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Usually ships in 1 business days | | | | | | 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. Morville's book is highlighted with full color illustrations and rich examples that bring his prose to life. Ambient Findability doesn't preach or pretend to know all the answers. Instead, it presents research, stories, and examples in support of its novel ideas. Are we truly at a critical point in our evolution where the quality of our digital networks will dictate how we behave as a species? Is findability indeed the primary key to a successful global marketplace in the 21st century and beyond. Peter Morville takes you on a thought-provoking tour of these memes and more -- ideas that will not only fascinate but will stir your creativity in practical ways that you can apply to your work immediately. ""A lively, enjoyable and informative tour of a topic that's only going to become more important.""
--David Weinberger, Author, "Small Pieces Loosely Joined" and "The Cluetrain Manifesto" ""I envy the young scholar who finds this inventive book, by whatever strange means are necessary. The future isn't just unwritten--it's unsearched.""
--Bruce Sterling, Writer, Futurist, and Co-Founder, The Electronic Frontier Foundation ""Search engine marketing is the hottest thing in Internet business, and deservedly so. Ambient Findability puts SEM into a broader context and provides deeper insights into human behavior. This book will help you grow your online business in a world where being found is not at all certain.""
--Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D., Author, "Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity" ""Information that's hard to find will remain information that's hardly found--from one of the fathers of the discipline of information architecture, and one of its most experienced practitioners, come penetrating observations on why findability is elusive and how the act of seeking changes us.""
--Steve Papa, Founder and Chairman, Endeca ""Whether it's a fact or a figure, a person or a place, Peter Morville knows how to make it findable. Morville explores the possibilities of a world where everything can always be found--and the challenges in getting there--in this wide-ranging, thought-provoking book.""
--Jesse James Garrett, Author, "The Elements of User Experience" ""It is easy to assume that current searching of the World Wide Web is the last word in finding and using information. Peter Morville shows us that search engines are just the beginning. Skillfully weaving together information science research with his own extensive experience, he develops for the reader a feeling for the near future when information is truly findable all around us. There are immense implications, and Morville's lively and humorous writing brings them home.""
--Marcia J. Bates, Ph.D., University of California Los Angeles ""I've always known that Peter Morville was smart. After reading Ambient Findability, I now know he's (as we say in Boston) wicked smart. This is a timely book that will have lasting effects on how we create our future."
--Jared Spool, Founding Principal, User Interface Engineering ""In Ambient Findability, Peter Morville has put his mind and keyboard on the pulse of the electronic noosphere. With tangible examples and lively writing, he lays out the challenges and wonders of finding our way in cyberspace, and explains the mutually dependent evolution of our changing world and selves. This is a must read for everyone and a practical guide for designers.""
--Gary Marchionini, Ph.D., University of North Carolina ""Find this book! Anyone interested in makinginformation easier to find, or understanding how finding and being found is changing, will find this thoroughly researched, engagingly written, literate, insightful and very, very cool book well worth their time. Myriad examples from rich and varied domains and a valuable idea on nearly every page. Fun to read, too!"
--Joseph Janes, Ph.D., Founder, Internet Public Library | | | |
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| | Product Details | | Author: | Peter Morville | | Paperback: | 208 pages | | Publisher: | O'Reilly Media | | Publication Date: | October 03, 2005 | | Language: | English | | ISBN: | 0596007655 | | Product Length: | 9.0 inches | | Product Width: | 6.06 inches | | Product Height: | 0.47 inches | | Product Weight: | 0.88 pounds | | Package Length: | 8.7 inches | | Package Width: | 6.0 inches | | Package Height: | 0.5 inches | | Package Weight: | 0.8 pounds | | Average Customer Rating: |  based on 51 reviews |
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| | Customer Reviews | Average Customer Review: ( 51 customer reviews )
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92 of 98 found the following review helpful:
 Frustrating - a few good references, but no good insights Jan 19, 2006
By John H. Kaplan
"johnkaplantech"
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.
32 of 34 found the following review helpful:
 Great topics but written like a long blog Jan 08, 2007
By Pat
"the kid"
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).
15 of 16 found the following review helpful:
 What You Can't Find, You'll Never Know. Read This Book. Oct 03, 2005
By Casey Bisson
"maisonbisson.com"
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.
11 of 11 found the following review helpful:
Another Rambling Book from O'Reilly Jun 17, 2007
By Kalenjin
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.
41 of 50 found the following review helpful:
 Infuriatingly Fluffy Dec 26, 2005
By Jennifer L. Stock
"http://www.kdpublish.com"
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.
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