Pete Bell of Endeca turned me onto the fascinating, faceted, folksonomic innovations going on at Buzzillions.

Here's what Pete had to say:

One of our customers just launched a beta of the most interesting integration of folksonomies and faceted navigation that I've seen so far. It balances the rigidity of facets built from a controlled vocabulary with the potential anarchy of raw folksonomies.

Users can iteratively refine their search using any combination of controlled vocabulary terms and user contributed tags. To see where these faceted tags come from, find a product and then select Write a Review. I plan to explore further when I have the chance, but at first glance, it looks very nicely done!

I had a wonderful time at the eighth annual IA Summit. I wish I could be there for the closing plenary and five minute madness, but today is Claire's eighth birthday, so I'm back in Ann Arbor, where it happens to be sunny and warm.

Since this was the first twittery summit, I'll blurt out a few comments twitterstyle:

• Excellent program! Nice balance between classic IA, postmodern IA, and management and entrepreneurship.
• Inspiring keynote by Joshua Prince-Ramus. I wish Jesse got to ask his question about wayfinding problems at the Seattle Central Library.
• The Argus dinner gets better every year. Happy Birthday Mags!
• Enjoyed the web that wasn't. Get ready for Glut!
• Unfortunately missed Core+Paths. All about findable objects.
• Every attendee got a free polar bear t-shirt, thanks to Endeca!!!
• The first ever Rosenfeld Media dinner was a success.
• IA in Second Life was fun. Local and remote panelists were present in Las Vegas and on Info Architecture Island (my female avatar made a surprise appearance), with back-channel twittering throughout.

Of course, the event's still live. For those of us who can't be there today, we can summit vicariously through Twitter and Flickr (iasummit07, iasummit2007, iasummit). And, we can start looking forward to next year's summit in Miami!

Being a late adopter, lone wolf librarian living in the wintry hinterland of the American Midwest, I only discovered twitter after it tipped the tuna.

And, of course, I made fun of it before even trying it. That said, and despite its poor event functionality, I'm looking forward to a very twittery IA Summit.

So, if you're headed to Sin City, even if you don't know me, let's be promiscuous and add each other as friends. But be forewarned that what happens in Vegas, stays on YouTube. See you on Twittervision!

Strange Connections

George Lorenzo has published the first chapter (free PDF) of his new book about communication technology and information literacy.

Roy Lachica wants feedback on fuzzzy, his sociosemantic bookmarking system.

John Hagel says findability leads to fundability.

I just received my shiny new copy of the 2007 Enterprise Search Sourcebook. Looks interesting! (Full Disclosure: I'm in it :-)

Magnus Revang has created a new version of my original honeycomb focused on the process of user experience design.

His version provokes thought about process (which is good), but I find its semi-circular linearity limiting. More importantly, it's not a honeycomb! We could call it the user experience donut where the real value lies in the (w)hole.

Strange Connections

I'm off to Australia, where I plan to visit the honeycombs of Balmoral Beach and teach an IA & Search Workshop in Sydney. Also, Eric Scheid is organizing an informal IA cocktail hour on Friday, starting around 5:30 pm at the Greenwood.

My Dot-Green Future by Bruce Sterling and Hands On (via Bruce's Beyond) are both worth a read.

Digital photos can now enjoy ambient findability (via Dan) and the united states patent office goes 2.0 (via Dan).

Okay, no more links. I'm headed up above.