You can’t spend ten years managing websites without developing some interest and experience in information architecture*.  However, I hesitated a bit to plunk down the conference fees to attend EuroIA conference, held September 24 and 25 here in Paris.  I worried it might be a bit too geeky and jargon-filled for someone like me, who works with IAs, is interested in IA, but is not a practicing IA.  But IA and content strategy are two sides of the same coin, so off I went.

I discovered I could spend hours listening to presentations, geeky or not, on faceted navigation, structured data, clustering tag clouds, implementing identity, and lean IA principles. I also thoroughly enjoyed the more existential questioning that went on in others: can information be architected? Has the industry reached the limits of its architectural metaphor?  I had so much fun at these sessions I left thinking I might be a closet IA.  Hmmm…

Rather than give you a blow-by-blow account of the conference  (you can get all that here) I’d like to share just a few impressions I am left with now that the excitement has died down and everyone’s gone home.

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I attended my very first UX (user experience for non-initiates) event in Paris ten days ago, during which I listened to information architect Paul Kahn talk about unstructured, semi-structured and structured data.

There was something about the title that appealed to me, and besides, what else was I going to do on a Wednesday evening?

Early in his presentation, he confirmed what I already knew:  people HATE filling in metadata, especially if it’s structured (that is, pre-defined, agreed-to, controlled).

And yet, some of coolest applications of data visualization today rely on structured or at least semi-structured data.

He gave a number of examples during his talk, all of them compelling, but the one I found particularly exciting was an application developed by Microsoft called Pivot (www.getpivot.com).

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