Information Culture and Enterprise Collaboration - mesh up

Fred Wilson from A VC has a post "Posting, Subscribing, and Tagging" that describes individual blogging. I wrote a post Empathetic Customer Service vs Sucky Customer Service yesterday that looks at blogging from a corporate perspective but dovetails Fred's post.

The BIG MESH UP 

Everything Fred says about blogging, tagging, feeds, etc, is right on target and can be applied on a much greater scale within organizations to improve collaboration and open innovation. The big mashup so to speak. Although the biggest problem there is the lack of information culture. Heck, some people, many in orgs, still do not "get" email. One more thing, someone commented on Fred's post that they thought blogs would eventually replace email, I think so too!

From Fred's post... 

First there's self tagging. That is when the person making the post contributes some descriptive tags to the post.

Second, when they are aggregated like Technorati does, they provide a much better way to search the blog world.

The second kind of tagging is user tagging. That's what del.icio.us and others offer. This is when the person consuming the content contributes a tag.

But there are other reasons for user tagging that are developing quickly. One that I like to talk about is tagging mp3s that are available on the Internet so that they are delivered to your friend's iPod.

Or tagging a recipe that I find on the Internet so that they are delivered to the Gotham Gal's MyYahoo page in hopes that she'll make it for dinner.

Tagging describes the content so it can be found, shared, delivered, and consumed.

Tagging extends the notion of subscribing because in addition to subscribing to a blog, you can subscribe to a tag.

When the posts get categorized via tags (whether self tagged or user tagged), the tags themselves become RSS feeds. That's how I get the mp3s delivered to my friend's iPod.

I believe that together posting, subscribing, and tagging will profoundly change the worlds of media, entertainment, commerce, and communication.

We are five years into the posting revolution, two to three years into the subscribing revolution, and maybe one year into the tagging revolution. We are just looking at the tip of the iceberg in terms of what can be done with these techniques.

So join the blogging revolution and get busy posting, subscribing, and tagging.

Bonus: Productivity Tips For Avid Blog Readers from ToDone.