As the year winds down, the NTEN Affinity Groups remain charged with discussions ranging from whether or not attendees should bring their kids to the 2008 NTC to how the future of IT staff is changing -- provoked by the new book, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google by Nicholas G. Carr. (For a review and excerpt of the book go here.)

Robert Weiner poses the question:

"Do you agree? Will IT departments have "little left to do once the bulk of ... computing shifts out of private data centers and into "the cloud."?

And Peter Cambell responds:

Let's see -- we've heard that, because servers can now be installed with "wizards, IT jobs will disappear. We've heard that outsourcing will demolish the IT job market. And there are more IT positions in the U.S. today than there were at the height of the dot.com boom. This one boils down to "the internet will become a self-sustaining utility and eliminate IT jobs". My take is that nuclear war or environmental disaster are more likely to cause an IT work fallout than the evolving nature of technology. The hardware maintenance might be vanishing, but our demands on the software are increasing. So, twenty years from now, we might never have to configure a RAID array or install a Network OS. But I might be wirelessly programming nanobits in automated devices. Or debugging image reception problems in brain-embedded chips (God forbid!). The work will change, as it always has, and isn't that a big part of what attracts us all to this career path in the first place?

Join the discussion at http://groups.nten.org.

Johanna Bates asked the NTEN Discuss Group for help educating her staff on how to create good menus and site navigation and received plenty of useful resources:

Websites

• Boxes and Arrows – Probably the leading website about IA and interaction design written for and by people who do it every day.
• A List Apart – A little bit more technical in nature, but some really great content.
• Adaptive Path Blog – AP is a well known IA shop and their blog always has good stuff to read and ponder.
• Creative Good
• NP Group
• Useit
• Good Experience
• Web Design From Scratch

Books

• Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability. By Steve Krug. This book is a great intro and guide to IA
• Information Architecture for the World Wide Web. Known in the biz as "the polar bear book". Rosenfeld and Morville are very well known and respected experts.

Discuss these topics and more, join an Affinity Group!