

Nineteen Eighty-Four - Orwell

The Trouble With Physics - Lee Smolin

Time Reborn - Lee Smolin

Ambient Findability - Peter Morville

Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software - Steven Johnson

Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age - Duncan Watts

Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life - Albert-laszlo Barabasi

Artificial Life - Steven Levy

The Four Steps To The Epiphany - Steve Blank

The World is Flat - Thomas Friedman

not a book, but the various writings of Douglas Engelbart - http://www.dougengelbart.org/library/library.html

Glasshouse - Charles Stross

Permutation City - Greg Egan

Neuromancer - William Gibson

The Shockwave Rider - John Brunner

The Society of Mind - Marvin Minsky

The Origin of Wealth: The Radical Remaking of Economics and What it Means for Business and Society - Eric Beinhocker

The Black Swan - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Fooled By Randomness - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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arkitaipMay 2011

IMHO you first need to understand design, its various sub fields (i.e. typography, colors, layout), user experience design/interaction design/usability, and finally how all of this applies to the web. You can learn the basics by reading books but the only way to truly understand and master is by study this things in the world and by practicing them. Start thinking about design, analyze it in your daily life, do your own makeovers of sites you use, design a blog theme, etc, etc.

As for web typography, you want to check of the latest generation of font embedding because that's where the real magic's at. The most known web font solutions are: CSS3 (font-face), typeface.js, cufon, flir, sifr, Google Font API, Typekit.

Here's a list of quality books on design and typography:

    A History of Graphic Design
    Before & After Page Design
    Designing Brand Identity
    Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things
    Graphic Design Solutions
    How Designers Think
    Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data
    Making and Breaking the Grid: A Graphic Design Layout Workshop 
    The Complete Manual of Typography
    The Designer's Guide to Color Combinations
    The Elements of Graphic Design: Space, Unity, Page Architecture, and Type
    The Elements of Typographic Style
    The New Typography
    The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
    Thinking with Type: A Primer for Designers
    Typography Workbook: A Real-World Guide to Using Type in Graphic Design

Books on web design:

    About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design
    Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become  
    Bulletproof Web Design
    Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide
    Designing Web Usability
    Designing With Web Standards
    Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design
    Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction
    Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
    Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed
    Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites
    Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web  
    Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction
    Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems
    The Essential Guide to User Interface Design
    The Inmates Are Running the Asylum
    Thoughtful Interaction Design: A Design Perspective on Information Technology
    Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks

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yaddayaddaFeb 2015

I'm surprised there isn't more discussion of the article's actual content.

Other than makeing me crave cheese omelets, this reminded me of Google's flu trend service - http://www.google.org/flutrends/ .

It also reminds me of "Ambient Findablity" by Peter Morville - http://www.amazon.com/Ambient-Findability-What-Changes-Becom... .

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maximumwageJul 2010

Why not just give in to information addiction? Unlike many other addictions, there's the possibility that the knowledge gained from it could lead to beneficial outcomes. As the book "Ambient Findability" says: what we find changes who we become.

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bravuraFeb 2010

The problems are not, as argued by the blog post on zacker.org, poor adoption. Rather, there are more fundamental problems with formal representations of semantics.

Once you start to sit down and try and encode all knowledge in a formal manner, one begins running into Godelian imcompleteness. Tugging on the string and trying to resolve inconsistencies leads to more special cases and more descriptions, which in turn lead to more special cases and more descriptions, and so on. In "Ambient Findability", a book on the future of information finding, author Peter Morville calls Knowledge Representation the "quagmire" of good old-fashioned AI.

There is a certain benefit to the formal representations used by the semantic web. Namely, that communication between different systems is enabled by communicating using discrete tokens. The discreteness of these tokens make the choice of token unambiguous, but does not mean that it is a perfect map of meaning. This is similar to language, which is an incomplete and imperfect representation of what is nebuluous and informal in the brain. For example, if I use the word "healthy", you can be pretty confident that I used this particular word (assuming you heard me okay), but you are not necessarily confident that you know precisely what that actually means. We communicate with distinct tokens as our language not because it is a perfect map of meaning, but because its better than using continuous linguistic representations. Imagine if you weren't even sure what word I used at any given point in time, because words are fluidly flowed into each other. So even though knowledge is better modeled probabilistically and continuously, it might be difficult to communicate with a language whose representations was explicitly probabilistic and continuous.

The semantic web shouldn't be viewed as a be-all end-all perfect encoding of knowledge. Rather, it should be viewed as a language for machines to communicate, in an imperfect way, but better than having no language at all.

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