The case against findability.
Things should be easy to find - an information architect could agree with that.
The recent problems surrounding Google maps sound, from a distance, silly. That crazy Indian president! What is he talking about?
But culture is a funny thing. At the IA retreat a few weeks ago I showed a screenshot of the levis website. Totally offensive to me (from Belgium), none of the attendees noticed a particular problem. The thing with culture is, what makes 1 person from 1 culture angry, won't mean a thing to someone from another culture.
I wrote about the Maori a while ago. A really important concept in Maori culture is âtapuâ?. It means that certain knowledge shouldn't be shown to just anyone.
I guess I'm trying to say: this idea that information should be freely available is a cultural one. And it's not always necessarily (this is painful to say) right.