Peter Morville.
Ambient Findability.
O'Reilly. 2005
rating : 4 : passes the time
review : 26 March 2022
Peter Morville, author of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, spent the last decade answering these questions. Ambient Findability is an unusual journey into the emerging reality that lets us find anyone or anything from anywhere at anytime. As both roadmap and manifesto, this book explains the economic and cultural impact of search and wayfinding technologies at the crossroads of ubiquitous computing and the Internet. Ambient Findability charts a path through the new landscape of marketing and design in a society that’s shifting attention and authority from institutional to individual sources of wisdom and inspiration. Ambient Findability is an amazing boundary spanner with insights that may forever change how you think, where you go, what you find, and who you become.
How do we find our way around the Web, to the information we want? Morville discusses many aspects of this question, from historical wayfinding via Search Engine Optimisation to the Semantic Web, with some interesting philosophy on the way.
More than 15 years have passed since this book was published. Many things have changed (smart phones now encompass many of the novel devices he mentions), but the findability problem has not gone away: it has only got worse. There is now vastly more information to wade through, even vastly more garbage to filter out, and new dangers to avoid, and it’s not going to get better. There are interesting ideas here – and a new word: intertwingle – but a newer edition would be appropriate.