OK, so SIGGRAPH ended on Thursday, but between travel time and time to decompress a bit, I haven't had a chance to blog about the last couple of days till now. The Web Program (which will not be a part of SIGGRAPH 2006!?!) began on Wednesday with some excellent presos. I'll try to recap some of the best in the next day or so to finish off blogging this year's conference.

First off, Peter Morville of Semantic Studios (who wrote the seminal book on web information architecture back in 1998) spoke about what he calls "ambient findability" which he describes idealistically as the ability to "find anything one or anything, anywhere and anytime."  The problem, of course, is with the proliferation of information, how to make sure that your information can be found any where, anytime. Morville has a nifty little chart (see image at right) that explains the nexus of ideas he thinks is necessary.

Morville is also interested in devices that access information on the web, but aren't necessarily desktop, browser-based systems. This includes mobile devices with browsers, but it also includes other devices which capture datastreams delivered through the web and display them in interesting ways (see AmbientDevices.com for instance).

More reading:
Findability.org
Information Architecture for the WWW, 2nd Ed.