This one was a close call, since we're like 98% of the way there. In the end though we've decided to get out the door with a
blogging centric platform and we'll fill in the blanks afterwards.
You can probably jam a lot of stuff into a blog database -- social bookmarks and lifestream pull feeds, for example -- if
you can mark it "not front page eligible". This would also mean that they shouldn't show up in syndication feeds and maybe in
some archives, though the latter will require more though.
Individual project teams can collectively create social bookmark (or tag) lists to support their work. These can be attached to their wiki or blog. They can be shared and discussed at virtual meetings. At the enterprise or division level, a knowledge manager can create an ongoing library of links to critical documents with annotations on their importance. These could be drawn from the best of team tag lists. Then official enterprise tag lists can be developed that represent the best thinking on specific issues that are important to the company.
Employees or teams can download tag lists to fit their work needs. Then, they can make these tag lists once again personal as they engage in work activities by modifying them with both new annotations on the usefulness of existing links, as well as new links. Anyone in the firm, including the original knowledge manager, can access these new derived tag lists to enhance their own or add back into the official enterprise tag list on the topic for continuous improvement.
With tagging behind the firewall, the best thinking in the firm can become more transparent and constantly updated to the benefit of all. Knowledge is easily shared and communities can consolidate their key documents and resources. It can also be linked to other on-demand business solutions to enhance their value.
I wrote about IBM’s enterprise tagging system, dogear, in another FAST post. There is also Mitre’s Onomi. Ii is likely more are being developed. Let us know about any you have heard of.
The reason I saw positive is because here's a more negative assessment of the same. I guess it depends on the type of person in the organization -- if it's a 1%er (that is, 1% of the employees do innovative stuff) -- you need a fairly large organization to get the "social" component.
Another barrier or opportunity is the time it takes to tag something. I've become more and more focused recently on the fact that the real barrier for anything being adopted is the time it actually takes to complete an operation.
O.K. On del.icio.us/tag/tagging it basically talks about the same stuff all over again, i.e. Because everyone else is doing it too, LibraryThing connects you with people who read the same things. I have to say… I don’t have enough time in my life to spend with (mostly) idiots who think that what they have to say has enough relevance and importance that I would want to waste my time in their lives. I find my life rewarding and challenging enough!
It's overlooked that tags don't have meaning outside of their social context: i.e. it's either myself (i.e. my tags) or my community (people doing stuff similar to me) that will produce tags useful to me. This is why I like tags in the context of Enterprise 2.0/Enterprise Datasphere: we're talking about a community of individuals that inherently have a common interest.
Dead's Mom also takes on Tag Clouds:
I just went back to del.icio.us.tag. I get that certain words are highlighted, I get what this means, what I don’t get is the relevance in my world.
I kind of agree with this too, which is why there isn't a generic "everyone" tag cloud on this site: I just don't see the utility besides "me too". What would be interesting (maybe) is a tag cloud about what everyone else is doing filtered by my tags. That might work.
Joshua Schachter is the inventor of del.icio.us, the most well-known social bookmarking site. Techology Review has his story here. I like this explanation of "folksonomy":
What del.icio.us's users were creating--without necessarily knowing they were doing so--was what technology blogger Thomas Vander Wal has dubbed a "folksonomy," a flexible system of organization that emerges organically from the choices users make. We're all familiar with the alternative, the kind of rule-bound, top-down classification scheme that Internet theorist Clay Shirky calls "ontological" in nature. The Dewey decimal system is an example: every object is assigned its place in a hierarchical system of organization, and every object is defined as, ultimately, one thing: a book goes in one place in the library and nowhere else. In a folksonomy, by contrast, definitions are fuzzier. With del.icio.us, the same Web page has many different tags, which often aren't even related to one another, and no explicit rules are being followed. Web pages are therefore listed not in one place but in many places, and sometimes pages aren't quite where you might expect them to be. So folksonomies are messier than "ontologies" are.
What del.icio.us has shown, though, is that folksonomies' imperfections are outweighed by their benefits. In the first place, folksonomies are dynamic rather than static. A Web folksonomy thus allows us to reclassify content according to our changing interests. An academic paper that's interesting today might be equally interesting a decade from now--but why it's interesting, why people care about it, might be very different. A traditional categorization system has a hard time dealing with this: once the essence of an object is defined, it's supposed to be defined for good. In a folksonomy, the reclassification happens almost automatically--as people start tagging the paper with new, more relevant tags, for example. Web folksonomies are also better at capturing the multiple meanings and uses that a given site has, rather than constraining the possible range of meanings.
The ability of tags to fluidly organize data is why I indentify it as a key technology for creating the datasphere.
I was at the University of Toronto this morning, courtesy of Greg Wilson to run through in more detail the demo I gave at DemoCamp several months back (link, link). In return I got a demo of BlogScope which is tracking an impressive 2.6 million blogs as of today. BlogScope does "text stream" analysis of blog posts, tracking what's popular, what's hot ("bursts"), and doing a form a faceted analysis ("correlation") -- what other words are popular in posts that have a certain word/phrase in them -- which is cleverly done since one would expect this to be a O(N2) algorithm.
We discussed structured data, geotags, tagging (all pretty key concepts in BlogMatrix) and so forth and how they could be used to extend BlogScope. There's a lot of potential for this application in "intranets", closed networks, if RSS/Atom had widespread adoption to export events and data with an organization.
GeoRSS is a way of encoding geographic location in RSS (and Atom) feeds. BlogMatrix is interested in this because obviously we're doing a lot of work with integrating mapping and blogging (example).
The geometric shapes that can be described by GeoRSS are:
point
line
box
polygon
the meaning of which all should be fairly obvious. What isn't clear to me is what the logical rule for associating this information to the entry. In particular, here's my issue: let's say I have a map like this and I want to put a bunch of different points on it (as described in the end notes). How can I say that one of the points represents the center point of the map I'm taking about and all the other points represent different points of interest within this one entry. I note that their Canoe Trip example just breaks up the the trip into multiple entries but this seems hacky to me -- i.e. you're forcing the user to break into multiple entries something that they'd naturally write as a single entry. And even if they did write it as a single entry and the CMS magically broke it up, the end result in a reader's feed reader showing the wrong thing.
This post is test the "link" extension, which lets this post be "officially" associated with some URI out there on the Internet. The idea is to mirror the functionality of del.icoi.us while obviously providing all the rest of the structured blogging power you are seeing here.
We’ve made even a few further changes to the look and feel of the site over the weekend:
your personal blog is now identified as such (for example, the page you’re on is ‘BlogMatrix News’)
entry content is now placed in a blue box to make it stand out further
there is now a ‘tag library’ on your posting page—just click on the links to add our suggested tags onto your pages. Furthermore, tags you have already used yourself will also be displayed here
The next version of the website will provide the user with a directory built around their tags in posting. You will also be able to look through all the tags across all users to find interesting posts, podcasts and videos.
This is the first phase of our tagging support. The second phase will allow you to tag other user’s podcasts, rate them and possibly even rate pages outside of BlogMatrix.
Anything and everything about the semantic web, microformats and structured blogging. We're building this site live, so expect more than occasional flakiness.
