Stowe Boyd points (via David Weinberger) to a discussion regarding the potential of tagging within companies.
Who would tag their content?
How (with what software) would they tag it?
What's in it for the taggers? (the del.icio.us lesson)?
What would the discovery solutions look like?
Is there a critical mass number of users to make internal, behind-the-firewall tagging successful?
And if so, what is that number?
And if there is a number, does that mean only companies with x number of employees can play tag?
Managed or organic taxonomies (or both)?
Tagging has already proven itself on the wider Net, I think it’s only inevitable that it will make its way to the enterprise. Not so much for mission-critical applications at first since there aren’t any standardized processes in place for using tags (yet), but as a way for ambitious individuals to make an impact on their company. It’s going to take the early adopters using tags in the enterprise before the rest of the company catches on and sees the value created by those people tagging. It’s also going to require the first killer Web/Enterprise 2.0 application, which I don’t think is even on the map yet.
The company I work for has been actively researching tagging behind our corporate firewall as means for improving on what you might call our Knowledge Management process.
The way we look at it, is that especially because we are in a closed environment, the chances that you will be able to effectively navigate on a different plane inside your organization using tags are far much greater in an open environment (which is subject to context pollution).
The second thing that really is a killer feature of tagging behind a firewall (in a closed environment that is), is context. Since we know far more then in an open environment about different entities we are able to leverage this during the search process.
The third thing that is really cool is about tagging ‘everything’, not just urls (although you might argue everything should be available through a url in the semantic web ideology). We can tag our customers, our projects, certain skills or interests that I think somebody has, you name it. We have the data, we can display it. Now we can actually have everybody tag it.
I will write a bit more about what we are trying to accomplish on my blog in a few days.
thanks for the comments Jason and Waseem. Exciting days ahead!
We’ve proposed a session at Mind Camp 2.0 on tagging in the enterprise. Contact me at mbraly at gmail dot com and maybe we could set up a quick call with you, Geoff and I before Saturday?
Michael, good chatting last night. Look forward to Saturday.