More on H20 Playlist as a Social Bookmarking Tool for Business

I have written about the H20 Playlist, a social bookmarking tool that the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School has developed, see The Berkman Center’s H20 Project – Creating Innovative Learning Environments. I think it is a tool that fits well into the business environment. Here are some more thoughts. First, social bookmarking can provide a number of benefits to the organization:

• Enabling topical resource lists than can be personalized and shared – creating personal “knowledge management” systems through lists of winning sales proposals, best practice deliverables, etc. around specific topics or work efforts

• Offering support to online workgroup activity through integration or connection with team work spaces

• Enhancing individual or team profiles to let others know what content the individual or team considers important

• Facilitating discovery of employees or teams with similar interests or facing similar issues

• Measuring popularity of intranet documents and their authors through numbers of tags

H20 Playlists have more structure than del.icio.us and this makes the service a good candidate or model for business use. Each Playlist has a title with its own URL separate from its tags, which makes it a unique entity that can be shared as a whole, a key feature for business applications. You can also rearrange your Playlist to reflect changing priorities instead of being limited to the reverse chronological order in delicio.us. There can be headings and subheadings. Like iTunes, a person sets up a library of all their links, and then creates Playlists on different topics that draw on these links, adding to the flexibility. You can search to see all the Playlists that contain an item, as well all the comments that others have made about the item.

How could Playlists work within a business? Individual project teams can collectively create Playlists to support their work. These can be attached to their wiki or blog. They can be shared and discussed at virtual meetings. At the enterprise or division level, a knowledge manager can create an ongoing library of links to critical documents with annotations on their importance. These could be drawn from the best of team Playlists. Then official enterprise Playlists can be developed that represent the best thinking on specific issues that are important to the company.

Employees or teams can download Playlists to fit their work needs. Then, they can make these Playlists once again personal as they engage in work activities by modifying them with both new annotations on the usefulness of existing links, as well as new links. Anyone in the firm, including the original knowledge manager, can access these new derived Playlists to enhance their own or add back into the official enterprise Playlist on the topic for continuous improvement.

The ability to stay current is facilitated by the Playlist feature that allows you to see what Playlists are being derived from existing ones, as well as what Playlists are influenced by others. With tagging behind the firewall, the best thinking in the firm can become more transparent and constantly updated to the benefit of all. Knowledge is easily shard and communities can consolidate their key documents and resources.

I have been talking several clients about social bookmarking through tools like Playlist and there seems to be good interest. Tomorrow I am going to share my own experiences with H20 Playlists and my Playlists on Web 2.0 topics. enterprise tagging

Comments

[Lee Kraus]

I saw H20 a few weeks back and thought it was a really interesting project. Do you think businesses will try to measure the use of these tools? Will they conduct ROI and put a dollar amount on the productivity gains?

[bill Ives]

Lee - Thanks for your comment. If organizations see playtlist as siimply a useful utility like the phone or word processing they may not do ROI. If they do look at ROI it is best done by aligning the tool with a business process and see how it improves the process. In this case the ROI measure should be aorund an aspect of process improvement and not generic time saving. Bill

[John Tropea]

Hi,

I posted on Social lists including H2O
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2006/09/12/all-about-social-lists/

[Lee Kraus]

That's true. Assuming that a mature company with resources uses a software system to monitor workflow processes. i.e. processing customer requests. Then associating a playlist with "processing customer requests" and tracking the playlist's use and activity (changes or derivative works) could allow a company to at least infer that the playlist intervention had some impact on the workflow process?

Just thinking about it outloud... Thanks.

[Brent W]

Wow, great idea. I always need to share links with people at work. Would H2O from upon this? They describe themselves as 'a web-based home for educational collaborations.' The content would still have to
be very worth-while educationally, I would think.

[bill Ives]

Brent - It is a free tool. There are some conditions for use. It is also open source and you used to be able to get the source code. I am not sure of the current status. I used it for a while and still have my play lists. The navigation could be improved and if it was a commercial product I am sure it would be. I would encourage you to see how it stands now. Bill