Social Bookmarking has Great Value in the Enterprise – Thomas Vander Wal

I was pleased to see Thomas Vander Wal’s post, Getting More Value in Enterprise with Social Book Marking (via BizTechTalk). Thomas is an information architect best known for coining the term "folksonomy."He is also known for initiating the term "infocloud." Under the subheading social Bookmarking has Great Value in the Enterprise, he starts, “Every organization needs to know itself better then they currently do…The need to connect people inside an organization with others with similar interest, contexts, and perceptions is really needed.”

Thomas then goes on to say, “As people also share these bookmarks in the organization with their tags and annotations, they also realize quickly they are becoming a valuable conduit to helping others find information and they grasp the value they will derive from being a resource that adds value in the organization. Other people derive value from information in the organization and outside it being augmented with individual perspectives and context.”

Thomas next has some nice words to say about Connectbeam in this context, “When this is pair(ed) with search, as Connectbeam does with their social search that pairs with existing pairs with existing FAST, Google Search Appliance, and others in-house search engines, the value the whole organization receives is far beyond the cost and minimal effort people are putting into the tools to get smarter, by more easily holding on and sharing what they know.” I have great respect for Thomas’ viewpoints so these words and much appreciated. He has captured our goals at Connectbeam.

Thomas concluded that every attendee to workshops he has delivered on enterprise 2.0 quickly sees that they undervalued the impact and capability of social bookmarking in the enterprise. His firm, InfoCloud Solutions, provides consulting and training in many areas of enterprise 2.0 There is an extensive list of workshops at his InfoCloud Solutions site.

Comments

[Dan Keldsen]

Puneet - thanks for the reference to BizTechTalk, and glad I could serve as connection point to his presentation. There is certainly something to the social aspect of sharing links, whether via social bookmarking, blogging, etc., eh?

It is ironic that so few organizations are embracing Social Bookmarking as a way to enhance Findability. It is among the least expensive, and easiest to use and benefit tools that one could have in the toolbox!

Of course that's why I've been working to spread awareness of these techniques, in addition to the "traditional" Information, Organization and Access (IOA) tools of search and taxonomies.

More forthcoming in our Market IQ on Findability - due out mid July, and free for download. Watch http://www.aiim.org/findability for details.

Cheers,
Dan

[puneet Gupta]

Dan

Thanks for your comment for for spreading the word about the benefits of social bookmarking. Puneet