After spending my entire Xmas reading academic texts I thought the last thing I would want to do after handing my essays in was read. But, I’ve never been a good judge of these things… maybe that’s why my life is so full of surprises?
Back onto tags and tagging. Firstly, Ian Delaney has a great post about tags, tagging and taxonomy focussing on how useful tags are for organising and sharing content.
This is interesting because I have just read another great post over at Data Mining which questions how valuable tags actually are for searching and sharing content. In particular it questions the way Technorati functions and whether Technorati tags are really metadata.
Both make valid contributions to the debate on social search. I won’t paraphrase – go and have a read.
Thirdly I picked up [via Justin Pattens Human Law blog] a post about the barriers for online organisational (for that, also read social) development put up by backwards thinking IT departments.
The orginal material is by Headshift‘s founder, Lee Bryant, and makes perfect and timely sense to me today after a frustrating email exchange with a client’s IT firm.
It’s a long post that summarises Lee’s presentation at last year’s ETECH conference. Coincidentally, it’s also about humanising technology.
Here’s a bit for flavour:
“Even though modern companies see themselves as organic, network-based entities, the systems that people are supposed to use for communication and collaboration are based on an IT-driven command and control model that is grounded in 1950’s management thinking …
Blogging, wikis, social tagging, aggregation and syndication, IM, shared presence and lightweight group forming tools are increasingly being used within the enterprise, whether officially sanctioned or not, because they get the job done. But it is not just about different tools, it is also about a new relationship with information and people. It is about managing feeds and information inputs, not individual content…”
Really good stuff. In fact so good I’ve hand-picked it and tagged it just for you. No, you!
Tags: tags; tagging; social search; metadata; social software
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