The lemur found its way into Bruce Sterling's New Scientist story:

And Shakespeare. I used to hate Shakespeare, because the teachers would park us in front of the webcam terminals, turn on the Shakespeare lessons and leave the building. But then, somehow, they showed us Macbeth, a play which actually MEANS something to us. Grown-ups don't understand that (or they wouldn't be teaching it) but Macbeth is the true authentic story of my generation. This is Macbeth's world, and us teenagers just live in it. Dig this: those "Three Weird Sisters", who mysteriously know everything? They can foretell anything, instantly, like Google? Plus, the witches make it all sound really great - only, in real life, it totally sucks? Well, those "Three Weird Sisters" are the "Internet of Things", they're "Ubiquitous Computation", they're "Ambient Findability". The truth is written all over the page (or the screen - my school can't afford to give us any "pages"). Just read that awesome part where they're boiling pseudocode in their witch-cauldron! They talk like web designers!

Strange Connections

Going Beyond Google. As I long time fan of Endeca, I enjoyed this Fortune article about their success and future plans.

On the Road. I'm headed to Louisville for the Kentucky Library Association's annual conference, and then off to Berlin for Euro IA. I'm looking forward to seeing some old friends at the reception on Friday evening.

Leaving Microsoft to Change the World tells the interesting and inspiring story behind John Wood's mission to bring books, libraries, schools, computers, and educational scholarships to the children of Nepal, Cambodia, India, Laos, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, and South Africa.

It's a wonderful story, and Room to Read, the nonprofit organization he founded to promote literacy and education in the developing world, appears to be having a real impact.

For the third edition of the polar bear book (almost done!), Lou Rosenfeld and I conducted five surveys of the IA community. All of the results are now available via the IA Institute web site, and cover the following topics:

• Survey 1: IA Trends
• Survey 2: Suggestions for the Third Edition
• Survey 3: Software for IA
• Survey 4: IA Education (educators' perspective)
• Survey 5: IA Education (practitioners' perspective)

Many thanks to the hundreds of you who participated, to Beth Koloski, our wonderful research assistant who did all the dirty work and assembled the results, and Noreen Whysel of the IAI, who kindly published them on the site.

Information architects, interaction designers, and anyone who labors over wireframes and sitemaps should read Communicating Design by Dan Brown.

His new book covers personas, usability reports, concept models, content inventories, sitemaps, flow charts, wireframes, and screen designs. For more, check out the book site or one of Dan's many articles. Nobody brings web design deliverables to life like Dan Brown!

Timo just posted Ambient Findability in Practice which features the Loc8tor, a nifty gadget for keeping found things found.

And, if you lose the handheld, your panic tag will locate the Loc8tor. They've thought of everything. Anyone know of similar products available in the U.S.?