ia play

Following my earlier enthusiasm for DoggySnaps and particularly their dog tags, this year Crufts goes Web 2.0 (sort of).

They are hooking up with Flickr and Youtube to include photos and videos. There are blogs from judges and there are even gradients and a star-like rosette.

Judges will still be picking the winner though.

20 years ago I would have been standing outside Northaw Church in my Brownie uniform, grateful for once for the tea-cosy hats we had to wear and being amazed at how long 2 minutes can be.

Today I simply closed my laptop and the time seemed like no time at all. Perhaps that was simply the difference between observing the silence in the lounge and standing outside in November. Or perhaps I’m just more used to being still than I was at 9 years old, more able to value time to pause, to think.

I’ve just read Faster by James Gleick, a rather disappointing book on an interesting subject, the pressure we feel to live our lives at a faster and faster pace. I was struck that my act of remembrance was shutting the laptop, not just stopping reading and typing but actually shutting and putting it down, the latter act having only symbolic value. A lot of my life is spent with one computer or another. Computers are not yet vilified in the way that televisions are but what would I be paying attention to without them?

I’ve been reading A List Apart‘s Web Design Survey. Only 1.9% of the responses were from information architects but since there were 32831 responses that means around 600 information architects. In contrast the IA Institute’s 2006 salary survey had 319 responses so 600 is a decent number of IAs.

The survey found:

• 16.5% of IAs earn $100,000+, a higher percentage than any other job title
• IAs were the 2nd most satisfied with their job (following project managers!)
• there was a higher percentage of female IAs than either designers or developers
• around 40% of IAs believe they need CSS & mark-up skills that they don’t have
• IAs were less likely than most of the job titles to have a blog or website and yet 69.4% did

More generally on the topic of satisfaction:

• women were more satisfied with their jobs
• job satisfaction increased with age
• satisfaction peaked with salaries around $40000-59999 and then declined
• employees of non-profits companies were less satisfied than for-profit, agencies, government or universities