Laïka hosted the first Montreal Web Development Book Club this past Monday. There wasn’t as much people as expected, probably because of the long weekend. It was still loads of fun and packed with great discussions. I presented In Search of Stupidity by Merrill Chapman. I’m going to post a review soon, but the book generated some good discussions about the industry in general.

The next book was Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger, which is about ways to organize information, such as hierarchies and tags. Evan Promodou, who started wikitravel (which recently won a Webby award), is obviously very interested in the subject. This led to a discussion about RDF. I never understood the interest in RDF (I think XML is good for almost everything except what people actually uses it for), but I’ll definitely have to check out how he uses it on wikitravel. Anyway, the book seems very interesting as it also presents a historical perspective on the subject, such as the Dewey system.

Information Architecture for the World Wide Web was the last book of the night. Heri mentioned that he read the book 3 times. The way he said it, I’m not sure if it was because it was such a good book or because it was hard to understand. It seems to be very academic, but still the book to get if you’re interested in information architecture. Anyway, this lead to a great conversation about how to evaluate if your site has a good architecture, especially in the case of a wiki as big as wikitravel.

For those interested, all meetings will be held last monday of the month. The next one should be on July 30 at 7pm, at Laika. You can read Heri’s report here and Evan’s here.