More and more I come across information arranged alphabetically and wish it was arranged differently. Wines are usually organized by grape or region or price, not alphabetically. I don't want to see a cheese reference alphabetically by name but organized by type or flavor (or perhaps region).
slide:ology seems to be an interesting site on presentations and the post Organizing Information Is Finite describes the acronym LATCH for: Location, Alphabet, Time, Category, Hierarchy. I'd like to see this catch on and the A be used less.
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On a related note, I finally convinced my wife of the benefits to Delicious Library. As a reviewer of childrens' books, she typically has a stack of 25 or 30 books in a corner of her office. I overheard her say to my daughter, "help me make a list of these books so I can figure out what I need to review next." I sprung into action. It just so happened she had exactly 25 books (all the demo of DL will allow, I believe) so I quickly scanned them all in as she sat there, amazed at how the computer read off the names of them. She already does a lot of research into each book on Amazon, so I showed her the various links to Amazon DL has. I also showed her how she could enter a URL for her completed book review in a field for the book for future reference. And, getting back to the subject at hand, I showed her how she could sort the books in different ways such as by release date, review date (actually "read" date), and yes, Alphabetically. Then I showed her how she could search by description and categorize books into different shelves, and I think I hooked her.
Cool. As she adds things, make sure the data is right. Amazon often confuses say author with illustrator (DL has separate fields). And I usually use my own genres rather than Amazon's which are all over the place and not consistent. You can also export and print to various formats and design your own templates (learn HTML and CSS). I have a number of frustrations with the current version, but I'm curious if she runs into them.
Also, you can drag an Amazon URL into DL, I use it to create various wish lists as well as track what I own (and can therefore scan).
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