Worth Your Attention

• Information architecture isn’t just about making it possible for people to navigate an information environment; it’s also about educating them about their choices, and why they matter. Thoughts on a strategic IA challenge. (Plus, some followup.)

• Brad Stone’s history of Amazon.com, The Everything Store has a great illustration of the lack of a trust in a client-designer relationship. Plus, my notes on The Everything Store overall — TL;DR: I recommend it.

• You can disrupt an industry for one of two reasons: you’re either looking to create value or to extract value. The latter is always a short-term play.

• “The internet was never just a technology or an engine of globalization. It was, at its core, an idea.” That idea is now threatened by the rise of digital nationalism. (WSJ subscription required.)

• Denmark appointed the first ambassador to the tech industry: “These companies have moved from being companies with commercial interests to actually becoming de facto foreign policy actors.”

• On the rise of personal CRM apps, which let you manage and optimize your friendships.

• The Harvard Business Review has a good overview of how bias creeps into AI algorithms and what to do about it.

• One of the challenges of aging is learning how to acquire wisdom without becoming attached to the superficial trappings of the past.

• UX Frameworks, “A resource to find and share frameworks for design research, synthesis, and ideation.”

• An amazing interactive visualization of the history of philosophy.

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