Whose Polar Bear Is It?

I recently completed a survey for Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville, who are developing the third edition of their book Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, a.k.a. "The Polar Bear Book." Here are the questions, and my responses below.

Question 1: What's obviously new in IA? Over the past five years, what major trend(s) have emerged in the field of information architecture?

Okay, this is super obvious, but tagging and folksonomy; i.e., forcing-slash-permitting the user to classify their own content, with messy, ambiguous, inappropriate—and often very powerful results.

Question 2: What's new in IA that's not so obvious? Over the past five years, what's changed in information architecture that hasn't received the attention it should?

Maybe this is an extension of the first question, but collective tagging/authoring/collaborative use is creating an even more webby web, and it seems like it's getting harder to tell the boundaries of a publication or system. So, if a site or app repurposes content from flickr using google's API and custom code, and allows users to add comments and tag or track or classify, whose site is it, really? Whose hand is on the dials? Who's in charge of saying how the thing's information structure should behave? Sites are becoming more like cognitive systems—computationally complex, yet still reason-respecting, and deeply embedded in their enviroments. But the additional complexity can yield an unruly creature that nobody really owns.