intranet librarian Darlene FichterNorthern Lights Internet Solutions, Ltd.

Intranet Applications for Tagging and Folksonomies

M n explosion of metadata, created by users of social software applications inZriSthe past year, suggests that it's definitely time to take a careful look at how toharness the power of tagging and folksonomies inside the firewall. Tags and re-sources in social software tools are intended to he shared with everyone to helpdiscover new resources, which is in line with intranet goals. It's time for intranetWebmasters to consider rolling out some testbed applications.

All the buzz about tagging in the media and on Weblogs is enough to make anyexperienced intranet Webmaster feel wary but excited. It reminds me ofthe Gartnerhype cycle, where new technologies are announced and hyped in the press untilthey reach the status of "superheroes" that will save all of mankind. If we hop on thebandwagon too early, we risk riding the hype wave and falling into the trough of de-spair. On the other hand, we don't want to sit on the sidelines, failing to innovate.We should strive to make the best use of new technologies coming down the pipe.

J All the buzz

about tagging in

the media and

on Weblogs is

enough to make

any experienced

intranet

Webmaster

feel wary,

but excited.

TAGGING AS A SOCIAL PHENOMENONBecause folksonomies are not taxonomies, they lack many ofthe latter's

strengths and benefits. Lou Rosenfeld [http://louisrosenfeld.com/home/bloug_archive/000330.html] states: "Folksonomies... don't support searching and othertypes of browsing nearly as well as tags from controlled vocabularies applied byprofessionals." Liz Lawley [http://many.corante.com/archives/2005/01/20/social_consequences_of_social_tagglng.php] simply calls it "lowest-common-denominator-classification." I won't attempt to catalog all the weaknesses of folk-sonomies; I'd rather highlight a few. Folksonomies are flat and unstructured. Tagsare messy. They lack precision and have no ability to control synonyms or relatedterms. Is it bunny, bunnies, rabbit, Easter, or a proper name? Lots of other variantscome to mind: plural, singular, spelling errors, and typos. Different social softwaretools take different approaches to tags composed of multiple words resulting ineven more variations. Is it "San Francisco" or san_francisco or SanFrancisco?

Folksonomies have many strengths—if they didn't, that buzz about themwouldn't exist in the media and on blogs. First of all, lots of people are willing toadd tags. They even enjoy tagging, perhaps due to its social dimension. Metadatais fun! Imagine that! Individuals can see clear benefits in applying tags. The feed-back from the social community helps reinforce and encourage more tagging. Incontrast, efforts to have content creators apply structured metadata schemes toenhance knowledge sharing have often met resistance. The cognitive overhead oflearning and applying a structured taxonomy must be borne by the individual sothe group can reap the benefit. Large enterprises can easily have taxonomies orcontrolled vocabularies with a thousand or more terms. As your taxonomy growsand expands, it takes more time to select terms and to learn the system.

RashmiSinha [www.rashmisinha.com/archives/05_09/tagging-cognitive.html]states that "the beauty of tagging is that it taps into an existing cognitive process with-out adding... much cognitive cost." Tagging takes away the decision-making processof choosing the right category that can lead to a state of analysis-paralysis. You can

MAY I JUN 2006 ONL.INS 43

simply jot down associated concepts without wonderingwhether you have categorized the item in the correct bucket.

Applying structured taxonomies for collaborative knowledgesharing systems is frustrating because some items don't fit. Thiscould be because the concept or product is so new that no termshave been added to the taxonomy yet or that the object in ques-tion doesn't fall neatly into a category. In comparison, folk-sonomies are nimble and flexible. They can change quickly. Youcan add new terms at AAOU, and there's no need to jump throughseveral hoops to get new terms added or approved.

INTRANET APPLICATIONS OF FOLKSONOMIESAs an intranet Webmaster, you may be thinking, "So what

if people like to tag? They like to play video games too." Thereal question is: What are the benefits of tagging for the en-terprise? Can tagging help fmdability? The jury is still out onfmdability, but tagging certainly helps discoverability. It alsohelps with personal knowledge management. Individuals findtagging useful for keeping track of things they have found sothey can find them again. Tags also help with the discovery ofnew resources, as the hive mind uncovers and reveals newsources in topical areas that they choose to monitor. Discov-ering experts in a particular area is another application.

Are there initiatives underway in your own intranet andworkplace to create expertise finders and enhance corporatedirectories? Are your colleagues struggling to keep up withwhat's new in their areas and individually wading through aglut of new sites and resources? How easy is it for employeesto find things once on your intranet, and how easy is it forthem to find things there again a few days later? What kindsof tools do you provide to employees to help them collect andorganize interesting sites and resources they discover andthen share those resources with others?

Tim Bray [www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=1284406] posed questions about tagging on his blog. Ongo-ing, tbat strike right at the heart of the matter: "Are tags use-ful? Are there any questions you want to ask, or jobs you wantto do, where tags are part of the solution, and clearly workbetter than old-fashioned search?"

Without a doubt, tags are useful for objects that have noother metadata—photos, music, videos, schematics, dia-grams, slides, charts, and graphs. We can benefit from tag-ging anything without words. For public libraries this might

All time most popular tags

05 amsterdsm anrai animals architecture Sft sugust auStralia autumn baby barcelona

b e a c h benm b i r t h d a y a^a^ btackanctwhite blue boston buiwing bw Ca l i fo rn ia

cameraphone camping canada canon car cat cats Chicago china Chr is tmas

church city clouds color COnceit day dc december dog dogs england eUrOpe tall f S m J I y

festival Rorida fbwer flowers food france f r i e n d s fun garden gsougged germany

giri gratfiti green hal loween hawaii riuig holiday home honeymoon hongkong house indla

Ireland Italy January J 3 p 3 n juty mn* KldS lake landscs^ light lOflClOn losangeles macrO fTie

mexiCO mablog mounuint museum music n a t u r e n6W nSWyOrk newyorXclty nawzsaland

V^^ night park cheto portrait red r

Tags on a Flickr site show their reiative popularity by size of typeface.

mean a collection of local history photographs that aren't la-beled at all. For intranets it might mean digital objects wecan't find or share very easily.

Tags can also provide an overview of topics that are cur-rently of interest to many people at a given moment. Tagclouds, a visual representation of the tags that have beenapplied to objects, provide a weighted view of tags. The largerthe term in the tag cloud, the more frequently it has beenused. A quick visual scan of a tag cloud lets you spot dailytrends or trends over time.

LEARNING FROM OTHERSIntranet Webmasters can test-drive many of the social soft-

ware sites that support tagging. What works on the Internetwith an audience of billions of users may not translate to anintranet environment. Fortunately, there are a couple of pub-lic enterprisewide projects where we can peer over their shoul-ders. The Pennsylvania State University Library has rolled outa social bookmarking service called Penn Tags [http://tags.library.upenn.edu/] for its community. Anyone can browse theitems in the database, but only community members can addentries. The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at HarvardLaw School launched a social bookmarking site called H20Playlist [http://h2obeta.law.harvard.edu/].

In the corporate world, IBM is developing an enter-prisewide social bookmarking application called "dogear."According to the IBM Think Research home page ]www.research.ibm.com/thinkresearch], "Large companies oftenmiss opportunities because they fail to understand that suc-cess depends less on reporting structure and more on infor-mal Webs of contacts. IBM Research is promoting an ap-proach called social network analysis to reveal these hiddenconnections that drive how work gets done."

IBM already has a robust internal taxonomy and plans toaugment that with foLksonomies [http://iasummit.org/2005/finalpapers/106_Presentation.ppt]. It's not a case of a folk-sonomy replacing a taxonomy. IBM thinks that dogear has thepotential to help reveal the interests and expertise of co-work-ers in order to solve real-world problems, dogear can also helpfoster communities of practice and increase communication.

IBM's key design decisions when developing dogearinclude the following:

• For posting new entries, use real names instead of pseudo-nyms to help find people with similar interests and experts.

• Allow anyone to browse or search anonymously to spreadadoption.

• Create systems that support permission levels so that sen-sitive bookmark collections can be limited to specific indi-viduals or a group.

• Support private bookmarks for personal use so individualsare not forced to use two systems.

• Consider scoping tags and bookmarks based on workplaceroles to allow scoping of content and remixing.

• Set up notification systems like RSS and e-mail subscrip-tions so that subscribers can keep up with new resources.

44 www.onlinemag.net

• Build recommender systems that suggest other bookmarkcollections or resources that might interest you.

• Design the tagging tool to allow for easy remixing and datamining of content

The ability to remix content from the social bookmarkingtools opens the doors to re-using this information in the en-terprise search results. Lists of tagged resources or tag cloudscould be remixed and added to team- or role-based pages onyour intranet. Tag information could also be embedded inthe corporate phone book and directory, providing insightsinto an individual's expertise.

TAGGING IN THE DIGITAL LIBRARYAt Lucent, Michael Angeles uses bookmarking tools to

meet the needs of digital library users. The company needsa way to clip and save useful articles. It also wants a simpleway to republish links to the articles on the corporate portal.Many social bookmarking applications have built-in toolsbuilt in that create RSS feeds by topic or bookmark account.Republishing these requires stepping through a process ofsetting up tools to convert RSS to HTML. Learning to stepthrough this process was a barrier for digital library users.They wanted to drive the car, not tune the engine. Angelesworked with a programmer to develop an easier system forthese users to repost content. Now they simply cut and pastea custom JavaScript code dynamically created for each tag orcategory into a Web page in the spot where they want theheadlines to appear [http://urlgreyhot.com/personal/node/2463].

Tags don't need to be added at the time the document iscreated or even by the creator. Tags could be created by manypeople in ways that are meaningful to them at any time. ShelHoltz [http://blog.holtz.com/index.php/Weblog/folksonomies_on_intranets] thinks that tagging has greatpotential for intranets in overcoming the "wide gap betweenhow employees think about information and the way theowners of the information classify it." What if all your em-ployees could tag pages on the intranet as well as Internet sites,digital library objects, etc.? Take a look at the BBC Backstage[http://bbctags.headshift.com/], which shows a working proto-type of the BBC site that allows visitors to tag articles.

What if you could build, mine, and repackage tags fromyour social bookmarking tool and dynamically show tags foreach intranet page? What if your library catalog could displaytags as well? Would a book tag cloud mined from links thatpeople make to Amazon and the library catalog be a usefuladdition to the library Web site? Would showing a small tagcloud of terms in the vernacular of your Web site visitors helpothers discover related content?

FOLKSONOMY TESTBED PROJECTSSeveral factors contribute to the success or failure of any

new intranet service. Carefully assess the potential audienceand the need for this new service. Are you solving a real prob-lem that people have, like Michael Angeles did? How readyis your organization to embrace new ideas and try new tools?

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The tags visitors have added to a particular BBC article

Are they reluctant or eager? Do you have a culture that sup-ports and rewards sharing knowledge?

Scale impacts the success of a "social" software project.No one has identified the number of people needed to reachcritical mass for an enterprisewide initiative. However, don'tassume that if you have a small workplace, tagging is impos-sible. You can start small and support the needs of one teamor group that need to collaborate and share resources. If youwant to roll out a large enterprise initiative, one way toachieve that scale might be to discover how many people aretagging content already that you can harvest. Are employeeswriting Weblogs and assigning categories? Do they use socialhookmark tools that publish RSS feeds that you could remix?Take a look at some of the free bookmark tools that you caninstall locally that could be adapted for internal use like Scuttle[www.scuttle.com], Nature Publishing Group's Connotea[www.connotea.org] and Unalog [unalog.com].

FUTURE DIRECTIONSFolksonomies and tagging are in their infancies. New fea-

tures are constandy popping up. This is the time of experi-mentation and rapid development. For example, somesocial bookmarking tools have started to suggest tags thatyou might use based on tags already assigned to this re-source. Whether this is a positive feature or not depends onyour point of view.

Several people have speculated about how combiningfolksonomies and structured taxonomies might help im-prove fmdability. Consider mapping a keyword search on theintranet against tagged resources for that term, full-textsearch results, and controlled vocabularies. Are there someinteresting new ways to combine and cluster results? Oftenthere is a chasm as wide as the Grand Canyon between theuser's vernacular and the controlled terms in library recordsor tbe intranet taxonomy. Tagging and folksonomy usagecould bridge that gap.

Darlene Fichter lfichter@lights.coml is president of Northern LightsInternet Solutions, Ltd. Comments? E-mail letters to the editor tomarydee@xmission.com.

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