CIO Magazine provided a brief, but useful, summary on enterprise tagging in the article The Name Game by Michael Fitzgerald. It covers IBM’s Dogear that I have written about before but there was also an interesting reference to another tagging effort at IBM at Thinkplace. An excerpt from the article is below:
“ThinkPlace originally classified ideas using terms from IBM's official taxonomies for content such as industry and products. But "we observed the users and saw that the terms they used didn't always match" the formal taxonomy, she says. So IBM created a way for users to enter keywords, or tags, that would be appended to the suggested terms from the formal taxonomy and thereby improve their ability to find relevant ideas. The results have been promising, says Arbusto. "You can see what your colleagues are interested in," she says. "From a collaboration and knowledge-sharing perspective, that's what's neat about folksonomies."
There is more in the article. I think that tagging will be a great enterprise application. IBM is considering making Dogear a product and has indicated that customer response is quite positive. The CIO article said that Chris Fralic, vice president of business development at Del.icio.us, told the author that a number of companies had contacted del.icio.us before Yahoo purchased it, looking for a corporate version of its tagging tools. It will be interesting to see who gets first to market here and who becomes the dominant player, just as del.icio.us did on the interenet.
Thanks to Tomoaki Sawada for sending me a link to this article.
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