DITA Session 10

I love information architecture - I once dated an information architect and I thought he was the coolest thing ever - he must have been one of the first ones because I think this was 1998 or 1999 - we went to Paris together.

So a website is liek a building, or liek a grocery store for example liek in lecture today - this is very Godard-esque as now many peopel actually grocery shop online!!  Who woudl have thought!

I finally identified the mystery vegetable - after first tryign to type  in descriptors of my own ('vegetable, large white bulb, mutiple green stems'). Nio luck, kept throwing up pics of spring onions.  So I Decided to look for vegetable pics - no luck, kept throwing back pics of veggie cornupcopias.  Then I just did it the old fashioned way and typed 'vegetable descriptions'.  Returned sites that were too child oriented.  Then 'guide to vegetables' or 'vegetable guide' yielded a site and I had to click on the vegetable names that I didn't identify myself until I cam up with a pic that vaguely looked like the mystery veg.  I then copy and pasted that into Google Image search and then that pic actually came up numbe rthree in the search!  It's a kohlrabi by the way. This entire process took me over 5 minutes.  Not long if you think about it - I probably would have had to go to the library 15 years ago.

Went to the tesco site and think it is wonderful how personalised nad how much control you have a a user with the 'shopiing list feature'. Excellent architecture.  I guess the lack of photos and just copy heavy product description works, that is a choice of architecture that favours speed over prettiness - but it's practical and you can chose to see the pics of you like.  Overall fantastic I think.

Amazon not so impressive but obviously I am the only one who thinks that or something bc they are so successful.  I find the site busy and annoying and not clean - it throws too many choices at me - I feel bombarded.  That being said I cna create a wishlist - which in a way is a personal library I wish I had.  I need to futrther explore their e-book potential???