Tagging: People-powered Metadata for the Social Web Review

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This was a really good book. It wasn't what I expected it to be. But it was a worthwhile read. I picked it up because I do a fair amount of work writing book reviews and making guides and booklists on Amazon. And Amazon now lets guys like me create tags for the books I review and include in guides and lists. I kind of expected this book would have talked a little bit about the Amazon system of tagging. Nope. But that's OK. It's still a good book. It includes seven chapters and three appendices:
1. What is tagging?
2. The value of tagging
3. Tagging system architecture
4. Tags, metadata, and classical systems
5. Navigation and visualization
6. Interfaces
7. Technical design
A. Case study: social bookmarking
B. Case study: media sharing
C. Case study: personal information management
Tagging is a form of information that is really starting to take root in our computer systems and online systems. I first experienced it back in 1998 when I purchased a copy of Lotus Organizer to use as my Personal Information Manager (PIM) when practicing law. The program allowed me to cross-reference the many lists I had created in its database. I thought it was really cool back then.
I was just getting into creating Web sites in 1998, too. And I found the tagging features in Lotus Organizer enabled me to do with the data in my database what I was doing with my Web pages in my Web sites. Basically tagging is another name for hyperlinking. Nothing more and nothing less. A tag will take you to a new idea, concept, data item, data page, or database. It's a springboard that will take you to information.
This book points out that tagging is a new form of information management as it relates to personal organization, information architecture, and online communities. I suppose my Lotus Organizer program is an example of the first, and Amazon's system is an example of the last. So is it really all that new?
All in all, this book explains the value of tagging. It's a guide to what, how and why to tag. Each chapter ended in a list of bullet points called a Summary. I liked this feature very much since it helped me skim through the book quickly. 5 stars!

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Tagging is fast becoming one of the primary ways people organize and manage digital information. Tagging complements traditional organizational tools like folders and search on users desktops as well as on the web. These developments mean that tagging has broad implications for information management, information architecture and interface design. And its reach extends beyond these technical domains to our culture at large. We can imagine, for example, the scrapbookers of the future curating their digital photos, emails, ticket stubs and other mementos with tags. This book explains the value of tagging, explores why people tag, how tagging works and when it can be used to improve the user experience. It exposes tagging's superficial simplicity to reveal interesting issues related to usability, information architecture, online community and collective intelligence.

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Designing Web Navigation: Optimizing the User Experience Review

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The title of this book does tend to focus things, doesn't it? A book totally dedicated to working out navigation challenges in Web products means that it is destined to be a one-stop keeper on your shelf. If you work in any capacity on Web front-ends, navigation is often the issue of issues, the source of stimulating and heated team discussions. This book won't end those discussions but the information in it will certainly add calm perspective to them.
_Designing Web Navigation_ seems to have it all in one place, including practice discussion at the end of each chapter and further reading recommendations. The amount of information is impressive. There is not a page without a visual aid of some sort. I certainly like having lots of screenshots of real sites with the commentary of the author.
I also like the practical knowledge of the author which informs his writing -- he emphasizes the variability of the rules in the complex contexts we Web workers tend to work in. Note, for instance, how differently he approaches Amazon's tabbed navigation from how usability guru Jakob Nielsen writes of them. Nielsen never passes up an opportunity to exclaim what is wrong wrong wrong about Amazon's tabs. Kalbach, instead, explains the motivation behind each passing stage in the evolution of those same tabs, giving the dynamic context. This rings true for those of us with daily working knowledge in constructing user interfaces.
I was a bit disappointed that the book did not have more on the specific problems of designing Web *applications* instead of conventional Web sites. However, the book is written is such a way that this is not a problem. The advice and arguments on p.236 "Don't start by designing the navigation on the home page" encapsulates quite well something I have learned working on agile development teams over the years.
I had a few problems with the readability of this book. Page numbers look like squished gnats and all paragraph sub-headings were a pretty but painful light blue. The extremely large line-height weakened the separation of paragraphs.
As I mentioned, this book is chock full of the right material that belongs on your shelf for when you need it...and you will.
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Thoroughly rewritten for today's web environment, this bestselling book offers a fresh look at a fundamental topic of web site development: navigation design. Amid all the changes to the Web in the past decade, and all the hype about Web 2.0 and various "rich" interactive technologies, the basic problems of creating a good web navigation system remain. Designing Web Navigation demonstrates that good navigation is not about technology-it's about the ways people find information, and how you guide them. Ideal for beginning to intermediate web designers, managers, other non-designers, and web development pros looking for another perspective, Designing Web Navigation offers basic design principles, development techniques and practical advice, with real-world examples and essential concepts seamlessly folded in. How does your web site serve your business objectives? How does it meet a user's needs? You'll learn that navigation design touches most other aspects of web site development. This book:

Provides the foundations of web navigation and offers a framework for navigation design
Paints a broad picture of web navigation and basic human information behavior
Demonstrates how navigation reflects brand and affects site credibility
Helps you understand the problem you're trying to solve before you set out to design
Thoroughly reviews the mechanisms and different types of navigation
Explores "information scent" and "information shape"
Explains "persuasive" architecture and other design concepts
Covers special contexts, such as navigation design for web applications
Includes an entire chapter on tagging
While Designing Web Navigation focuses on creating navigation systems for large, information-rich sites serving a business purpose, the principles and techniques in the book also apply to small sites. Well researched and cited, this book serves as an excellent reference on the topic, as well as a superb teaching guide. Each chapter ends with suggested reading and a set of questions that offer exercises for experiencing the concepts in action.

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