In the days of the Sumerians, Ziggurats set cities apart from one another. Local priests kept mes (HOWTOs written in cuneiform on clay tablets) in their information temples and distributed them when relevant. The Ziggurat’s were for all practical purposes mankind’s first database. It was the entire accumulation of knowledge that the kingdom built meticulously generation after generation. [read the novel Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson for more on Sumerian culture] The pinnacle of this body of knowledge is now known as the Internet. The combined knowledge of our species stored as digital impulses travels throughout the world as a stream of energy. Our Ziggurat’s are now linked electronically to each other via hypertext (perhaps the greatest invention our civilization came up with this century) and allow us to contextually search for nuggets of information. There are issues to need to be worked out. Just as the Tower of Babel fell, we are dangerously close to our own infoclypse.

Trying to imagine the sheer volume of data that we have accumulated through the Internet is staggering. The only thing that comes to mind is the Egyptian coinage of ‘million’, which is a hieroglyph depicting a man bonking himself on the head. Trying to find a particular piece of information in that mass would have been depicted as a human gouging out his eyes. The evolution of portals (AKA navigation sites like yahoo, altavista and my personal favorite, google) has helped in our library sciences, but commercialism has deviated the groups from their core purpose.

Pornographers and evil marketing scum have found ways to subvert every effort at keywording the information. (Not that I have problems with porn in general ;) Add to this the fact that just about every seriously large web site now contains some type of database or dynamic page creation kit, and you have the dawn of new inaccessibility. Search engine bots can’t find pages to index anymore because they don’t exist yet. Or better yet, once they index the page the URL won’t exist anymore because it’s based on the bot’s unique user session. My favorite roadblocks are information commodity brokers - companies that charge for the ability to read a particular document stored in their box. (must be a $cientology ploy)

Finding relevant information has become more and more difficult. When I first started with information architecture a very simple rule was handed down to me. It was as momentous as Hammerabi erecting the first set of laws civilization has known. “The Rule of 3” -- For any given site, a user should be able to find the information (s)he is looking for within 3 clicks.