Social Bookmarking
by Michael Sampson
The daily information tsunami facing managers and knowledge workers isn't showing signs of abating. There's new and different information to review, numbers to reconcile, and people to keep up-to-date. Managing this tsunami and retaining the relevant, while discarding the debris, is the personal and corporate information management challenge of our age. Classification is one strategy for doing so. It helps us to distinguish between different items, to organize what we know, and to analyze the relationships between multiple things.
Classification: Taxonomy and Folksonomy
There are two general ways of undertaking classification: taxonomy and folksonomy. Taxonomy is a classification against an established context-appropriate list or hierarchy of descriptors. It is a valid approach when we are dealing with a known corpus of data, when classification in a certain way can be judged as objectively right or wrong, and when accuracy needs to approach perfection. Content matter experts normally establish taxonomies. When these conditions don't hold for instance the corpus of data is emergent, there is no objectively right or wrong classification, and when accuracy can be good enough, a folksonomy is the more appropriate classification approach.
Let's review an example. Upon finishing an important document, a reader decides she wants to refer to the document again in the future. So she must decide how it should be classified. Under a taxonomy approach, she would select from a pre-defined collection of descriptors and assign one or more to the document. If the taxonomy was associated with a document management system, these descriptors are alternatively known as meta-data. Under a folksonomy approach, the reader is free to use whatever descriptors she deems appropriate. While there may be some equivalence with the formal taxonomy descriptors, it is unlikely.
Social Tagging on the Internet
Websites that embrace the folksonomy approach to classification are one of the fascinating developments in the Web 2.0 era of the Internet. These sites provide a framework for users to tag relevant information for their own benefit and for sharing with others. This tagging of material in a social environment is a collaborative approach to information management. Its richness improves the more that people use it. It allows multiple perspectives on the same thing to flourish, but instead of leading to digital anarchy, it permits people to understand the mental models of others and to expand their perspectives and horizons. It also increases findability-items aren't locked in only one place, but can be accessed from multiple viewpoints. And finally, it significantly increases the occurrence of serendipity: the finding of interesting and relevant people and things almost accidentally.
For example, rather than creating a set of bookmarks within Internet Explorer or Firefox that is tied to a specific computer, users can create their bookmark collection within the del.icio.us bookmarking service, allowing access to their bookmarks from any computer. But it gets better: When they submit a bookmark, they also may add one or more descriptors so they can find it again. Better still: whenever they visit their collection of bookmarks, they can see everyone else who has bookmarked the same item- regardless if the others have used the same descriptors or not. Thus, while the tagging of Internet pages in del.icio.us is an individual activity, the contributions of the many coalesce into a broad collaboration.
Consider a second example. 43things is a website for declaring the goals you want to achieve. The twist is that goals are declared publicly, so every user is able to view everyone else who has the same or similar goals. By taking this approach, 43things enables the formation of communities of interest around an individual but common goal. Someone just starting out with the goal of "running a marathon" can track their progress in reference to others with the same goal, and can also read what others who have already achieved the goal have written about doing so. Other folksonomy-oriented services include YouTube (for videos), Flickr (for photos), and Technorati (for blog posts).
Social Tagging in the Enterprise
Social tagging can be used across the enterprise or in specific work groups. Once the required infrastructure is in place-which is generally simple due to the availability of secure hosted tagging services or social tagging appliances for behind the firewall deployment-people can start tagging documents and other digital artifacts with appropriate descriptors, e.g., client names, project names, geographical locations. Over time and over a large user population, a rich Web of relationships between documents and items is established.
Although a critical mass of users is required in an enterprise setting to derive value from social tagging technology, not everyone has to contribute tags. Many people can get value by merely monitoring what others are tagging. This is called subscribing to a tag stream. Vendors, such as Connectbeam, paint interesting case scenarios of using social tagging for sales team collaboration, research and development, proposal development, and more.
Social tagging is definitely worth investigating on the public Internet and as a new lightweight form of enterprise collaboration. MS/TMP