In-House Counsel

Information architecture ? ?the art and science of organizing electronic information?

By Rees Morrison

The term ?information architecture? appears in David Weinberger, Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder (Henry Holt 2007) at 47. Weinberger defines it as ?the art and science of organizing electronic information.?

On this blog, the information architecture includes (1) categories, (2) cross-references to previous posts, and (3) metaposts that gather all earlier posts on a topic (See my posts of Jan. 13, 2008: topical categories that interest readers; Jan. 18, 2008 #2: more than 3,500 references; and Jan. 3, 2008: four collections of metaposts.). Separately, I keep an index of all proper nouns and sources as well as a sorted table of contents based on the headers. What I have not done is explored tags on my posts.

Orders of information exist. First-order information is the blog postings themselves; second-order information here are the three information architectures described above ? each of them aggregates the fundamental information at a higher level. Third-order information has less information architecture than lower orders of information (See my post of Jan. 4, 2008 on orders of information.) but people can get to the information more easily. On this blog, the search capability represents third-order information.

Full post as published by Law Department Management on February 24, 2008 (boomark / email).