Enterprise Blogging With Del.icio.us

"Tag Teams Wrestle With Web Content" www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/software/groupware/story/0,10801,101100,00.html?source=NLT_WS"d=101100p
Opinion by Robert L. Mitchell, APRIL 18, 2005 (COMPUTERWORLD) - "Desktop search tools have done wonders in allowing me to gain control over information once it's on my desktop, but that begs the question: Does all of that stuff need to be there in the first place?

Mr. Mitchell goes on to write about the benefits of del.icio.us as a bookmarking service. A better way for information workers to accumulate and organize information is to leave it where they found it and provide a pointer or bookmark to that content. Users create their own keywords and short descriptions and associate them with each bookmark.

Enthusiasts see social bookmarking as a way to index the Web, but it could also become a powerful tool for enhancing the productivity of distinct groups, or communities, within an organization."

This link is to a "Pilot Study of del.icio.us Survey", conducted by a grad student from Loyola University, Chicago. Nice charts and graphs.

A couple of the ideas on the mail lists that interest me are:

- how individuals tag links - I wouldn't say altruistic, but, as I'm thinking of the term, a collective oriented user would be conscious of the fact that delicious works socially AND make an attempt to support the social use of the system, so that would mean using particular tags with some thought of helping others to find things. Jon Udell's demo (http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/gems/delicious.html) is the perfect example, checking to see how other people are using tags, etc. It would be a scale, not an either/or. Even the most collective oriented user is still bookmarking for him/herself, but also thinks of others in the process.

- multiple personas for privacy purposes

There is much more to the concept of bookmarking when you toss in the idea of enterprise blogging. As you can see from this post, those little images next to certain words in the text are links to tags that I have placed on del.icio.us. For me to find information from other users of del.icio.us that have the same tag is as easy as clicking on the link. Even better though, is the ability to use that tag as a vehicle to start a discovery process of those individuals that have used the same tag. In other words, since they have used the same tag, maybe you share other interests which may help you discover new ideas or gain new perspectives to old problems. In our system - Ideascape - we use a picking list to determine which tags will be displayed. Think of the way we use del.icio.us as a piece of a gigantic learning and development platform or an extended knowledge management system.

Since Ideascape is set up to publish content internally and externally, we use two bookmarking systems. In the blogosphere, we hear information all the time about personal blogging apps. Ideascape is not a personal application but an enterprise ready platform that scales to support hundreds or thousands of bloggers simultaneously. Businesses are using it for idea management, knowledge management, and content management with great success. We use a system that is pretty much the same as del.icio.us for internal tags and bookmarks and del.icio.us for external ones. With internal blogging, the majority of posts never get published externally or made public. So, a we use two sets of tags, one for internal posts and one, del.icio.us, for external posts. Also, tagging can easily become quite messy, so we also use a formal taxonomy to make it easier and faster to find information.

Bookmarking is a great idea. I hope del.icio.us, et al do not become polluted with spam. Regardless, we also have a stand-alone bookmarking application for businesses that want to keep all of their bookmarks and tags private.