Wikipedia never ceases to amaze me. It has fundamentally changed the world. Together with Google, Wikipedia has changed the process of finding information: Type what you are looking for into Google and chances are you will end up at Wikipedia.

I particularly like how this little visualization came about, as the author explains: 

I was listening to writer Clay Shirky talk about cognitive surplus – the idea of spare brainpower in the world’s collective mind just sitting there waiting, wanting, to be harnessed. He had a stand-out statistic that snagged my mind. I thought I would visualise it.

I don't understand why more complex organizations don't try to emulate Wikipedia. They organize information in blogs and decks, and via press releases and archived email. This wasn't intuitive before, and it's even less so in the post-Wikipedia world we live in. An entire generation will enter the workforce in the near future and the "search + wiki" model is the way they have always found information.

Puzzles, anchors, stars, and plowhorses; those are a few of the terms consultants now use when assembling a menu (which is as much an advertisement as anything else). “A star is a popular, high-profit item—in other words, an item for which customers are willing to pay a good deal more than it costs to make,” Poundstone explains. “A puzzle is high-profit but unpopular; a plowhorse is the opposite, popular yet unprofitable. Consultants try to turn puzzles into stars, nudge customers away from plowhorses, and convince everyone that the prices on the menu are more reasonable than they look.”

I originally found this over at Boing Boing. It's an insightful look at the information architecture of a restaurant menu. Given the rise of grid-based CSS layouts, I wonder if there are some insights here that might be able to be adapted to the web, and how well they might translate. I'm particularly curious if there's a way to reorganize the menus on Seamless Web that would substantially change consumer behavior. It would be an incredible exercise to actually test different a few menu structures for a site like Seamless Web. Instead of hiring a firm or team to come up with "the design" it would be intriguing to develop several designs at once, based on different strategies, and test them live on random samples in order to determine which one has the most effective impact on purchasing behavior. While this kind of testing might seem intuitive to some, it happens far less often than you might imagine.

feedly organizes your favorite sites into a fun, magazine-like start page.
based on Google Reader and Twitter.

So, this is something that flew under my radar. Probably because I only switched to Firefox recently. Before that I was using combination of Camino and Safari. Now that Firefox is my main browser, I’ve been playing around with a number of plugins.

Feedly is particularly interesting to me because it doesn’t require a login of any kind. It uses existing logins for services such as Google Reader and Twitter without actually asking for them. Since it’s a plugin, it delgates login authority to the browser itself. It organizes your information and presents it to you in a more aesthetic way than Google Reader might. It also does a number of other things, such as integrating with Twitter and providing a persistent sharing tool across all pages that lets you share content and find similar content. It’s smart, too. It makes pretty good recommendations based on the content you’re looking at. If you’re looking at a list of Photoshop tutorials, for example, it will recommend other sites that people have recently liked or shared in Google Reader as suggestions.

There is also something compelling about Feedly’s information architecture. They way everything is laid makes it feel considerably different from the format of most blogs. Feedly is designed to be used to aggregate information from separate sources, but I’d be interested to see what a version of Feedly looks like which can dissect and reorganize information from a single source. As we move into a more semantic web infrastructure, that’s probably not far off. I’d love to see what a site like CNN look like when you can pipe it into an application that can reorganize it in any number of ways.