www.josschuurmans.com

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.

Brilliant hacks on Steve Rubel's Micro Persuasion

Playing around on del.icio.us the other day, I ran into a blog entry by Steve Rubel on his blog 'Micro Persuasion': 'Ten Technorati Hacks'. Absolutely brilliant. Start right here to get the best out of Technorati.

So I bookmarked Steve's blog and before posting this entry I went back to see his latest. I don't know how he does it, but I gotta tell ya, this is the best resource to blogging I've found so far. For example, check out his entry 'Ten Blogging Hacks' from Sunday.

Somewhat related on www.josschuurmans.com:

• Reading about del.icio.us (October 19, 2005)
• Technorati tracks the books conversation (August 4, 2005)
• 10 answers to "Why blog?" (June 5, 2005)

Reading about del.icio.us

Del.icio.us (damn it's hard to spell that name repeatedly!) is a social bookmarks system. Yeah, that's right.

It's an online tool that lets you collect, categorize, sort and describe bookmarks of Web pages, independent of your browser or other off-line bookmarks manager. That's a convenient tool, as it lets you retrieve your personal bookmarks from any Net-connected machine with a Web browser.

What makes del.icio.us a social system is its ability to let you see the links that others have collected, as well as showing you who else has bookmarked a specific site. You can also view the links collected by others, and subscribe to the links of people whose lists you find interesting.

This social aspect makes it a typical "Web 2.0" service, I suppose. The possibility to browse the  favorite bookmarks of the colllective del.icio.us users is potentially a pretty powerful offering. It's the power of sharing information about information.

Another proposition that I'm interested to explore is del.icio.us' RSS feeds. Curious if I could add them to my blog as sort of an advanced blogroll. So here's my own bookmarks page: del.icio.us/JosSchuurmans

Somewhat related on www.josschuurmans.com:

• Time is a blogger's ultimate filter (October 3, 2005)
• The unfulfilled needs that Memeorandum addresses (September 28, 2005)
• FOAFing the Semantic Web (September 21, 2005)