The Aiwa Facebook: £149 at Currys

Nice Facebook analogy from Iain Tait: Facebook is an all-in-one stereo system - fine for beginners but ultimately a bit limiting and of mediocre quality (web 2.0 is separates, natch). See also Wired's article Slap In The Facebook.

This was also one of the recurring themes at BarCamp Brighton, particularly with such a strong Microformats and semantic web flavour pervading the whole weekend. Lots of bold words about Facebook's inevitable (albeit it far-off) demise.

Although in principle I agree, I thought this was a little strong - I'm still rather ambivalent about it all. Facebook's certainly a useful tool and it's great to see so many people contributing to the web, sharing media and so on. I just regret that there's this great big mainstream love affair with a walled garden concept I hoped the web had outgrown.

Of course, the interesting question is how those of us nearer the front of the curve can convince our less geeky friends that separates are better, without sounding like horrible snobs. Believe me, I've tried, and believe me, I sounded like a horrible snob.

Why become an information architect?

I can't remember where I heard it, but I was surprised it came from someone in the field. The sarcastic tone surprised me even more than the chuckles of agreement.

Hang on, I thought with astonishment, surely we've not reached the stage where we reduce ourselves to hackneyed self-criticism? In my experience, passion for their craft is common to every IA, and it's one of the few careers you can't really 'phone in'. So, it's taken me a while, but for the record here is my response.

[Note: Yes, some of what I'm talking about could be called interaction design, user experience etc. Change the post title if you like. I'll leave defining the damn thing to others.]

It's creative
Every job has its drudgery. I'm sure some IAs would say that churning out wireframes comes pretty close sometimes, and certainly it can if you allow yourself to drift on autopilot. But any job that pays you to think and to listen, then to turn that into something meaningful, usable by everyone but retaining one's own creative influence, is a rare thing.

It's important
You're making decisions that can have a lasting effect. We all know that bad site > unhappy users > no revenue, but IA can matter beyond the realms of the bottom line. I have true respect for IAs working, say, on medical information sites, improving access to information that can change (or even save) lives.

It's varied
IA undoubtedly can lay claim to some of the largest changes of scale of any job in this domain. You may be looking at wide strategic decisions affecting thousands (millions, if you're with the big guys) of people. Or you may be arguing whether 18pt leading is appropriate for this type, or whether icon A is sufficiently differentiated from icon B. I've spent mornings looking at numerous shades of pea green and drowning in a sea of RGB hex, followed by afternoons trying to convince others that semantic markup should be a central platform for our business.

It pays
Salaries are going up, and not showing many signs of abating. This is a specialised profession in great demand. Of course, we will have to wait and see how it survives the next tech dip, but even the IAI's year-old figures are pretty impressive.

It's part of something bigger
This, for me, is what seals it. The chance to help create the future of the web, to create a shared language of interactions, of new features and that wonderfully vague world of 'cool stuff'. Things that will turn a sceptic into an ardent supporter. Sure, of course I'm here to make money for my employer, but ultimately I think I'm also here for the greater good - to make the web a better place. And because the industry isn't at 'idea saturation point', in a small way I can help to shape the whole industry. How many accountants can say that?

Perhaps this all needs to be balanced with the negative aspects. Perhaps that's another post. But try adding the prefix "Only you know" before any of the above headings for a flavour.

WordCount

I rediscovered an old site I'd meant to post about long ago: WordCount. It's another of those interesting visualisation tools, this time showing the commonality of English words. Derived from Oxford University's British National Corpus of 100 million words, it's an obvious practical example of the long tail. Since we get by on an estimated average vocabulary of 21,000 words* (compared to the 86,800 in Wordcount), there's plenty of undiscovered material to play with.

Aside from the interest derived from simply playing with it and learning more about our language, some wags have created games from forming sentences from words appearing consecutively in the list:

• "Despotism clinching internet" (seems somewhat prescient of the net neutrality debate)

• "America ensure oil opportunity"

• "Apple formula: imagination"

Or, of course, you can play the slightly smug vocabulary-testing game, by testing your favourite obscure word and keeping score. Me? I started with a mediocre 'abstemious' (61282nd) but quickly followed it up with an impressive 'ziggurat' (83305th). No triple-word score sadly. There's also QueryCount, which is an exploration of the most frequently sought-out terms, and is of course considerably more profane.

Of course, sites like this don't really have a purpose per se, of course, other than exploration. But isn't it nice sometimes to release ourselves from the current task-based focus of the web, and get back to good old-fashioned surfing?

* For an alarmist aside, read Are iPods shrinking the British vocabulary?.