Social Bookmarking in the Enterprise – IBM’s Internal Tagging Tool - Dogear

I wrote about IBM’s internal book marking tool. Dogear, a while back after first seeing it at an IBM media event, see IBM’s Social Software Initiatives: Blogs, Wikis, Tagging, and More – Part Three- Internal Applications. Here is some more on this media event by Mike Gotta, an industry analyst who writes a blog, Collaborative Thinking.

Now I found a comprehensive article, Social Bookmarking in the Enterprise, by the three creators, David Millen, Jonathan Feinberg, and Bernard Kerr. David did the presentation that I attended and I heard that Jonathan and Bernard did the construction. This tool is sometimes described as like del.icio.us inside the firewall. I just signed up for the real del.icio.us and was pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to use.

The authors begin their article with this sentence which really rings true to me. “One of the greatest challenges facing people who use large information spaces is to remember and retrieve items that they have previously found and thought to be interesting.” This is the most important reason why I do my blog. It is my personal knowledge management system. But then a quicker way for some stuff can be tagging. I just signed up for del.icio.us and was pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to use. It will not replace the personal KM function of my blog but it will allow me to easily keep links in one place. They provide a clear description of the social bookmarking tools, like del.icio.us up front. Then they look at the issue of tagging inside an enterprise. This is where Dogear comes in.

One of the first design decisions was to provide the real identity of those who create tags so that users could make inferences about the interest and expertise of other participants. They felt that this would help build communities of common interests which is a good thing. Being an enterprise they also allowed for role-based collections of tags. They provided an RSS feed to notify additions to collections selected by the recipient. They added collaborative filtering to infer stuff that people might want and let them know about it. They also looked at potential integration points such as with the enterprise search engine.

In their pilot the authors used social networking analysis to look for patterns of shared interest, as well as those who are providers of tags and those who are seekers. They also said that the enterprise bloggers have been talking about it so that must be a good thing. I think this tool shows great promise and I look forward to see where it goes. enterprise 2.0 enterprise tagging

Comments

[Luis Suarez]

Great post, Bill ! Thanks for sharing it with us. I am not sure what has happened but yesterday I created a weblog post in my weblog as a Trackback and it looks like it didn't go through as it is not showing over here. Either way, as I said, I created a weblog post on the subject to try to expand further a bit and you can find the link over here: http://www.elsua.net/2006/02/24/social-bookmarking-in-the-enterprise-%e2%80%93-ibm%e2%80%99s-internal-tagging-tool-dogear-as-a-weblog-engine/.

[Patrick Cormier]

Hello Bill - I do not think the trackback will make it through, so here's my answer:

http://imbok.blogspot.com/2006/04/favorite-articles-on-tagging.html