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Exploring Social Bookmarking By Donna Cuomo, Laurie Damianos, and John Griffith Social bookmarking enables people to tag content as a way of classifying resources for their own use and to share with others. There are now hundreds of such services available on the Internet. This growing phenomenon is attracting the attention of larger companies: Yahoo purchased the popular del.icio.us social bookmarking service in addition to flickr, a service for tagging and sharing images. MITRE is exploring the value of deploying social bookmarking within a closed corporate community. Social bookmarking differs from traditional browser bookmarking, or storing "Favorites." First, bookmarks can be annotated with user-specified metadata, including meaningful keywords that facilitate retrieval and act as memory jogs to bookmarked content. Users can also add their own description or comments to the bookmark. Users can retrieve bookmarks by one or more tags without searching manually through nested folders. The "social" aspect of social bookmarking allows people to share their resources with others, explore the tag space, and discover virtual communities of interest in the same topics. Since bookmarks are stored in a central repository, bookmark collections are viewable in any browser on any Internetaccessible device. A Tool for Collaboration The concept of social software maps well to our sponsors' overall collaboration and cross-corporate information sharing goals. Much of our sponsors' work involves collaboration across time and space, requiring virtual teams to share resources through the use of listservs, technical exchange meetings, wikis, websites, SharePoint team sites, and other collaborative spaces. With more and more employees already using social bookmarking services like del.icio.us, Furl, and Connotea to manage and share their resources, social bookmarking could complement our current techniques for sharing corporate knowledge and could also help to expand social networks. MITRE's social bookmarking prototype is a technology exploration to assess the value and utility of social bookmarking in the enterprise. MITRE hypothesizes that social bookmarking will benefit the corporate environment by providing teams with a place to share resources, helping form and support social networks around interest areas, and potentially feeding expertise finding. We developed a prototype and conducted user-evaluation activities to elicit community and individual feedback on system features and value. Through word of mouth, low-key advertising, and demonstrations, we announced the pilot system availability to large communities within MITRE. In addition to monitoring the adoption rate over time, we have been collecting quantitative data and statistics on tool usage to provide insight on usage patterns and social trends. Onomi The prototype system on the MITRE Information Intranet (MII) is based on an open source tool called Scuttle, which shares many features of del.icio.us. In keeping with the popular convention of giving such tagging tools whimsical names, we dubbed the prototype "onomi" (rhyming with "folksonomy," a term coined to contrast with taxonomy). Onomi allows users to create both public (viewable by everyone with an account) and private bookmarks. Some of the time-saving features include browser bookmarklets for quick bookmarking, bookmark import (from both browsers and other social bookmarking tools), type-ahead tag completion, and tag recommendation based on how other people have tagged the same resources. Users can browse bookmark collections by topic, employee, or organization; search across collections by tag, title, description, or owner; and view bookmarks they have in common with others. By displaying employee pictures, onomi promotes visual communities of people who have the same bookmarks or share the same tags.
To date, the system has had close to 2,000 visitors with 275 providing content. Users have contributed 9,700 unique terms employed a total of 68,000 times to tag 12,600 bookmarked resources. Some users bookmark content purely for their own use (but make it public by default), while other users post content for the purpose of sharing. Likewise, some project teams at MITRE have created their own virtual communities to share project resources and provide pointers to materials. In addition to the information providers, many of onomi's visitors are information consumers, or "lurkers," exploring the public collections to discover new resources or establishing RSS feeds of particular topics or users. The system home page displays all new bookmarks as they are posted, providing a dynamic view into the activities and interests of onomi's users as well as frequently used tags and popular tags over time. As onomi continues to expand its user base and resources, we will continue to monitor the data to provide further insight into the utility of social bookmarking in a closed corporate community. Can a capability that relies on human capital overcome the "participation inequality" phenomenon, which predicts that a fairly small percentage of any population will actually contribute content to social tools? Growing Interest In the meantime, there has been interest in this corporate social experiment from the public as well as our sponsors. MITRE's onomi pilot received a commendation in the 2007 intranet Innovation Awards competition, inaugurated by Australian firm Step Two Design to encourage innovation and collaboration throughout the global Intranet community. Although this award is a first for onomi, it has received quite a bit of attention since its launch, including a mention in a CIO Magazine article. MITRE representatives have been asked to speak about onomi at the Taxonomy Boot Camp, Taxonomy Community of Practice, and a Montague Institute roundtable. Papers written about onomi were selected for presentation at the WWW 2006 Conference in Edinburgh and also at the Hawaii International Conference of Systems Sciences in 2007. In addition, corporations such as Cisco, Motorola, IBM, and Raytheon have shown interest in our onomi pilot, and in collaborating with us to share lessons learned. Several sponsor sources have also indicated interest in onomi. While the social tagging phenomenon is clearly a hit on the Internet, stay tuned for results on how well this consumer technology makes the transition to corporate and government environments. |
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For more information, please contact Donna Cuomo, Laurie Damianos, or John Griffith using the employee directory. Page last updated: October 9, 2008 | Top of page |
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