[Sigia-l] Information-centered Design (was I Want My GUT of Information Arc hitecture!)

[fabrizio ulisse]

> How is this different? Let's take an example. Today, we
> build, for example, furniture sites for companies building or 
> selling furniture; separate sites for each brand, on and on 
> they go, too many to list here. We build them for businesses 
> that have one thing in mind - to make money; big surprise. 
> Businesses control this information; our current job is to 
> make it easy for furniture buyers to find what they are 
> looking for (User-centered design may only exist to make 
> content easy to find on *my* site), and that activity makes 
> us all proud. However, there are many others sites on related topics
> like: building furniture yourself, reviews of furniture, 
> styles of furniture, etc, but this information is controlled 
> and developed by others, again thinking of only their own 
> business goals, and, thus, disconnected from the rest of 
> furniture sites. 

[CUT]

> In the future, there will not be these independent brand
> sites. There will be *one furniture site* where all the 
> brands will post their products. Why? Because we consumers 
> will go there for all the other relevant information, 
> including reviews, photos, stories, etc. etc. 

This second snippet doesn't sound nice with the rest of your thoughts.
IM(HHH)O this hyerarchi-mall model is completely outdated. The "nodes"
of informations you were talking about in the first snippet implies
something different and more feasable: maybe the concept itself of "web
site" will fall, and "meta data browsing" (or "semantic navigation" as
yo may call it) will cancel the idea of web site as a "unit within
borders". And this is the main reason why we all are dealing with
connected vocabularies, faceted classification, dublin core metadata and
stuff.n And thee reason why, to me, you're perfectly right in all your
<crazy radical soapbox speech>.

My two cents, for that is worth 

- fabrizio