Social Bookmarking - a easy to understand video

From time to time in this blog I've used Lee Lefevers excellent animations at Commoncraft to get over to people some of the basic principles of social bookmarking. I've used it now for the best part of 24 months and use this instead of book marks on my own web browsers.  If you were like me a novice at social bookmarking, then this is a very good primer.

For me I can definitely see this having a use within a Enterprise setting - imagine that you have a skills based community covering an issue. There are no doubt web sites that cover this issue and you can save these social bookmarks to a group using a tag. As an example I am a member of a Mac user group. A number of us have set up a group and lets call it WMUG. By using a tag called for:WMUG everyone who subscribes to that group can see what people have posted as a bookmark - how it has been tagged but of course you can also see what bookmarks they have as well as those that they are really interested in.

The tags are also useful as they utilise the language that people who are interested in a particular issue say macs will talk, such as Leopard, Finder, Dock, Stacks, Time Machine. This is what is known as a folksonomy and breaks away from a taxonomic structure and gets people to use the language of their issue or interest.

I'd like to see this tried to support a community of practice or whatever name your organisation calls it. once again it breaks through the rigidity of corporate intranets and allows people of a certain interest to share information that they have found on the net.  I'm not decrying corporate intranets they do have a place within the organisation and maybe within the organisations own intranet, there are useful articles that can be tagged and shared within people within the organisation using a social bookmarking tool.

Enjoy the video and if you do share it, then ensure that you give Lee and Commoncraft the credit they deserve and consider how an easy social bookmarking might be used in your business

The information Revolution

This You Tube video is all about information and has been picked up by quite a number of KM Bloggers such as Shawn at Anecdote and Euan Semple at The obvious and so I thought that I'd put it on the blog for others to look at. I particularly like the comment towards the end when it says that we need to create information, allow it to be critiqued and organised. I've always been keen to use tags that have a folksonomic element in that it relates to the people within your sphere - all organisations have their own internal jargon and people tend to search for documents or information using that jargon. We really do have a change going in as we can find information and also by using systems such as Google Reader information can find us. The only hope is that we have the wisdom to choose wisely.

An interesting find to bring the human element into search facilities

I was browsing through Stumbleupon and came upon an article on cnet news highlighting a new programme launched by a company called Attendi. What this is a combination of a chat service and a search engine and I wondered whether this might have applications within knowledge management in an enterprise setting by bringing a human touch to the process.

I wonder whether this is a trend as I was reading in an American magazine which I subscribe to an article about a guy called Jason Calacanis who is developing a new search engine called Mahalo- who is hiring people who build search results by hand rather than relying on an algorithimic approach like Google. It's early days but an interesting trend to watch as people get overwhelmed by the information that Google provides look for and possibly pay for a customised service.

Anyway back to Attendi which highlights that it wants to dos something slightly different and to be the search engine that "bypasses Internet content and head straight for your brain." The aim is to provide answers for questions individuals have that have yet to be indexed on the Web.

Thinking about this in an enterprise setting - let us say that you want to find out for example how many widgets it takes to build a particular machine or what are the best precedents to use for a merger in Germany. A lot of internal search engines will bring up a collection of document with a variety of relevance to the issue that you are looking to find.

Searching on Attendi brings up a list of people who have volunteered to give information. Each person (or "Attendi") has a viewable profile. You can ask the system if you can chat with that person. If they are available online and respond, a chat window appears and you can ask them to share their expertise.

But answering the "Whats in it for me' question beloved of people when asking why they should share knowledge here's a thought.

Perhaps every time you answer a question or offer to share expertise this links into HR or even better you are ranked by your peers for the quality of your advice/information and you move up the rankings, this would be very useful say at appraisal time when your line manager looks at what you have done to share knowledge in the organisation . It would also be helpful for new starters to find out who the key players are.

Something I'd really like to work on one day with an innovative organisation and an open IT department to help the business mobilise it's knowledge resources.