Directed social bookmarking
One of my colleagues spends a lot of time seeing how we can introduce more enterprise 2.0 technologies to the workplace, and when I come across good stuff in that field I tend to throw it over the wall to him. It therefore struck me as insane that when I was reading this from Andrew McAfee and specifically looking at a picture depicting how bad email is for collaboration, that I sent him links by email.
This got me thinking that there should be a better way, but I quickly realised that the shallow streams of consciousness that we get from the social web aren’t directed enough. Once again a problem seems to have come up that is identity dependent and fine grained. So… we’ve started a little experiment of using del.icio.us tags that are directed at each other. I’ve borrowed the @name convention from Twitterees as a mechanism for doing this.
The missing piece seems to be a feedback mechanism (other than an email saying ‘thanks good link’ or whatever).
Filed under: e2.0 | 8 Comments
Tags: del.icio.us, e2.0, email, enterprise 2.0, social web
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Metrics is one approach, try scoring/monitoring tags per user, group, community – i.e. if you sent me a link and i found it insightful i’d probably add some tags of my own thus the tag collection lifecycle is an interesting feedback system unto itself though I understand it doesn’t directly address your challenge though it’s a simple case of mashing up the del.icio.us urls to blog entries for a comment thread just like Digg.
I’ve just stumbled across the ‘for:name’ tagging system in del.icio.us, which almost but not quite does what I was trying to achieve (and still lacks a feedback mechanism). The problem here is that it assumes symetric del.icio.us usage/membership, it assumes that I know my friends del.icio.us usernames. Once again this seems to be an instance of social networks being isolated (in addition to being wide and shallow).
You might want to take a look at Reddit, they’re “going open” as well!
I think with the issue of the ‘attention economy’ one does not always have time to feedback comments straight away – by looking at the tag lifecycle of links one gets other pertinent data that can form the basis of an automated feedback system as I alluded to above.
Hugh just pointed me to http://delicious.com/help/faq#inbox with a note “Looks like Chris has had his wish granted”.
I’m not sure that’s true, as there’s still no feedback mechanism. All that’s happened is the for:name system has been rebranded (in a way that will most likely get it blocked by many corporate web filters).
In our (albeit) small firm, we use diigo to share links which works extremely well. I haven’t used del.icio.us in a couple years (having switched to Diigo) so perhaps del.icio.us has all the same features and more, but what initially drew me/us to Diigo was the ability to share to groups, public/private bookmarking, and especially annotation – sticky notes and highlighting: useful just for yourself, but really comes into its own when sharing bookmarks and links in this way as you can be more specific as to why you are sharing/what you find interesting. Very powerful stuff…that said when I tried to drive adoption at my old big investment bank people (outside IT, and over the age of 23) looked at me like I was crazy and/or ignored it…