During the recent Intranets Live web conference (October 2008) I heard Shiv Singh talking about how Avenue A Razorfish had used a specific tag on Delicious to drag an RSS feed of useful links onto their intranet. He also mentioned a similar thing using a special tag on Flickr images, and using that to drag an appropriate photo roll onto the intranet.
I was intrigued so thought I'd do some rough research to see if such a thing was relatively easy to do.
Initially I thought I'd look at the technical requirements - from what I found it wasn't going to be too difficult to do with delicious and very easy to do with Flickr.
From there I progressed to some water cooler interviews to see what response might be, I picked staff I know are web savvy to ask my questions of. Their response was positive so as a final check of - was this a good use of my time and resources I did a quick poll of a sub set
of my users.
7% of intranet users were given the option of replying to the poll which was on the FrontPage of the intranet for two weeks. Of my total user population 3% responded
[NOTE - 3% is 40% of the 7% who actually saw the poll, which I was quite pleased with, especially because many people bothered to tell me they didn't use anything]
Del.icio.us 8%
Digg 8%
Furl 0%
Ma.gnolia 0%
Reddit 0%
Stumbleupon 2%
MSDN 8%
TechNet 4%
Other 6%
None 65%
Conclusion - at this stage this sort of development probably should be put aside in favour of projects with more immediate impact.
The reason I'm posting this now is that I've just read a Post by Step Two owner James Robertson about the three tiers of collaboration. In it he talks about the 'capacity' as being the key building block for making sure collaboration works.
http://www.steptwo.com.au/columntwo/three-tiers-of-collaboration/
My brain brought James article and my recent work together providing me with the following conclusion
- my social bookmarking data may represent a real symptom of the long way we have to go as an organisation in fostering greater sharing and therefore collaboration
Other fitfully taken up collaboration projects support this hypothesis but obviously further work needs to be done to confirm or reject the idea.
I'd be interested in other people's experiences and comments on what James article gets you to think about.
DorjeM
Comments
Oh, and I do actually know what the code is. ;-)
James
My "so what" list :
- in the corporate space we see very very few instances of staff being malicious in what they post, because they value their reputations, so why would someone use the 'secret tag'
- both delicious and flickr identify the poster of the item (should you click through to it), and if you don't want it associated with your normal account is it really worth going to the trouble of getting a bogus email address to create a bogus flickr account so you can post a bogus post using the 'secret tag' ?
I just can't see what the motivation would be in this situation.
- similarly in my investigations one of the key requirements I documented was the ability to be able to blacklist items from user X
so they don't show in the list
From what I understood of Shiv's explaination the goal of both the delicious and flickr feeds was to help their staff community collaborate and share useful stuff - if someone else works out what the 'secret tag' is (I couldn't work it out after my cursory look) and uses it is it going to materially impact the effectiveness of their business ?
I don't think so - but hey this is just supposition unless Shiv wants to wade in with the reality ;-)
DorjeM