De.lirio.us intranet folksonomies

Following my reference to Shel Holtz's remark about intranet folksonomies the other day, a colleague directed me to de.lirio.us, a del.icio.us-like social bookmarks application that can run on intranets.

I have high expectations of intranet folksonomies as powerful alternatives to traditional search engines. However, as with all social applications, its success will depend on users' participation.

Why are folksonomies, or social bookmarking, or user-driven categorization, so promising?

People search in different ways. Every person has their unique search strategy. We tend to organize things in our heads by creating mental maps. We invent categories, or labels, or tags, for ourselves. This is how we structure our perception of the world.

Personal taxonomies

When we search information, we tend to use the mental maps and vocabularies that reflect how we understand the world. Since these vocabularies are so personal, it is an eternal challenge for designers of online content applications to categorize in such a way that most people are likely to find what they are looking for.

Folksonomies offer part of the solution to the problem that people search in different ways. By allowing readers to tag or categorize pieces of content, it is likely that similar readers will find the information they are looking for by searching with similar tags.

Let's consider Wikipedia's entry on 'folksonomy':

[STARTS]
Folksonomy, a portmanteau word that combines "folk" and "taxonomy," refers to the on-the-fly classifications (called tags or keywords) that Internet users freely invent to categorize the objects with which they interact online.

Social software makes these classifications available to other Internet users, often by means of a tag cloud, a list of user-developed tags. For this reason, folksonomy can be viewed as a distributed classification system. Examples of folksonomy-enabled social software include Furl, Flickr, and Del.icio.us.
(...)
[t]he term folksonomy has been attributed to Thomas Vander Wal.
(...)
Folksonomy may hold the key to developing a Semantic Web (Wikipedia entry - JS), in which every Web page contains machine-readable metadata that describes its content. Such metadata would dramatically improve the precision (the percentage of relevant documents) in search engine retrieval lists.
(...)
In contrast to top-down controlled vocabularies such as Dublin Core (Wikipedia entry - JS), folksonomy is a distributed classification system with low entry costs.
(...)
Since folksonomies are user-generated and therefore inexpensive to implement, advocates of folksonomy believe that it provides a useful low-cost alternative to more traditional, institutionally supported taxonomies or controlled vocabularies. An employee-generated folksonomy could therefore be seen as an "emergent enterprise taxonomy".
[ENDS]

If you are unfamiliar with the concept of folksonomy and social bookmarking, allow yourself to spend an hour or so on del.icio.us, listen to the ETech 2005 panel podcast 'Folksonomy' on ITconverstions with Joshua Schachter (del.icio.us), Stewart Butterfield (Flickr), Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia) and Clay Shirky, and read Bruce Sterling's article 'Order Out of Chaos' on Wired.

Then start pushing for de.lirio.us on your own intranet.

Comments

[Marc]

very info.mati.us post.

Check out the new web-based intranet social bookmarking application at http://www.socialmarc.com

Thanks!