Presentation at Enterprise 2.0 2008 in Boston. This is aimed at people who have social bookmarking tools running in their organization and ways to solve for under performance and messy usage.

1. After Noah: Making Sense of the
Flood (of Information)
Thomas Vander Wal
Presented to: Enterprise 2.0
Boston, MA, USA :: 10 June 2008

2. 2 Common Statements

3. Nobody is using
our services

4. OR

5. Good
Great
Utterly fantastic
OMG we have way too
much information

6. Encouraging Use

7. Add or improve guidance for use

8. Keep in mind:
perceived light use
can have high value

9. Number of Tags Per Item
Distribution of “x Tagged”
A6473
90.0
# People Tagging
67.5
45.0
22.5
0
Median
InfoCloud Solutions, Inc. 2008

10. Focus on values derived

11. Who is using the service?

12. What value is gained?

13. Personal

14. Collective

15. Collaborative

16. Newbie

17. Service Owner

18. Quick instructional videos

19. http://www.commoncraft.com/bookmarking-plain-english

20. Easy tagging -
similar to Amazon

21. Tag Yes/No
InfoCloud Solutions, Inc. - 2008

22. Provide many use cases

23. Continually highlight
various success stories

24. Move to pervasive tag
tool integration

25. Integrate with search

26. Social search

27. Collective search

29. Selective social search:
• Groups
• Co-worker
• Selected interests

31. Personal contextual
search

32. Too much info

33. Causes

34. Single tags

35. Tools too simple

36. Lacking structure
• Tags are taken as singles terms
• Not using co-occurrence

37. Lacking context
• No grouping of taggers
• ID does not tie to a persona or profile
• Lacking relationship of tagger

38. Facets needed

39. Across many
applications and services

40. External incentive
encouraged tagging

41. Taggers are adding tags
terms to self-stem
(e.g. tag, tags, tagging)

42. Many misspellings

43. Tools need improved
guidance & in-line help

44. Solutions

45. Single tags
• Interface encourages diversity of tagging
• Use more than one tag
• Detect homogeneity

46. Use a taxonomist who
understands folksonomies

47. Terms Around an Object
Taxonomy Folksonomy
- Ball (89)
- Ball - Circle (63)
- Sphere - Blue (23)
- Blue - Orb (11)
- Sphere (6)
- #A6437
- Gradient (3)
- ToBuy (3)
- Darkblue (2)
- Round (2)
- … 26 more
InfoCloud Solutions, Inc. 2008

48. Part #A6473 Terms
Distribution of Terms
Validate A6473
taxonomy 90.0
or add to
taxonomy Value in
Interest
Synonyms &
67.5 & watch
Unique views
45.0
22.5
0
InfoCloud Solutions, Inc. 2008

49. Tool is simple
• Simplicity is good, but they need to be
smarter
• Surface multiple context
• Surface co-occurrence of tags
• Lacking individual tagging

50. Embrace structure
• Use co-occurrence of terms
• Use identity and personal relationships
• Tie to a taxonomy
• Existing
• Generic

51. - Andy Edmonds @ http://surfmind.com/muzings/?p=107

53. Show context
• Human
• Object
• Related terms

55. Facets

56. Identify facets
• Interface
• Takes time - neg
• More complex interface may deter taggers
• Automated
• People
• Products & type
• Geo-location
• Temporal

57. Tools Get Out of the Way

58. Aggregate tags across tools
• Tag in and across applications
• Blogs, wikis, Sharepoint, etc.
• Retrieve across applications and services to
provide breadth and more value

59. Remove false incentives
and focus real value -
such as refindability

60. Auto-stemming
• Identify synonyms
• Plurals
• Spelling variations (incl. mis-spelling)
• International terms

61. Improve application
guidance

62. Pulling it all together

63. Human needs and
support

64. Support various uses

65. Improve the tools used

66. Thank You!
InfoCloud Solutions, Inc. - 2008

67. URL: http://infocloudsolutions.com
E-mail: thomas@infocloudsolutions.com
E-mail: thomas@vanderwal.net
AIM: vanderwal
Skype: tjvanderwal
InfoCloud Solutions, Inc. - 2008