del.icio.us in the Workplace
I love del.icio.us. But you already know that. Either you’ve seen my del.icio.us account, or you’re in my network, or even better, you’ve seen me present and watched me spit on the front row while dancing gleefully across the stage whenever the part about social bookmarking comes up.
You see, del.icio.us embodies in one application all that is good about the so-called Web 2.0 movement. That is, more so than MySpace or YouTube. I mean that. Here’s why:
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It’s frighteningly simple in concept, but enormously powerful in practice
It personalises vast amounts of information
It relies on people – the bigger the participative network – the better del.icio.us works
It’s a new twist on search
It’s all about tags (freely chosen keywords attributable to content for categorisation)
It’s free
It’s easy to share
It’s easy to plugin to your blog / site / app
It was not sold for a ridiculous amount of money and stands to make decent money
It has community, private and commercial applications
And that’s all I can think of right now. Still it’s a nice list :).
Andrew McAfee has posted about a company, Avenue A | Razorfish, which uses social media effectively in place of an intranet (or rather as an intranet), and encourages their employees to tag info on flickr, digg or del.icio.us with ‘AARF’, so that all that info can be subscribed to and monitored by anyone else in the organisation.
As Andrew points out, this can be a security concern as anyone who has access to these platforms (which is anyone in the world) can simply apply the same filters and make pretty informed guesses what Avenue A | Razorfish is thinking, researching, reading and even doing at any point in time.
In the same way that wiki software can be effective behind the corporate firewall, social bookmarking tools centered around tags can do the same. However companies like SocialText and JotSpot are going to great lengths to secure their software from outside interference. Tagging items on flickr, digg and del.icio.us is cannot do the same.
I don’t think the answer is ‘del.icio.us for the enterprise’. I guess I could see a paid service that allows certain accounts to be private. But that seems to detract from the ethos of del.icio.us. Another idea, and this is not all that dissimilar to www.sxip.com, is to register and own tags. Almost like an IP address. There would be typical tags like ‘web’ and ‘Google’, but then also tags like ’3b7hY5′ for specific organisations and/or users. Proprietary tags, if you like, to be used across any platform (or at least partner platforms to that service). Sheesh, that’s not a bad idea for a business.
The third idea, as a company, is to embrace the idea that even your IP can be shared to your advantage. By crowdsourcing your ideas via community tags you could land up eliciting the help of evangelists, industry partners or complete strangers. I might find some interesting info for SAA and tag it as such if I knew they subscribed to the feed. This takes some courage but as Andrew McAfee suggests, could be a differentiator for companies in the new connection economy.
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I agree that delicious is amazing. I am a recent user and you are right, I am in your network. But there is something that makes me feel somewhat saddened by the delicious movement: I like to think that I am an individual, as does everyone else, but the whole tagging story, it sometimes upsets me (childish i know) that someone else has tagged the same website with the same tags that I have used, no matter how ‘obscure’ the site is. Just a thought.
I know how you feel Nic. I had what I thought was a really original idea to tag SA blogs with a specific tag and build up a directory of SA blogs in del.icio.us. When I checked out the tag I discovered that some people have been using it already (“sablogs”) and I considered using something else. Then it hit me that this is what the community side of del.icio.us is all about – a whole group of people adding links using that tag and, in the process, building up the collection of “sablogs” links far faster than I could. I wonder if the whole community/sharing thing is perhaps a little foreign still and we need to get used to this idea of letting some of our stuff out there for everyone to see.