Library clips

I’ve been waiting a long while for a social bookmarking experiment within the enterprise, and IBM are away with dogear…see more…also here.

A few of my previous posts touch on this topic.

Whether a tagging system is a prelude into setting up a taxonomy, or social bookmarking is celebrated for it’s uniqueness I think it is a great KM tool nonetheless.

At the moment there seems to be a few services that you can customise to make your own folksonomy (I’m not talking Ning), they are:
- Scuttle (eg. ScuttlEDU)
- rubric (eg. del.irio.us)
- Connotea (eg. Connotea)
- bookmark4U
- Freetag (integrate tagging to your portal)

See a post by URLgreyhot on the enterprise folksonomy called infoview (based on a request or need for a place to save articles, and a way to re-publish articles on corporate portlets)…what better way than a bookmarking system, but hang on these things are also for discovery and sharing, this social aspect makes them a news outlet of their own.

A great idea from the IBM article was linking user information from dogear with other corporate portals (such as profiles, directories, blogs, groups, etc…)…imagine del.icio.us had a profile page that also had your tagged contacts, like Tagalag.
Anyway the great thing about this is that someone searching the staff directory can really get an insight into your interests and your social circle, way more than a one liner describing your interests in a profile or from your resume.

Using a subset of dogear for project groups, dogear can be used as a place to store all relevant articles on a project which can be shared amongst the group, with RSS notification…also the personal context of tags seem to be work better or cross over in a confined group, as it will be a common context if the bookmarks from all accounts are related to the same subject matter and the users work in the same cultural space, ie. the emerging vocabulary will be more succinct, and due to a smaller scale it is easier to review the aggregated tag set.

Also since everyone in the organisation can use dogear, maybe there can be various home pages, one for each business unit, one for each COP, one for each locality, reason being that the sales team probably won’t be interested in bookmarks from the finance team, or the IT team, etc…this wouldn’t be creating silo’s as you are made aware of all the instances of dogear, which everyone can access, and you can be a member of multiple instances as long as your bookmarks won’t pollute the subject matter of another instance.
Maybe at the time of bookmarking you can choose which instance/s a particular bookmark will be posted to.

The other great simple thing is that any instance, user account, tag, any page from dogear can be re-syndicated as it has an RSS feed, so this is great to highlight the latest stuff on business unit, project page, etc.. on the Intranet.

The article also offer some statistics, and a sociogram (connections of people via their interests, and to distinguish between the information seekers and providers)…I’d like to see more statistics in the future, so far 17,000 bookmarks in 3 months, I wonder what the tag variation is, and how cleaning tag sets will work, or if it is needed.

What about filing/tagging PDF’s, and office documents?

Tagalag is a tagging system for contacts or profiles, not a bad idea at all.

In brief this is a place to store and share all your contacts by tag.

Each account is made up of 5 sections: my feeds, incoming tags, and outgoing tags, photo, map

- My Feeds is a place to display feeds that represent you such as your blog feed, social bookmarks feed, there is also an OPML file for all your feeds (reading list)

- Incoming tags is a list of people who have entered your email address in their account and described you or your association with them by a descriptive tag label.

- Outgoing tags is when you enter someone’s email address into your account, organised by tag

- Photo (this is what I look like or how I choose to describe myself)

- Map (this is my location)

It’s really simple an effective, the great thing about it, is that aggregated emails and tags are the perfect data to host in a folksonomy environment.
You can share and discover people by tag (each tag hopefully describes the person within the greater context of the folksonomy, a tag like “friend” won’t really have any context in the greater folksonomy)…not only does the tag describe the person, but if you go to that persons account, you will see their contacts, which tells you more about them (who they are associated), and also you can see a little bit of their profile or interests in the My feeds section.

It would also be good if there was a My OPML section, this tells people even more about your interests, and attention data.

You don’t even have to be at the Tagalag website to tag people, you can even tag people from within an email…see here.

Start discovering on the home page…recently tagged people are discovered on a map (note: this is recently tagged, these aren’t neccessarily new people added to the Tagalag service…I guess this is popularity).
Also see Active Taggers, Popular Users (not sure how this differs), and Popular Tags.

Actually a tag cloud is in order, and maybe some feeds to keep track of new people who have been tagged with your favourite tag.

What about groups?…a view of Tagalag within a group (keep a clean tag set, and only invite people)

This service could do something similar to the Blogging Librarians group in Frappr.
You could use the tag “Blogging Librarians” and when you view all people within this tag you can click to their user accounts, or use the map to discover people…at the moment Tagalag doesn’t have a map view for each tag.

Promote Tagalag with an icon for your blog, so you can say “Tag Me!”..see the tools page.

CrunchNotes points us to a post by J Wynia which describes how to extract the most popular posts from an OPML. Here is a sample from the Web 2.0 Workgroup’s OPML.

As you can see the sample has the most popular posts within the OPML file sorted by feed, it would also be good to see a river of news version of this (not sorted by feed).

You have to be technically minded to make your own, way over my head, but I’d like to see a service like this take off.
It really is a great idea, as an OPML file can be a topic blogosphere of it’s own, being able to organise the posts from an OPML file by popularity, is like making your own Technorati…what’s hot within an OPML file…good stuff!

Well, it’s not really as fast as Technorati as it’s based on the Yahoo! API, but if it was based on some type of real live web, it could be your own version of Technorati on your favourite part of the blogosphere or better put, view the most linked to posts from a selection of your favourite blogs.

[ADDED: of course I forgot to add that an RSS feed for an OPML Sampler page would not show you the latest posts from each feed, but the most popular posts…see more from Alex]

ScoopGO! is a watered down version of Rollyo, or Swiki.

Basically you can create a search tool to search selected feeds of your choice (30 max), you can also pick/add from suggested feeds.

Every search box has a title and is categorised from a selection of system categories (no use of tags…hmm!)

The front page has a selection of user accounts where you can access the scoops they have created…there is also a showcase of some popular scoops.

The Manage section allows you to manage your scoops (edit, delete, copy a scoop, etc…)

Every feed added to a scoop is kept in a list, you can view summaries of this feed within scoopGO or go to the native site.

Every scoop has a dashboard, check out the scoop dashboard for technews.

This shows the Title and description of the scoop, and a link to the user.
You can search in the scoop search box, and also view the latest titles or summaries from each feed in the scoop.

more…

Plugin for firefox
Create a search box for your website
Create a pre-defined search term within a scoop

[via RSS compendium blog]

Urlgrey has a post with some realistic insight into the use of a tag cloud for an OPAC.

What sort of tag clouds could be generated:

- number of items with a given subject term (tag)

This just tells us how many books, etc.. on a particular subject term (tag) are in the library, this is based on how the librarians index
…We can get an idea of what subjects a library specialises in.

I suppose a tag cloud could be done for books, journals, videos, etc…or combine them all.

Davey P has gone ahead and created a sample for his OPAC.

Notice when you mouse over a tag it shows all the list of subject headings within a subject, taking this experiment further, this could also be a tag cloud within a tag cloud.

- Urlgreyhot suggests you could make another tag cloud that represents borrowing frequency (usage)

A tag cloud based on popularity, showing what are the popular subjects.

This way you could compare the first tag cloud, to see how many books are on a subject, with the second tag cloud, to see how often people are borrowing books from this subject.
In turn you can make use of this knowledge with respect to collection development, marketing, etc…This is nothing new, you can do this with statistics anyway, it’s just a visual view of the same figures.

- What about user tag clouds (free tagging)

These are the ones we are familiar with, although tag clouds don’t have to represent user choices, they are just a representation of data
…if users tagged items in an OPAC it could just be a complementary way to search for something, although, every item has to be tagged at least once to be represented in the tag cloud.

To help search for known items the subject term tag cloud could be presented as a list in weighted order or in alphabetical order.

Here are Davey P’s 2 posts:
Taggytastic!
Taggytastic! (part 2)

Related Posts:
Public RSS Aggregator Folksonomy: Visitor Tags and User Tags
Enterprise folksonomy