WebWord

1. Team members can set up social bookmarking pages for personal and professional access. Think of this as a way to offer everyone asynchronous collaboration. Or, think of this as a way to store “memories” of pages, including tags and other reference material.

2. Social bookmarks can allow people to find each other. Think of this as search and discovery. Think about this as a pre-collaboration tool. That is, you can’t collaborate until you first find others in your space.

3. User created tags offers other team members new ideas. More importantly, tags demonstrate a way of thinking about and organizing the world. Tags reveal perspectives and personalities. That in turn helps teams.

4. Social bookmarking pages maintained by multiple team members can be useful for running and guiding projects. Timing, personalities, and more, can be less important or more important depending on the project because they are independent from each team member. Tags can provide new facets to the same information. Likewise, tags can provide the same facet to different information.

5. Finally, tags can actually lead or train others. Certain tagging habits or characteristics can actually drive leadership and mentoring. Like writing or speaking or coding, tagging can be considered a special skill. Tagging is language oriented, certainly, but it takes different skills to be a great tag master.

Taken together, these social bookmarking and tagging ideas can help your team understand itself better. Social bookmarking can help others discover, publish, and share much easier than just a few years ago.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 16th, 2006 at 9:53 am and is filed under Usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.