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