John Eckman wrote an interesting post, Enterprise 2.0 Conference - Social Bookmarking and Tagging, after attending the session of Thomas Vander Wal. Thomas is the man who coined the term “folksonomy. ” The wikipedia now defines this term as “the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content. In contrast to traditional subject indexing, metadata is generated not only by experts but also by creators and consumers of the content.” It also gives Thomas credit for its origins.
John focuses provides the presentation from Thomas’s session and focuses on the portion where he says “the tools are “too simple” - where their feature set isn’t the one most likely to lead to effective use by the most users. Stemming, an awareness of the danger of single tags, recognition of co-occurrence of tags, inline help and context setting, as well as an awareness by the tagging application of the social environment in which the user operates, all can lead to a more effective tagging experience.” Thomas says that tags can be lacking structure and less effective when there is no grouping of taggers, the ID does not tie to a person or profile, and there is a lack of a relationship with the tagger. He also adds that they need to work across many applications and services.
I agree completely with both John and Thomas. This is our goal at Connectbeam as I have written in a number of posts on this blog. We want to provide a tagging capability that integrates to enterprise applications, as well as profile information on the tagger and their communities. We combine social bookmarking with social networking. I will not repeat past posts but you can find how this works at the following:
Connectbeam and Microsoft Announce Spotlight ConnectTM for SharePoint 2007
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