Insights About: Enterprise Folksonomies

I would like to share some different insights and thoughts about the use of folksonomies in enterprises that I personally find interesting.

Joshua Porter, “Why we can’t compare folksonomies to search”:

"In Search, we have no idea who the results belong to before we get to them. They are simply the most relevant results to whatever words we type in. Highly useful, of course. But not Personal. In folksonomies, on the other hand, we get to discover content based on who is tagging it. This is powerful because now we can judge content in terms of who is tagging it, and not just how relevant it might be to some algorithm that doesn’t take into account who-knows-who. Just like the movies, we tend to value the judgments of people we know (or are familiar with online) more than people we don’t know"

Bob Archer, “Folksonomy tagging for the greater good”:

"I believe there is real value in folksonomy in the corporate world. This content tagging approach will allow employees, including the content creators, a simple means to define content as easily as it is created. While traditional search engines would only index the content on the page, or the file structure the page exists in, folksonomy would allow tagging of content beyond this. Tagging also distributes the time consuming process of creating and classifying content beyond the content creator...//…it offers enormous potential solving the content dilemma facing corporate intranets."

Mark Thristan, "Enterprise Distributed Categorisation: I Get on the Folksonomy Bandwagon":

"It strikes me that the flat categorisation of a folksonomy could be clustered and analysed using the same techniques as are used for a card-sort, and that key, popular categories coming out of a distributed categorisation exercise could be used to form the structure of an intitial taxonomy"

Sandro Groganz, “Folksonomy in the Enterprise: Will it pay off?":

“Additionally, there are different levels of confidentiality concerning corporate information: Some of it is for all employees, other only for the top management, certain teams, etc. This fragments the group-dynamics due to confidentiality gaps especially in large enterprises, who could actually profit from a broad collective intelligence when it comes to a high quality folksonomy."

Luis Suarez, "Tagging beyond content applications and people":

"What actually happens when you go beyond the tagging of applications and their different components and you start tagging people?...//…Now with tagging, and specially, with tagging people we would have the opportunity to perhaps locate that expertise a lot easier since we are the ones in control not only from the perspective of being able to add different tags ourselves, thus bringing a dynamic aspect to all of it, but also at the same time by being able ourselves to add the tags with which we would want people to be able to find us."

Michael Fitzgerald, "Tagging Tools Offer Powerful Way to Organize Information":

"No taxonomy can come up with every term employees might have for something. But with tagging, users gain the flexibility to work outside the taxonomy. "

Dominic Sayers, "Tagging in the corporate environment, part 2":

"I claim that the visibility of the tag is a real concern for corporate taggers. In an investment banking environment we are not allowed even to list the transactions that the advisory teams are working on because that knowledge is market-sensitive. A tag could easily give the game away."

Andrew McAfee, "FastForwarding to a Better Understanding, Part 3"

"...users are going to vote with their feet when it comes to collaboration technologies. They're going to adopt the ones that make the most sense for them, not for any greater good. Some corporate technologies can and should be imposed on their users. But how would you effectively mandate that employees collaborate primarily via wikis, or tag lots of pages so that a corporate folksonomy develops, or trade in the internal prediction market? The idea itself seems a little ridiculous."

David Millen, Jonathan Feinberg, and Bernard Kerr, "Social Bookmarking in the Enterprise"

"The success of social software applications, in general, requires participation to reach critical mass to provide value to users and to ensure a sustainable level of contribution and vibrant interaction. Real-name identity may discourage some people from using the system, and private bookmarks will significantly reduce the benefits of information sharing among users. For a large enterprise, however, we believe that the ability to reach critical mass will not present a problem"

Shamus McGillicuddy, "Social Bookmarking: Pushing Collaboration to the Edge":

"Unlike some other "new Internet" collaborative applications (often referred to as Web 2.0), such as wikis and blogs, enterprise social bookmarking technology still hasn't reached the enterprise market. Unfortunately, while there are companies rapidly adopting technologies such as Ajax and RSS, experts say many organizations are slow to deploy the more interactive, bottom-up concepts associated with Web 2.0, including social bookmarking."

“…bookmarking allows companies to apply metadata to information such as competitive intelligence that may have limited long-term value but is extremely valuable in the short term. Such short-term information is often difficult to capture with enterprise content management tools.”