Being with others without the burden of interaction, compare rashmi sinha. Lead, discover and follow: 3 basic human traits that work well with social bookmarking services.
Some loose attempts to think about tagging (t d f) in non-private places.
Tags and their aggregation are social objects that form ad-hoc groups. It’s somehow a manifestation of the idea the language forms thinking (check this link to read about this issue especially about Leo Weisgerber (t d f).
How does that relate to corporate contexts? We need to take into account that there is a conceptual difference between group-tagging and individual tagging. The first is done in group-enabled workspaces with a looser affiliation to individual conceptualization when tagging. In groups there is definitely a bigger pressure to add abstraction (some kind of decision-making) to individual concepts - due to lack of research in this field I’d assume that this social pressure reduces the benefits of ad-hoc groupforming because there was some kind of task-assignment beforehand. On the other hand we possibly are closer to bargaining for group-reusability and findability.
Applications that are designed for corporate usage must take that into account in order to support usage and acceptance on all levels involved. The biggest challenge however ist to support individual benefits into such an application.
Therefore web built a stop-tagging feature into NEXTspace our social software solution for enterprises along with several features that allow for re-tagging and filtering based on algorithms.
Besides connecting to others via browsing their tags we need plain old collaborative filtering a kind of degradation in terms of sociability. We will support the need to formal and statistical interests - often acknowledged as business critical. And btw. aggregated lists on public servers support the creation of memes and trends very useful social concept.
Some years ago Matt and Paolo’s k-collector introduced the idea of topics (aka tags) as subconcepts of 4 main categories. The idea was to reduce complexity and created some kind of simple taxonomy. We have to reevaluate that concept it might be very useful in corporate contexts.
rashmi sinha (above) resumes the strenghts and weaknesses (for private use) of free form tagging as some kind of social coordination without forced decision-making. There sure is a difference to the enterprise. Tagging nevertheless offers a lot of diagnostic value in corporate contexts if you are able to support a blossoming workplace altogether and provide tools that support decision-making at a different level. It is although a basic formula with most of the social software tools around if implementing them into the workplace: care for visible benefits for the individuals and you and them will harvest their wisdom.
Related posts
Tags: NEXTspace, Social Software
Comments are closed | Permalink • 
• 
