Here’s an excellent article written up at the ASIS&T Bulletin, by some talented and thoughtful folks in Europe (namely Andrea Resmini, Katriina Byström and Dorte Madsen). I’ll quote the end of the piece at length.
IA Growing Roots – Concerning the Journal of IA

Even if someone’s ideas about information architecture are mind-boggling, if they do not [...]

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Motivation
Months ago, I posted the first part of something I’d been presenting on for over a year: a simple way of thinking about social design choices. I called it the “Cultivation Equation for Social Design.” I should’ve known better, but I said at the end of that post that I’d be posting the rest soon [...]

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In the closing talk for this year’s IA Summit, I had a slide that explains the various layers that make up what we use the term “Information Architect” (or “Information Architecture”) to denote. I think it’s important to be self-aware about it, because it helps us avoid a lot of wasted breath and miscommunication.
But [...]

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In the “Linkosophy” talk I gave on Monday, I suggested that a helpful distinction between the practices of IxD & IA might be that IxD’s central concern is within a given context (a screen, device, room, etc) while IA’s central concern is how to connect contexts, and even which contexts are necessary to begin with [...]

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NOTE: You need to view this in “Full Screen” mode, which you can do by clicking the little projector-screen icon on the bottom-right of the viewer. Otherwise, the narrative text isn’t readable. (Or download the 6 MB PDF version.)

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(Thanks to David Fiorito for compressing it down from its formerly [...]

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Some very nice and well-meaning people have asked me to speak as the closing plenary at the IASummit conference this year, in Miami.
This is, as anyone who has been asked to do such a thing will tell you, a mixed blessing.
But I’m slogging through my insanely huge bucket of random thoughts from the [...]

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There are some insightful comments on how moderation architectures affect the emergent character of social platforms in Chris Wilson’s article on Slate:
Digg, Wikipedia, and the myth of Web 2.0 democracy.
He explains how the rules structures of Wikipedia and Digg have resulted (ironically) in highly centralized power structures and territorialism. A quote:
While both sites effectively [...]

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So, my article is up… thanks to all the excellent editors who pushed me to finish the dang thing over the last seven months. Procrastination is a fine art, my friends.
Personas and the Role of Design Documentation – Boxes and Arrows
Here’s a nugget:
A persona document can be very useful for design—and for some [...]

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Note: This is something I had embedded in a few very long presentations from last year, and I’m realizing it would probably be useful (to me if nobody else) to elaborate on it as its own topic. Here’s the first part.

There’s a lot of writing and thinking happening around the best approaches to designing [...]

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There’s been a lot of talk over the last couple of years about a collective Eureka moment where we’ve all come to realize that the Internet, the Web, and designing User Experiences for those platforms, is “really about People … not products and information.”
I think it’s great that more folks are coming to this [...]

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Kevin Kelly’s article Bottom Up is Not Enough is making the rounds, and rightly so. Here’s a snippet:
Here’s how I sum it up: The bottom-up hive mind will always take us much further than even seems possible. It keeps surprising us in this regard. Given enough time, dumb things can be smarter than [...]

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I haven’t written here in many weeks, but it’s not because I’m not writing.
Lately, though, my thoughts have been too fractured to coalesce into anything that felt like a real blog post. I’m now realizing, however, that they never will unless I unclog the cognitive drain, as it were.
So, this post, in a [...]

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