I recently discovered A Social Life, a most excellent blog that is focused, so far, on enterprise tagging (aka internal tagging / bookmarking...), a subject that is *very* close to my heart right now. Steve Eisner, the blog author is VP of Engineering at AskMe, and has posted a series of insightful thoughts about how tagging might actually work within an enterprise. One of the few times that I've printed out posts and written notes in the margins.
Cleaning up the Tag Soup and Our Experiences with Enterprise Tagging Terminology are recommended, but there's good stuff in every post I've read so far.
[tags]tags, tagging, enterprise, internal, folksonomy, social[/tags]
Recently in IA and Metastuff Category
Missed this the first time round: Clay Shirky's Viewpoints are Overrated – Peter Merholz taking issue with Clay Shirky’s Ontology is Overrated essay.
(found via a must-read set of comments for a post on Burningbird)
David Weinberger posts some notes of a talk from Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us. Brilliant stuff.
I've spent too much time working with fuzzy models of the world to need discrete taxonomies. There's no such thing as a perfect categorization. There is value in controlled vocabularies, but that doesn't really map to the task. I'm not trying to categorize the web but helping people find stuff later
There's also some discussion of upcoming features – group tags, some permissioning, "networks"
A group will be an established set of people who opt in. A network is a set of people you designate; they will not know they're a member of your network. I point out that flickr tells you. Joshua says that every time he gets a notice from some random person that he's been added as a contact "I want to rip my face off."
While the world falls in love with folksonomies and tagging, Dare Obansanjo mutters "Bah humbug, seen it all before".
All the problems with META tags are still valid today most important being the fact that people lie especially spammers and that even well intentioned people tend to categorize things incorrectly or according to their prejudices.
Not sure whether I agree with him or not, but it's Monday morning, I've been ill for most of the week, and I'm feeling contrary.
connotea: an experimental bookmarking service for scientists.
Piers Young with a great idea:
What if, at the company you worked in, you had a system similar to del.icio.us, which bookmarked items of interest etc. And on that system, rather than having just "and 42 others" as the cue to who else found something interesting, you had "and 42 others(2 marketing, 3 HR, 7 IT Support, 30 other)". Any obvious cons to this?
I couldn't think of anything really bad about it - might be some resistance by people not wanting to share, but that's going to happen anyway.
It would be nice to have a more general application that allows ad-hoc definition of "groups" - ie the company social bookmark list would be one group, and you could belong to many others.
And I guess you could use del.icio.us right now for this if you use a unique not-likely-to-be-used-accidentally taq for your company/group bookmarks - something like zz90adj. Not very easy to remember, but what you want here is the posting action to automatically embed this tag into your delicious post.
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