Web 2.0 Galore: Social Tags & Bookmarks

Web 2.0 is everywhere. Nowadays you can't click on a link without stumbling across a blog, wiki, tag, RSS feed, networking site, digg button or AJAX app - even if you have no clue what those terms mean. If you are wondering about the manyfold Web 2.0 goodies out there, you might be interested in two of my recent posts in my own blog (Web 2.0 Essentials: What is it? and Web 2.0 Essentials: How to Get Started).

Today, I will concentrate on two specific Web 2.0 topics that are a little more abstract than blogs and wikis: Social tagging and bookmarking. As a recent Wall Street Journal article has demonstrated, this odd couple just came down from Mount Geek to the Mainstream Valley.

Tags - More Than Meets the Eye

Tags are a good example of metadata - data describing data, giving it structure and meaning. If book in a library contains data, then its reference card contains metadata - for example a book called "Delicious vegetarian dishes from India" might keywords such as "cooking", "lifestyle", "Asia" and "vegetarians". Tags are very similar to such keywords, as they describe web content in simple terms. The Black Belt Dojo site could be tagged "blog", "internal communications", "certification", "community", and so on, while individual blog posts could be described with more specific terms ("Liam's ramblings", "Sue's adventures"). The important point about these tags is that they are visible to readers (which, for those who know HTML a little, meta keywords are not - they are visible only to search engines).

So what? Well, the fact that tags are visible allows them to become a common language for those interested in the content. People writing about the same things will start using the same tags, and search engines will be able to pull these tags together into comprehensive link lists. Individual tags become social tags - a shared nomenclature to describe and find content. That's the secret of the great blog indexing service Technorati: Instead of analyzing content via programmed algorithms (as Google does), Technorati relies primarily on social tags to retrieve blog entries for you.

In other words: Tags allow communities to structure the internet.

Social Bookmarks: Shared Knowledge

Enter social bookmarks. Let's say you are working on several computers throughout your week: A desktop PC in your work office and a laptop at home. The websites you visit are often the same, so you need the same bookmarks on both machines - a cumbersome synchronizing process if done by hand. Luckily enough, there are services that allow you to store your bookmarks online: That way, they are stored on a central server accessible from anywhere in the world.

Once your bookmarks are stored safely online, you may have the desire to share some of them with a friend or colleague; in fact, some of your bookmarks are so great that you would like to share them with whomever you wants to know about them. So you strip your online bookmark repository from its privacy settings, so everyone can look at (most of) them. Furthermore you describe each and every one of them with useful tags - that way, they become clustered into categories and searchable.

Once the bookmarks are free for other people to search and access, a clever online bookmark service can make a ranking of all published bookmarks into a "bookmark hit list". They might even go one step further and allow these users to rate the bookmarks on their quality.

Voilà: Bookmarks + shared online repository + tags + ranking = Social Bookmarking. These services exist, and they are called del.icio.us, digg, reddit, NewsVine or StumbleUpon, and they - or rather: their users - are driving the way news are made newsworthy. That's the way internet buzz is created nowadays (or did you think that the cute video of a cat playing the piano was found by a FT reporter?).

Social Tags/Bookmarks and Internal Comms

Still there? Great, because social tags and bookmarks are relevant for internal communications, especially intranets. If a company gives its employees the possibility to tag intranet (and internet!) content, it will be much easier for them to find relevant news sources. Giving them the option to share their bookmarks will increase knowledge sharing without much effort and increase their productivity. Finance employees can share their links to currency converters, while production managers can post their favorite links to process optimization roadmaps. Intranets don't have to rely on machine-driven search results and can navigate the tags and shared links from their colleagues.

Ergo: Social tags and bookmarks are knowledge management in action.

Our Very Own Link Repository

For the internal communications community, I propose to share our bookmarks. I have set up a del.icio.us account for us blackbelts, to be found under http://del.icio.us/internal_comms. You can share your own bookmarks by including them (contact me for password info), or, if you are a del.icio.us user, you can share your bookmarks network with this group. That way, we can stay updated on great IC links through a simple URL.

[Read more about Web 2.0: Web 2.0 Essentials: What is it?]
[Read more about Web 2.0: Web 2.0 Essentials: How to Get Started]
[Read a WSJ article about social bookmarking: The Wizards of Buzz ]

Comments

[sue]

Hi Timm

Thanks for such a comprehensive explanation. I have to admit I find it difficult to get my head around this stuff. Even after trying really hard and reading the post three times, it's not sinking in. (although I like the idea that Liam 'rambles' and I 'have adventures'!)

Do you think all comms people have to start getting fully up to speed with these types of concepts? When I was back at ntl with a techie wizard in my team, I just used to look over in his general direction every time we needed something and not worry at all that I knew nothing about it myself. It was his specialist area, and in fact we had to deliberately buddy somebody up with him in the team, because we were well and truly exposed when he was out of the office.

These days I do find myself worrying that I could get left behind if I don't get up to speed with the tech side of things. Is that right? Should the ins and outs of social media become part of our normal language? Or can we stick at the level of blogs and RSS and look for the specialists to pick up the rest?

Sue

[Fiona Gibson]

Wow. Thanks Timm. I'm similar to Sue (although I tend to ramble and not have adventures...) in that I've unwittingly become a technophobe. Never thought I'd say that. Your explanation is very clear and makes a lot of sense - perfect for my little brain! It may have been a pain to write and do all of those handy links, but I finally feel as if I understand a little bit of 'new' technology (am well aware I'm some way behind pushing the envelope of new technology...). Sue - I've gone from having a techie (thank you Mark Mazza) to having to be one - nothing motivates you more than having someone breathing down your neck, expecting you to know what's going on!

[Timm]

First of all sorry for the rather long post - I probably should have split that topic into two seperate ones (social tags / social bookmarks). The problem is that it the underlying principles are quite abstract and tough to explain.

Not getting any comments for a couple of days got me seriously worried if my post was just completely incomprehensible. @Fiona: Thanks, and congratulations for making it through the text!

@Sue: You raise a good point - should IC people be expected to know all this, or would it be better if they relied on techies to make it work. In my opinion, IC professionals should at least know what the possibilities and implications of social media are - but not how they set up in detail. Usability is similar: If you are responsible for an intranet site, you should be familiar with usability principles (for instance what a good navigation looks like), but don't need to know details of color schemes and search button positioning. That's where usability experts come in (and I'm certain all of you are employing those to design and test your intranets!).

In the end, social media is based on one simple question: How can I share information with other people? If you know that question and some of the tools available (social tags and bookmarks are just two of them), everything else will fall into place.

[Sue]

Thanks Timm, and for the record I think it's a great post. Unfortunately on my 'I find it really hard to get my head around this' subjects (anything involving figures, technology or geography) I need someone beside me patiently explaining things very slowly and in words of one syllable before it goes in. So the fault is with my dimness, not your writing.

We need these kind of explanations. I asked the question about 'what do we need to know', because whilst I see the same experts talking about social media at every conference and hear endless discussions about it, whenever we talk about it on Black Belt we're met with blank looks.

It's a very hot topic, but it's also hard to get a grasp of the extent to which people are actively using social media in IC, and how much of a problem it is if we're not using it and we don't really understand it either.