Customer Reviews

Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become

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1 star:		(2)

 

 

Ambient Findability can be summed up as follows: There is a lot of information on the web so it's hard to find what you want, it's going to get worse, and the author claims to know what to do about it but won't tell you.

The book starts out with great promise. I believed it would contain insights, sage advice, and practical details about how to make my web pages findable to my audience. The first couple of chapters were great introductory material, and they whetted my appetite for the meaty material that was sure to follow.

Then, there was some more introductory material, and I began to notice that the author threw a lot of quotes around but didn't explore them very deeply, and threw in illustrations of things mentioned in passing in the book that really didn't illuminate anything. For example, he mentioned the Tower of Babel, and then presented an illustration of a Bruegel painting of it, which illustrated... not much. After a dozen of these you wonder if they were just trying to make the book look bigger.

Around page 100 or so, I wondered if the author would ever stop glossing over introductory material, and actually get to the meat of the book. Unfortunately this never happened as far as I was concerned, and so my frustration. Ambient Findability never delivered any practical tips or any insightful theories that could help an aspiring web designer.

One thing you can say for the author, he has read a lot of great books, and Ambient Findability contains references to many great classics worth reading, including Blink, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, the Cluetrain Manifesto, and Don't Make Me Think. I wish the author had chosen to emulate those books and had worked to develop and present some insights of his own, rather than just drop quotes from other sources. As it is, this book is good for gathering a few references to other better literature, and not much else.

My everyday work involves search engines, both using them for research and developing the technology. I was deeply impressed by the lengthy and highly enthusiastic reviews posted here. One day, I wandered into a bookstore and saw the book. I bought it without even opening it. I have to say that given the high expectation, I was quite disappointed by the book.

I read the book in detail for most parts of it and skimmed through the rest of it. The book I like most is that it is not just about Google, blog search, myspace, etc. It attempted to give a broad analysis of the topic, mostly from non-technical viewpoints, drawing literatures from very diversified sources, AI, social science, politics, history, etc. I learned terms like folksonomies, boundary objects and a lot of stories and quotes that I can use to make my next presentation on the same subject more interesting. This is what I gained from the book.

The main weakness of the book is twofold. First, the book does not help you understand more about the problem of findability and where the future might be, let alone giving you a hint on the solution; it repeats what most people have already known and re-asserted it with more discussions and examples. Second, the writing adopted a style commonly found in online articles and blogs. Beautiful but confusing statements. The style is good for online writing where creating controversies and arguments is an important goal of writing, but I won't expect it from a book. For example, on Page 38, the author said "... visualization approaches fail because there's no there there." It is not only hard to understand, but once you do you find it not true. The purpose of information visualization is not to represent pages in 3D space with edges representing the distances between pages (see what the author quoted in the same paragraph) but one of the important goals, and obstacles, is to extract the themes of the pages and connect the themes based on their semantic relationships. A careful look at Fig 2-14, a screendump from Grokker, would reveal that what were shown on the screen were topics, not pages. On Page 143, when talking about a client's website become unsearchable because texts on the pages were rendered as images, the author said "one the web, the journey often begins with the destination." Beautiful, but the truthfulness of the statement depends on which end of the pipe you are looking into. There are too many examples like these that don't stand deep logical reasoning. A full elaboration will make this review too long.

After reading the book, I felt like I have read a long blog from the author. Like reading any blog written by great minds, you often find shining ideas here and there, but you have to endure the style of writing and imprecisions, and organize the thoughts yourself. This is what the author advocated anyway (Chapter 7 Inspired Decisions).

Morville's work is the most appropriate follow-on to the usability concepts so well promoted by Steven Krug in his Don't Make Me Think and Jakob Nielsen in Designing Web Usability. "Findability," Morville argues, is a necessary component in the success and propagation of an idea or detail or fact. Business and non-profits alike will benefit from understanding the value of findability.

Obviously, findability serves more than just internet marketers and hucksters. Morville offers an example of a nonprofit medical research agency and how the findability -- in this case, the search engine ranking of their web content -- affected people's ability to get authoritative, quality information on the web.

"[T]he [web development] team", Morville writes, "had to look beyond the narrow goals of web site design, to see their role in advancing the broader mission of disseminating [...] information to people in need."

Morville could have asked "if a remarkable idea springs up in the forest, but it doesn't show up in the first page of Google search results, is it really all that remarkable?" But findability is more than that, and there's a lot more to the book. Morville discusses findability in depth, considering both its current and possible future implications. Eventually, of course, findability will butt up against our notions of privacy, and Morville explores that as well.

Though the book will serve information architects, software designers building anything related to web content management, web designers, marketers, and PR flacks well, its real gift is to the teachers, researchers, librarians, and public servants who handle so much valuable data that must (or, in some cases, must not) be findable.

I am deeply disappointed with O"Reilly. It is with them that I place the most blame for the personal misfortune I have suffered from paying $29.95 for this book. Their line of books has been consistently timely and exhaustive of the major technology topics of the day. When I discovered this title in their catalog, I was excited by the possibility of finding a solid work on some of the emerging ontological challenges and characteristics of the modern Web. But that is not what this text is, and for the reasons listed below, I don't believe they should ever have allowed this book to be published.

My chief complaint is Morville's inability to do more than leap around a subject, quoting other sources aggressively but shedding no original light of his own. This is combined with the unfortunate editorial choice of using the same symbols for both footnotes and bibliographic entries. It seemed that he did a poor job of citing all his sources; if he cited them as often as required, the pages would bristle with numbers, because the text is such a hodgepodge of other people's words and ideas.

The entire book reads like the first few pages of a scope document, or a sales pitch, wild with glib, facile, sophomoric rhetoric, lacking any substance, intended to excite and to provoke, but providing nothing to back up the emotional language. And some of it is downright incomprehensible: "Our future will be at least as messy as our present. But we will muddle through as usual, satisficing under conditions of bounded rationality. And if we are lucky, and if we make good decisions about how to intertwingle our lives with technology, perhaps we too can reclaim a fragment of asylum." (p.97)

When the work is original, it often disintegrates into a series of terse and mostly unhelpful definition lists.
I kept asking myself: where is the value add? The text is profusely illustrated in a high-color format unusual for an O'Reilly book, but the images consist of low-resolution screen grabs which are largely unnecessary for an understanding of the material under discussion. This whiff of "shovelware" is unsurprising, given Morville's research methodology: "For most of my research, I found what I needed from where I sit, via the free Web, online databases, and my personal bookshelf." (p.172)

The only concrete recommendations concerning increasing findability that I could glean are to stay away from bitmapped (i.e. graphic, not live) text in websites and replace "pushy" marketing messages with more verbose link descriptions. Perhaps the text would have been more focused if the author was able to define his professional identity more clearly. In each chapter he seemed to wear a different hat: designer, librarian, information architect, findability engineer. For him, "words are messy little critters" (p.15) but for the money I paid for this book and the time I invested in reading it, I would have hoped for an author with a little more control over the English language.

In a positive light, there are a few interesting anecdotes, mostly personal, and an explanation of the term "folksonomy" and the popularity and power of sites like Flicker and Delicious that those unfamiliar with the rise of user-contributed keywords as means of organizing large amounts of dynamic information will find helpful. And he makes the excellent point that web developers should pay attention to how their site is being found, and that viewing the discipline of search engine optimization as somehow sleazy or secondary is an excuse to ignore questions of context and to shirk one's responsibility to the user.

But as a whole, I cannot recommend this book, and am in fact going out of my way to warn other people about its content. Morville is a bright guy and he certainly has his mind in some interesting places. But I would have been better off reading his website. The material in "Ambient Findability" has all the buzzword-dense charm of the web but it exhibits its often frustrating lack of deep scholarship and originality. I hope O'Reilly exercises more caution in its selections for future titles of a more general nature.

Like most O'Reilly books, the credentials of the author are impeccable, and the concept is current and relavant.
However, like most techincal publishing houses, O'Reilly does not have enough editors fluent in enough technical areas of expertise to impose order on its authors. The result is that they produce excellent texts for those already familiar with the subject, and dreadful experiences for those hoping for something other than a "Dummies" book.
"Ambient Findability" is no different. The subject is broad, the concepts are deep, and the order is completely lacking. O'Reilly seemed to have exercised no editorial restraint in the publishing of this book - it is andectoal, rambling and repetitive in parts, and generally jumps around (much like the subject of the book), without any common touch points.

The main point of the book is that information is grouped in structured and not so structured ways on the web, and being able to "find" information is predicated on how it is percieved by other parts of the web. This already is a vast ocean of space to cover. 180 pages with a lot of graphics is bound to be light, but add on rambling discourse, and you can only swallow 20-30 pages at a time, before bed.
I really believe the author is a great mind on this subject. He could do much better w/ a well disciplined editor.

This book is a very thought-provoking read about what should be a major theme in information retrieval and in interface design -you cannot use what you cannot find.
There are plenty of books that will teach you information retrieval algorithms, and plenty of books that will teach you about human-computer interfacing and interaction, but none of them seem to be looking at the big picture. Moreville discusses the "anatomy of the large tail". This is the fact that there are millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bit stream. For example, Barnes & Noble carries 130000 titles. However, half of Amazon's book sales come from titles outside its top 130000 sellers. The implication is that the market for the number of books that are not even sold in the average bookstore is larger than those that are. This book is filled with valuable insights and statistics such as this. I notice that Amazon shows no table of contents for the book, so I do that here:
Chapter 1 "Lost and Found" is an introduction to the importance of being able to find information and an idea of the lost productivity and business revenue caused by a lack of findability.
Chapter 2 "A Brief History of Wayfinding" - Through history, humans have learned to navigate environments of increasing complexity, creating wayfinding tools and vocabularies , all of which are ultimately adapted to more complex environments as they are invented until today we struggle to port these spatial metaphors to the web, where distance is poorly defined and "there is no there".
Chapter 3 "Information Interaction" - Since Moore's Law implies that technology accelerates exponentially, it follows that we will be increasingly overwhelmed with information. Conversely, the paradigm of Human Information Interaction embraces social and psychological dimensions of information seeking behaviour. Using this paradigm, innovators such as Google have improved information retrieval by tapping into the fact that humans are drawn to gossip and the power of popularity.
Chapter 4 "Intertwingled" - Findability is becoming more urgent as our environment becomes more complex, with information about the real world being imported into cyberspace. Accordingly, we strive to make good decisions on how to intermingle our lives with technology in order to make information manageable, viewing it with novel interfaces (orbs, digital paper, etc).
Chapter 5 "Push and Pull" - Ideally, we want to increase our signal-to-noise ratio to pull people, places, products and ideas into our attention, while reducing the push of unwanted messages and experiences.
Chapter 6 "The Sociosemantic Web" - The Semantic Web promises an era where search and navigation systems (i.e. agents) bring us the information we need. The author makes a case for a "sociosemantic web" that relies on the pace-layering of ontologies, taxonomies, and folksonomies to learn and adapt as well as teach and remember.
Chapter 7 "Inspired Decisions" - The author discusses artificial intelligence concepts, irrational human behavior, and information overload. He discusses graffiti theory, which suggests that we are unconsciously shaped by the information we digest, and this produces feedback into the information we seek.
The author has done a good job of weaving together his own theories with the theories of others into a well-written cohesive read on the subject of information organization and retrieval. There is a great deal of science in this book, but he makes it very accessible. I therefore highly recommend this book for anyone who is interested in information retrieval, artificial intelligence, or user interface design, or just the general reader who would like to know what trends might be ahead in the field of data design and findability. It would also be useful to those who are interested in business and entrepreneurship who wish to find new ways for their potential customers to find them. However, if all of the author's theories are correct, ambient findability will only be ultimately achieved if it is implemented on a global basis, due to the fact that achieving findability requires a social effort as well as an individual one.

The back cover description of Ambient Findability begins with the following paragraph:

How do people find their way through an age of information overload? How can people combine streams of complex information to filter out only the parts they want? Why does it matter how information is structured when Google seems to magically bring up the right answer to people's questions?

If you expect these questions to be answered or even addressed at a reasonable level of detail then you will be disappointed. Ambient Findability is more like a collection of essays related to findability than a book about how to improve the design and implementation of products, information, web sites, etc., to make them easier to find. Because of some repetition across chapters and many figures that are unnecessary the book could be shorter than its short 179 pages.

The first chapter, Lost and Found, discusses how information is being used in new and interesting ways, presents a definition of findability, and a brief case study of work the author did on the National Cancer Institute web site. Chapter two presents how people have determined their location and how to get to where they want to go through history. Chapter Three, Information Interaction, reviews the difficulties of classifying and finding information and discusses Mooers (not a typo) Law which states that people will avoid obtaining information that is painful or troublesome to them. The fourth chapter deals with how products are incorporating information and findability. Chapters Five and Six, Push and Pull and The Sociosemantic Web, respectively, deal with issues that you might find in an information architecture book. The last chapter, Inspired Decisions, discusses the irrationality behind our so-called "rational" decisions, how information overload makes the situation worse, and the author's theory that all the information that flows through our senses shapes how we think and act.

The book does have a great number of references to interesting research and trends in the areas of information architecture, cognitive science, usability, and related areas. In fact, the number of references is the book's main strength as there were a number of interesting papers and research efforts mentioned of which I was unaware. However, the numerous references could also be considered a weakness since it appears that Morville does much more citing than explaining.

O'Reilly categorized Ambient Findability as a Marketing/Technology & Society book. The Technology & Society part strikes me as correct but I am not so sure about Marketing. If you are looking for markers or pointers to how information may be used in the future then this is an interesting book to read. If you are looking for concrete suggestions or discussions of how to improve findability in the here and now then this book is lacking.

Full disclosure: I received a complimentary copy of the book for review.

Have you ever stopped to think about how "information" and the ability to find it has changed our lives? Ambient Findability by Peter Morville takes you down a thought-provoking path as to what it all means...

Contents: Lost and Found; A Brief History of Wayfinding; Information Interaction; Intertwingled; Push and Pull; The Sociosemantic Web; Inspired Decisions; Index

First off, this isn't a book along the lines of "follow these steps to increase your search engine ranking". In fact, if you're just looking for some quick hit suggestions on how to make your site easier to find, don't buy the book. It'd be a waste of your time. But if you're ready to really think about what "searching" means, read on. Morville examines how a number of trends have converged to make it possible to find out just about anything regardless of where you are and when you're looking for it. Wi-fi has made it possible to have search engine access outside the home or office. Google's massive indexing ability has allowed us to find things that would never be found otherwise. GPS, cell phones, and other technical marvels have made us locate-able regardless of where we (or the searcher) are. All this "ambient findability" changes who we are both as individuals and as a part of society. And with the continuing advance of smaller chips, more bandwidth, and integration of RFID into everyday products, this convergence of information exchange and interaction only promises to get deeper and more pervasive. As stated in the book... The future is already here, but it's just not evenly distributed yet...

I'm a little surprised I liked this book as much as I did. As I've stated in the past, I tend to avoid philosophical musings and gravitate towards practical "how do I" titles. But this one snared me. It's well written to begin with, and I think the subject matter was one that I was already interested in. It's the type of book that you should read slowly and think about as you go. When you understand how we've arrived at our current destination, it tends to make you have a greater appreciation for things we (or at least I) have taken for granted.

If you're ready for something that will make you think and ponder, Ambient Findability should make an appearance on your "need to read" list...

I bought "Ambient Findability" looking for (1) insights into how people search for and find desired information and (2) tips on how to make web-based information easier for people to find. It turns other that the book doesn't focus much on either of these issues.

The title, "Ambient Findability," is somewhat misleading. The book is a lot like listening to a thought leader (which Morville is) holding court on a variety of topics tangentially related to findability. You get a broad-ranging set of Morville's musings, many of them interesting, that fall all over the map. I would have appreciated knowing that before I bought the book. Unfortunately for me, there wasn't a lot of meaningful advice on making information more readily findable. I noted a few good references, but that was about it.

Wow, wow, holy cow....I am rushing to finish up a book on Information Operations: All Information, All Languages, All the Time, and I am so very pleased to have gotten to this absolute gem of a book before closing out. Compared to the other 200 or so books I have reviewed--including such gems at ATTENTION, Real-Time, Early Warning, and so on, this is clearly a "top ten" read in the literature on information art & science.

Halfway through the book I was torn by a sense of anguish (the U.S. Intelligence Community and the beltway bandits that suck money out of the taxpayers pocket through them have no idea how to implement the ideas in this book) and joy (beyond Google, through Wikis and other collective intelligence endeavors facilitated by open source software, relevant findability is possible).

This is a truly gripping book that addresses what may be the most important challenge of this century in a compelling, easy to read, yet intellectually deep and elegant manner.

The author is a true guru who understands that in the age of a mega-information-explosion (not just in quantity, but in languages, mediums, and nuances) the creation of wealth is going to depend on information being useful, usable, desireable, findable, accessible, credible, and valuable (page 109).

Especially important in the first half of the book are the author's focus on Mooers (not to be confused with Moores) who said in 1959 that users will make do with what information they have when it becomes too inconvenient to go after better information. This is key. At the same time, he focuses on the difference between precision and recall, and provides devasting documentation of the failure of recall (1 in 5 at best) when systems scale up, as well as the diminuition of precision. Bottom line: all these beltway bandits planning exobyte and petabyte databases have absolutely no idea how to actually help the end-user find the needle in the haystack. This author does.

The book is without question "Ref A" for the content side of Information Operations. On page 61 I am just ripped out of my chair and on to my feet by the author's discussion of Marcia Bates and her focus on an integrated model of information seeking that integrates aesthetic, biological, historical, psychological, social, and "even" spiritual layers of understanding. This is bleeding edge good stuff, with nuances that secret intelligence world is not going to understand for years.

There is a solid discussion of geocoding and locationally aware devices, and I am very pleased to see the author recognize the work of four of my personal heroes, Stewart Brand, Bruce Sterling, Kevin Kelly, and Howard Rheingold.

Halfway through the book he discusses the capture of life experiences, and the real possibility that beyond today's information explosion might lie an exo-explosion of digital data coming from wired individuals feeding what they see and hear and feel into "the web". The opportunities for psycho-social diagnosis and remediation, and cross-cultural communication, are just astounding.

The book wraps up with a great review of findability hacks, semantic tricks, and the trends to come in inspired and informed decisions. Like Tom Atlee, the author sees the day of collective intelligence enabled by the web, but I have to say, I thought I knew a lot, after reading this book I have the strongest feeling that my education has just begun.

This is one of those books that could help define an era. It is about as thoughtful, useful, and inspiring a book as I have read in the past several years. DECENT!