Now that I’m playing with the IA of a site of mine, here are some things that keep coming back.

• Start with the user and the content, not with the IA.
• Editorial vs. user-generated: it’s a mix. Some things need to be editorialized. Some things user generated. Sometimes it’s in between, where stuff is user generated and then slightly editorialized. This goes for both org schemes and content.
• Comprehensiveness is very important in some contexts when providing content.
• If you look very very closely at the content, you’ll find that it’s often not what you thought it was. For example, a travel guide you write while on the ground is different than one you write while remembering how things were.

This is too vague – badly written too, let me try to repost this in 2007! :)