Dairy of a Madman

There are bookstores — I’ve been in them — that are treasure troves crossed with nightmares. You never know what you might find, but that’s primarily because you have no idea where to start looking — and gods help you if you are in search of something specific. There are boxes everywhere, on and under shelves that sag threateningly under the weight of piles of who-knows-what. Card tables are set up haphazardly, forming makeshift aisles. The walls of the maze are made up of even more books, magazines, and VHS tapes that probably have some vintage porn recorded on them.

Web 2.0, proper noun
The name given to the social and technical sophistication and maturity that mark the - Oh, screw it. Money! Money money money! Money! The money’s back! Ha ha! Money!
From The Devil’s Dictionary (v2.0)

When it comes to information, the creation of the web is analogous to the discovery and application of a new experiential dimension. The ability to categorize and access data through any number of schema (limited only by the author’s imagination) improves over, for instance, bookstores or libraries in the same way that immersion is intensified from Flatworld into our three-dimensional space.

I will now take a breather, pausing to stuff my inner nerd back into the shadows, just a wee bit…

The new web applications are much better about this sort of organization. Not only are more people beginning to see the potential offered by the medium of hypertext, but also new implementations like tagging open wide, wide doors (in that case, for instance, you take the weight of the work off of the content author and also open up the categorization to the masses, as opposed to relying on an internalized and singularly subjective perspective of the content). It’s all in the early stages, and so there’s plenty of room for improvement; not to mention that the ideas underlying the implementations are inherently imperfect (one man’s tag is another man’s meaningless label), and so things will continue to evolve.

There are volumes on IA that go well beyond the scope of a single blog entry, and I encourage anyone who is interested in website design or simple surfing to at least browse one or two, if not take the time to thoroughly study the concepts. The larger websites of the world are designed by teams these days, and those teams typically have a person or person(s) responsible for and educated in IA, but the majority of sites are still put together by individuals who give cursory if any consideration for the organization of the content within the sites. (There are still large organizations that apparently have little or no understanding of IA, or else have allowed the concepts to fall victim to internal politics — I won’t name names, but will generalize that higher education and some e-commerce sites are impossible to comfortably surf on occasions.) If the majority of the sites — and therefore, the majority of the content — is being handled by these individuals, then, it becomes apparent that the mass of information (and here I’m referring in a generic sense to anything you might want to find on the Web: text, images, video, audio, products to buy or rent, etc.) is being grossly neglected in favor of flashy, cool design or the curse of the deadline or underestimate.

For every Barnes and Nobles or Borders or local library, you have ten bookstores described above. With only a little more thought and consideration put into place before the design and coding of a website ever begins, this ratio can be drastically reduced in little or no time, with little or no appreciable negative effect.

Maybe the web is just another thing, a product for the marketing departments to hawk and form as the basis for the bottom line. I prefer not to be so cynical, though — yes, it’s a tool, and it can be used to augment the commercial aspects of your business. Set up a storefront, advertise your products, hell — build the next application that you can sell to Google or Rupert Murdoch.

And there’s a time and place for those book sellers who don’t have time (or energy, or space, or motivation) to organize their wares in any way whatsoever. I’ve found a lot of great things when wandering through some of them — first edition Stephen King hardbacks in reasonably good condition, old comic books — but those were whimsical trips, and the finds are rare, much like bargains at a flea market.

This sort of thought really belongs on the front-end of project planning, though. This blog is TERRIBLY organized, from the standpoint of finding information outside of a chronological query. I’ve thought about correcting that, but realize that that task is overwhelming, with nearly 1,000 posts that would have to be reread before a complete tagging system could be created, and then reread again to implement said system. I avoid this project (for now, at least — one day, I suspect the anal-retentive in me will become Herculean enough to tackle it) because the only person that I know of that would actively search it is me, and I can find things easily enough as they are.

Unfortunately, too much of the information on the web falls victim to exactly this sort of thought, conscious or no, and thus, more room for me to rant and rave.

Sigh. I suppose I can start working on the tagging thing now, instead of later…

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