Information Architecture for the World Wide Web
Peter Morville and Louis Rosenfeld
O'Reilly
$39.99

Here's the third edition of this classic handbook, and I still meet people who have not read it. Perhaps they have been put off by the subtitle, Designing Large Scale Web Sites. In fact, it does not matter how big your site, or even intranet, is. The benefits of using this book are beyond number. The changes made to this new edition are not obvious and, indeed, the contents page is almost the same as the previous edition. However the enterprise information architecture (IA) chapter has been rewritten to good effect, and the chapter on search is considerably extended. The chapters on education and tools and software have also been revised based on some surveys undertaken during the writing of the book. The introduction to the book also states that sections on tagging and folksonomies have been added, which have been, but not to the contents page or to the index. The most perplexing omission in the book is that there is no reference to personas. The illustratons have been updated, which is most welcome. They show the advances made in information architecture over the last few years. The style of writing is very conversational, though occasionally this results in some strange sentence constructions and 50-word sentences.

So should you replace your copy with the new edition? At the price asked, you'd be mad not to. This is a book that tries and, by and large, succeeds in encapsulating the knowledge and wisdom of the authors. At the end of a long day's read, I emerged wiser, but also feeling that this edition had been written by two very busy consultants in between a lot of other commitments. But for their commitment to the cause of good practice in IA, we should be very grateful and vote our confidence in their expertise with our credit cards.

Wikis: Tools for Information Work and Collaboration
Jane Klobas
Chandos Publishing
$59.95

This book is dedicated to Anne Clyde, who was one of the pioneers in the study of web applications and of wikis in particular. Clyde died in 2005 before she could write this book, for which she had developed the outline. Jane Klobas and her co-authors have taken Clyde's outline and written the book in her memory. It is a very fitting and worthy memorial to an exceptional person.

The book starts off with an introduction to wikis, and then moves into wikis as information sources and wiki-finding tools. Then come chapters on specific application areas, including library and information science, business, and education. The final set of chapters covers the technology options and the problems of managing wikis.

This is a very practical book, clearly written for people interested in building and using wikis. The authors write from experience and offer pragmatic, practical guidance. This is not a big book—230 pages of text in a large font—but all the essential guidance is here. The authors are based in the U.K., Italy, Iceland, Australia, and Canada, so take into account good practice from around the world, and not (if I may say so) just from the United States. The publishers worked hard to reduce the delay from manuscript to publication, and as a result, the references are pleasingly current. Even if you don't have a wiki now, buy this book, because the way things are going, you will need to look into wikis soon.

Ross Mayfield's Weblog
http://ross.typepad.com
wikiSquared
www.wikisquared.com

Two for the price of one in this issue: These are a couple of the best blogs on wikis. Ross Mayfield is the CEO and co-founder of Socialtext, which has been a leader in commercializing wiki applications in the enterprise. Although his blog tends to push the company, Mayfield is consistently interesting, and because of the scale of the Socialtext business, he is really at the center of a lot of interesting developments. The blog also offers a fascinating list (blog roll) of related and not-so-related sites. As a result, Mayfield's blog is a great starting point on a wiki journey.

Tom Portante comes to wikis through a combination of social anthropology and technology. Cerebral in his blog entries—where Mayfield leans toward the practical—and markedly less regular in posting, wikiSquared offers a valuable source of insights into the role and impact of wikis.