Social bookmarking and tagging at today’s Boston KM Forum meeting

Suzanne O Minassian  June 25 2008 04:18:30 PM

Today I attended a meeting of the Boston Knowledge Management Forum where the topic of the day was "Categorization and Tagging: Where's the Beef". The majority of the discussion fell into a few 'categories' of its own.  Bill Ives was our first speaker and gave a great talk about the concept of emergence in enterprise 2.0.  He quoted Andrew McAfee: "The dominant verb for IT in the 80s and 90s was IMPOSE.  The new verb for enterprise 2.0 is EMERGE."   Not surprisingly, discussion arose on bridging the gap between emergent user patterns and information and imposed / hierarchical information.  The debate for imposed structures and categorization was to aid search and retrieval, as several taxonomists in the room pointed out.  I felt compelled to share the IBM intranet method for surfacing user contributed content in context to standard search results as an alternative method of discovering information. We're finding great success with this approach, as it allows users to discover social content, people, and tags even if they never entered into the social bookmarks, blogs, or other areas at all.  Bill also mentioned Dogear in his talk as an enterprise grade social bookmarking tool.  

Another talk I enjoyed was David Hobbie of Goodwin Procter.   What I like most was that, like Bill, there was no "product pitching" here.  David walked us through what his company needed in a social software tool, what their use cases were, and what challenges they see to adoption.  He brought the information scatter / flood issue into context by talking about their inability to find 'stuff' - they can't find documents, they can't find internal experts and they are unaware of new work - and contrasted that to the fact that they are dealing with too much stuff - too much email, too many places to go look for information, and too many similar documents.  He also talked about driving forces in enterprise adoption and mentioned personal benefit as necessary for adoption.  Social bookmarking is a great example of this. Many users bookmark for their personal benefit, but the collective set of information is incredibly useful to the other users.

I'm looking forward to more from the KM Forum (whose meetings are held in Waltham at Bentley College if you're interested in attending).

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