My friends are doing brilliant things these days and I feel compelled to send out some props. I’ll start with Jim Kalbach, whose book Designing Web Navigation: Optimizing the User Experience will be out in August, but who apparently can’t stop writing and has started a blog.

We haven’t had a book on this topic in years, and Jim’s will be the first book dedicated to this topic to talk about how to design navigation, not merely describing how existing designs work. I’ve swam deep in those waters, and almost wrote a book as well, so I like to think I know the territory. So it won’t surprise when I say I think this is a significant topic, one that influences a large swath of society’s use of information these days. And I’m happy to say that Jim, with his dual academic background and years of hands-on experience, is perhaps the best qualified to write the book. I’ve only seen a couple chapters so far, but I’m anxiously awaiting the rest.