The CX Blog

The other day, I read a review of David Weinberger “Everything is Miscellaneous” at Morville’s Semantic Studio–very interesting discussion of old style taxonomies, folksonomies and ontologies where Morville holds the line that organization still counts, while Weinberger is eager to see the power of findability in a Web 2.0 world given to the user exclusively. Weinberger suggests Librarians may be a threatened species.

I’ve heard and read some talk about the end of librarians and even libraries, to which Weinberger adds his support. I lean more towards Morville’s notion that there will be a middle ground–the role of librarians as knowledge “enablers” or facilitators, that libraries will serve communities, and that information will be available to everyone to manage and find through linked means.

onward….

I was in a workshop yesterday where a business research director described the problem with the data reports they’ve been sending out: “The web has taught us all to think differently and we expect to be able to drill down and find information in increasing depth.”

I found the idea that “the web has taught us” pretty interesting…and true. Nowdays, we expect to see information in a linked manner, with depth and connection. In this instance, the director imagined a data report that visually represented a 7 day week of information in space and time so that the user could see “activity” and click through to trended and highlighted events.

We are now accustomed to accessing information in this way. Imagine the groups that will hit the workforce in 5 years.