Enterprise bookmarking
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?
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Why Web 2.0 Matters to your Business - Knowledge Discovery
In the case of the Web 2.0 Watermill, there are primarily four areas where technology is beginning to facilitate a vastly improved Internet: knowledge collection, knowledge discovery, knowledge building, and knowledge sharing.
- Ken Yarmosh, Why Web 2….
Trackback by Ken Yarmosh — April 19, 2006 @ 1:30 pm