At the IA Summit, Grant Campbell and Karl Fast presented "From Pace Layering to Resilience Theory: The Complex Implications of Tagging for Information Architecture." I highly recommend both the paper and the slides, and if you're really into resilience, check out Ecology and Society.
Of course, that doesn't mean I totally agree with Grant and Karl. First, I don't agree that information architects have ignored tags. To the contrary, IAs are infatuated with collaborative tagging. We simply haven't found many opportunities (yet) to integrate tags into our practice.
Second, the authors commit the same sin as Clay Shirky and David Weinberger by ignoring context. Tagging has flourished in the free-wheeling blogosphere, but has had little traction in the realm of corporate and government web sites where authority is an equal partner to findability. It remains unclear when and whether tags belong in the information ecologies in which IAs typically practice.
That said, I've begun a Web 2.0 consulting project in which I'll get to integrate tags and taxonomies, so I'm on the hunt for inspiration. Amazon's experiment with tags seems to have failed. Has collaborative tagging ever been successfully integrated into the web site of an established institution? How about examples of sites (even small ones) that elegantly combine tags and taxonomies? Thanks!
The presentation that Karen Loasby of the BBC gave at the 2005 IA Summit comes to mind. But that was for an intranet and I can't quite remember if the tags the journalists applied were only subsumed selectively by the CV, or if they were also used on their own for navigation. (And I can't seem to open her ppt.)
http://www.iasummit.org/2005/conferencedescrip.htm#66