acidlabs

I’ve been chatting with Thomas Vander Wal online for ages. I consider him one of those guys of whom I am all of a fan, a colleague and a guy I’d be glad to have a beer with after work. Today, Thomas went through some issues for us with respect to social bookmarking and the value for organisations.

Here are Thomas’ key takeaways in terms of defining and developing value:

• provide guidance in context to assist unfamiliar users - Amazon’s guidance for tag usage is a great example
• light usage has real value - users and objects that tag or are tagged infrequently still have great (long tail) value
• personal, collective, collaborative - individual voices collect together, sometimes collaborating on a shared end goal
• provide many use cases - develop, conceptualise and deliver as many use cases for as many levels of your organisation for social tool use, particularly management who you may need to justify your efforts to
• continually highlight success stories - use real, personal stories about how people are using the tools to make their jobs better
• move to pervasive tag tool integration - make all your tools able to export and import the social bookmarking
• integrate with search - in particular, integration that surfaces up relationships you have with others in terms of valuing results

Thomas moved on then to a section entitled Too Much Info. He discussed some issues around failures of tagging tools, including propensity of single and sometimes meaningless, e.g. “document”, tags, overly simple solutions (some complexity is needed), lack of context and sociality, e.g. who is “fred563”, what is “group27”? He also noted that good tools also have functionality such as self-stemming and meaning, e.g. tag, tags, tagging, tagger, social bookmark, folksonomy (noting he coined the word).

Moving to solutions, Thomas provided some ideas for us:

• have tools encourage people to use more than one tag
• have tools be able to identify overuse, e.g. “you’ve used document as a tag for 150 items, would you like to add variants or tags with deeper meaning?”
• use a taxonomist who understands folksonomies to help you introduce occasional new terms to your taxonomy and to help make sense and structure of your folksonomy
• use context to build meaning, e.g. who is talking about or tagging this, what else is this tagged as
• identify facets that exist, but do it in an automated way, e.g. identify names/people, places, times, geolocality, and make it simple enough (Skikkit was identified as a good, functional example)
• aggregate tags across tools by providing functionality in and across applications to tag and to retrieve and gather from other tools
• focus on refindability

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