My friends at Q LTD have created Hugs for the Holidays, a delightfully practical guide to holiday hugging etiquette.

Personally, I believe the tips for hug elusion will prove especially helpful during the holiday season. Beware the ambiguous hugger!

Strange Connections

I've joined the advisory board of GeoQwest, an ambitious venture dedicated to ambient findability. First up? Let's talk about that musical web site.

Daniel Torres Burriel has produced a rough Spanish translation of IA 3.0. My friend, Mari-Carmen Marcos, assures me that the first sentence does not translate to "Peter Morville is on crack." I'll have to trust her on that one.

Karen Loasby's 2001 to 2006: Five Years of Information Architecture is good end-of-year reading. Time flies (and so does Santa).

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Anyone who's fought for the user experience will appreciate this excerpt from a New York Times interview with Microsoft's Senior VP for Online Services:

Microsoft lost its way, Mr. Berkowitz says, because it became too enamored with software wizardry, like its new three-dimensional map service, and failed to make a search engine people liked to use.

"A lot of decisions were driven by technology; they were not driven by the consumer," he said. "It isn't always the best technology that wins. It is the best experience."

Mr. Berkowitz compared his move from Ask Jeeves to Microsoft as stepping from a rowboat onto a cruise ship. I wonder if he's been watching reruns of Titantic.

Strange Connections

This interview with Chris Farnum is excellent (and fun in a Car Talk sorta way).

In geospatial news, GeoTec and Where 2.0 are seeking speakers.

Andy King has a nice article on the interaction of delay, breadth, and familiarity.