Social bookmarking is all the rage. To borrow an over-hyped term, it’s a cornerstone of Web 2.0. Not surprising, social bookmarking is starting to spread quickly to corporate intranets.
For those who still haven’t used it or only heard about it social bookmarking is a way for users to publicly bookmark web pages and share those bookmarks with others through the use of keyword tags. These tags allow the users to organize and share their bookmarks. Unlike traditional bookmarks, multiple tags allow bookmarks to belong to more than one category. Users can also search out other relevant sites and pages by tag or author.
Social bookmarking has been popularized on the Internet by sites and services by Del.icio.us, Digg, and Shadows. The hot rumor in Silicon Valley is that Google could launch its own social bookmarking service within days.
From the intranet perspective, social bookmarking is a taxonomy system developed and maintained by employees. A taxonomy that is always updating and refreshing as a living, breathing business system. You may have heard such a taxonomy referred to as a folksonomy.
Not surprisingly and often leading the pack in intranet innovation, IBM is one of the first out of the gate in rolling out social bookmarking on their intranet, W3. In doing so, IBM has created their own bookmarking system called Dogear (see Social Bookmarking in the Enterprise).
Dogear features, people and process:
- No anonymous bookmarking
- Both private and shared bookmarks
- New content alerts via RSS or ATOM
- Collaborative filtering
- Advanced search by tag
- Bookmark listings by tag
- Bookmark listings by author name
I would think the advancing social bookmarking technology would make taxonomy vendors and uber search engine vendors such as Autonomy very nervous about their revenue streams.
