I recently attended the 8^th Annual Information Architecture Summit where talk of Web 2.0 was all the rage. The theme of the conference was ‘Enriching IA’ with a focus on:

• Rich information: More and more information becomes available to users and systems alike, and these days most of the information comes with metadata, built-in links to other information, and API’s or micro-formats that allow for mashups. How rich is your information?
• Rich interaction: The web is moving towards a more interactive environment, and desktop apps are adapting web metaphors. How does this affect the way you design applications?
• Rich relationships: We’re all already linked through information; and social computing is increasing the possibilities to exchange information. Is your information a social lubricant or is it an obstacle for building relationships?

Web 2.0 obviously dips into all of these areas. As tagging and open APIs allow users to define metadata and create visualizations and overlays of information with things like Google Maps, Mashups and Many Eyes, the web is becoming a users’ market. Users also are sharing and communicating and networking at breakneck speed. Sites like MySpace, YouTube, and Flickr – to name a few – allow users to share and tag their own ‘information’ and to create their own content that they can then put out for all the world to see. So if users are controlling their own content, does that mean Information Architects (IAs) will go away?

Hardly. Web 2.0 may be the next new best thing, but it ain’t the whole ball of wax. There are some User Experience gurus, however, that feel that IA is going away. Josh Porter claims that:

“IA as it has lived will soon die. Not because it wasn’t valuable, not because IAs didn’t do great work, but because the Web is moving on. The problem is that IA models information, not relationships. Many of the artifacts that IAs create: site maps, navigation systems, taxonomies, are information models built on the assumption that a single way to organize things can suit all users… one IA to rule them all, so to speak.”

I need to point out two things here:

1. He says “IA as it has lived” and…
2. “IA models information not relationships”.

One can interpret the first statement to mean that IAs must adapt or die. I’ll agree with that. What career doesn’t follow that process? The second assumes that everything on the web is ABOUT relationships. It is with this statement that I have the most trouble. I’m not convinced that everything on the web is appropriate for Web 2.0 ‘methods’. Does all information need to ‘build relationships’? Does he mean relationships of data or metadata or social relationships? I can’t help but think that the alternative to ‘one IA to rule them all’ is ‘all IAs to confuse them all’. In other words, personal content, metadata, taxonomies etc., means the most to the people who create it. If everyone created their own street signs, where would we be?

Needless to say, I’m skeptical. For one, IA is more than JUST deliverables like site maps, navigation schemes and taxonomies. It is about solving information problems, creating good experiences (on and off the web) and helping people find information (which still applies in a Web 2.0 world). Peter Morville points out a study in which Amazon tried a tagging experiment. What they found was that:

“tagging works well when people tag “their” stuff, but it fails when they’re asked to do it to ‘someone else’s’ stuff. You can’t get your customers to organize your products, unless you give them a very good incentive. We all make our beds, but nobody volunteers to fluff pillows at the local Sheraton.”

As for me, I’m not jumping on the Web 2.0 bandwagon just yet. At least not to the degree that everything must be 2.0. Sure, it’s cool, it has its uses and it has great potential, but I do believe that there is content out there to be organized for the sake of the users who don’t want to fluff someone else’s pillows.