Book Description: How do you find your way in an age of information overload? How can you filter streams of complex information to pull out only what you want? Why does it matter how information is structured when Google seems to magically bring up the right answer to your questions? What does it mean to be "findable" in this day and age? This eye-opening new book examines the convergence of information and connectivity. Written by Peter Morville, author of the groundbreaking Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, the book defines our current age as a state of unlimited findability. In other words, anyone can find anything at any time. Complete navigability.

Morville discusses the Internet, GIS, and other network technologies that are coming together to make unlimited findability possible. He explores how the melding of these innovations impacts society, since Web access is now a standard requirement for successful people and businesses. But before he does that, Morville looks back at the history of wayfinding and human evolution, suggesting that our fear of being lost has driven us to create maps, charts, and now, the mobile Internet.

The book's central thesis is that information literacy, information architecture, and usability are all critical components of this new world order. Hand in hand with that is the contention that only by planning and designing the best possible software, devices, and Internet, will we be able to maintain this connectivity in the future. Morville's book is highlighted with full color illustrations and rich examples that bring his prose to life.

Ambient Findability doesn't preach or pretend to know all the answers. Instead, it presents research, stories, and examples in support of its novel ideas. Are we truly at a critical point in our evolution where the quality of our digital networks will dictate how we behave as a species? Is findability indeed the primary key to a successful global marketplace in the 21st century and beyond. Peter Morville takes you on a thought-provoking tour of these memes and more -- ideas that will not only fascinate but will stir your creativity in practical ways that you can apply to your work immediately.

Abstract: This book explores the human potential to pool widely dispersed information, and to use that knowledge to improve both our institutions and our lives. Various methods for aggregating information are explored and compared, including surveys, deliberation, markets (including prediction markets), blogs, open source software, and wikis. The success of surveys, in establishing what is true, can be explained by reference to the Condorcet Jury Theorem; but when most people are less than 50% likely to be right, the failures of surveys, in establishing what is true, can be explained in the same way. Deliberation is often celebrated as likely to counteract the problems in surveys. But deliberation itself creates serious risks, including amplification of errors, cascades, and group polarization. These risks produce blunders in many domains, including legislative institutions and the blogosphere; hence it is too simple to celebrate the Internet or the blogosphere by reference to Hayekian arguments about the dispersed nature of information in society. By contrast, markets, including prediction markets, often do remarkably well, for reasons sketched by Hayek in his examination of the price mechanism. Because of their ability to aggregate privately held information, prediction markets substantial advantages over group deliberation. Open source software and wikis have their own dynamic and create their own puzzles. Steps are explored by which deliberating groups obtain the information held by their members. These points bear on discussion of normative issues, in which deliberation might also fail to improve group thinking.