Rusty Foster, popular benevolent dictator of the community-edited superblog Kuro5hin, has written this article on Information Architecture for the Online Journalism Review. IA pioneer Richard Saul Wurman defines an Information Architect as "the individual who organizes the patterns in data, making the complex clear." Rusty touches on the short history of IA, discusses some of the current principal players in the field (including the nascent Asilomar Institute for study of the subject and Andrew Hinton's 25 theses), and wraps the whole thing up with an interview with Chris Mandra, executive producer of the recently revamped NPR Online. All in all an interesting if breezy introduction to the subject.
Counter-intuitively, order can sometimes spring from chaos. Consider the roll of blogging as a decentralised, organic solution to one level of Internet content-sorting, as discussed in this essay from Rebecca's Pocket:
"By highlighting articles that may easily be passed over by the typical web user too busy to do more than scan corporate news sites, by searching out articles from lesser-known sources, and by providing additional facts, alternative views, and thoughtful commentary, weblog editors participate in the dissemination and interpretation of the news that is fed to us every day."
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