Finally got around to uploading my ebooks to Scribd which is a service that provides social reading and publishing that has a easy to use interface for users and content owners.

The following two ebooks i wrote while working at Dow Jones (where i am still currently). One is about Hybrid Approaches to taxonomies and folksonomies in the enterprise that came out in 2008 and the other one is about how social media is changing the enterprise which i co-wrote with Robert Scoble, Shel Israel and Greg Merkle in 2009.
~enjoy!
The Taxonomy Folksonomy Cookbook: Finding the Right Recipe for Organizing Metadata

You can also view the French Version of the Taxonomy Folksonomy ebook.

Conversational Corporation: How Social Media is Changing the Enterprise

You can also view the French version of the Conversational Corporation ebook.

Luis Suarez is the Knowledge Manager, Community Builder & Social Computing Evangelist in the IBM Software Group division and has a great blog and Twitter feed that always has great tidbits on enterprise adoption of 2.0 tools, especially within the realm of knowledge management. IBM has always been an early and successful adopter of enterprise 2.0 tools.

Via the ReadWriteWeb Twitter Feed i saw this post from Suarez on the The Business Case for Enterprise Social Bookmarking: $4.6 Million a Year in Cost Savings! . Nothing like throwing those kind of numbers to get someone interested in reading more. The numbers he references are from 2008, but i agree with the point that he makes that enterprise social tagging/ bookmarking keeps gets ignored but is still an important and rather critical part of a successful Enterprise 2.0 adoption strategy.

If you have been reading my blog for a while you know that i have always been an advocate of social tagging and in 2008 published an ebook on Hybrid Approaches of using Folksonomy (social tagging) and Taxonomy in the Enterprise.


Image|Flickr| AMagill

[This post is cross-posted on the Synaptica Central Blog]

Last month the Library of Congress released their report on their ongoing Flickr project that i have been very interested in and have written about as the project progressed. From their blog post on the report:

"Only nine months into the Library of Congress’ pilot project placing Library photos on the Web site Flickr, the photos have drawn more than 10 million views, 7,166 comments and more than 67,000 tags, according to a new report from the project team overseeing the lively project."
“The popularity and impact of the pilot have been remarkable,” said Michelle Springer, project manager for digital initiatives in the Office of Strategic Initiatives, who said total views reached 10 million in October. The site is averaging 500,000 views a month, she said, adding that Flickr members have marked 79 percent of the photos as “favorites.”

A summary of some of the outcomes:

• Increasing awareness of the digital photograph collection the Library of Congress (LC) has which has been available for years on the Library's website turning to not only an engaged audience but a lot of referral traffic to the Library's Website. "Feedback of this nature suggests that as a result of this project the Library is reaching new audiences—people who did not or could not find this material on our own site, and people who never thought to look here. "
• Gain a Better Understanding of Social Tagging and Community Input (see below for more details)
  
• Pilot helped the LC staff gain experience with Web 2.0 online interactions with 'patrons'
  
  

Since the beginning of the project i have been very interested in learning about some of the outcomes that the project would provide in regards to user tagging versus applied controlled vocabulary through traditional bibliographic cataloging. In the report the share that they used the Flickr API to do deeper analysis of the tagging that was done by the community (see pages 19-24 of the full report) based on nine categories that provided some interesting insight focused on issues commonly cited in comparisons of social tagging vs. assignement of controlled vocabulary terms(page 28). The categories analyzed were:

I. LC description-based (words copied from the Library-provided record): e.g., titles,
names, subjects, etc.

II. New descriptive words (words not present in the Library-provided description):

• Place: e.g., cities, counties, countries, natural feature names
• Format (physical characteristics of the original photos). Sample tags: LF, large format, black and white, bw, transparencies, glass plate
• Photographic technique. Sample tags: shallow depth of field
• Time period. Sample tags: wartime, WWII, 1912
• Creator name: e.g., photographer’s name

III. New subject words (words not present in the Library-provided description):

• Image (items seen in the image itself). Sample tags: cables, trees, apples, windows, hat, yellow
• Associations/symbolism (phrases and slogans evoked by the image). Sample tags: Rosie the riveter, Norman Rockwell, We can do it!
• Commentary (revealing the tagger’s value judgments). Sample tags: Sunday best,
• proud, dapper, vintage.
• Transcription (transcribing words found in items such as signs, posters, etc., within the photo)
• Topic (terms that convey the topic of the photo). Sample tags: architecture, navy, baseball, story
• Humor (tags intended to be humorous rather than descriptive) Sample tags: UFO, flying saucer

IV. Emotional/aesthetic responses: (personal reactions of the tagger). Sample tags: wow,
pretty, ugly, controversial

V. Personal knowledge/research (tags that could only have been added based on knowledge or research by the tagger, and that could not have been gleaned solely from the description provided or examination of the photo): For example, the tag murder used on a portrait of someone who was later murdered or tags added for the specific county when that information was not part of the description.

VI. Machine tags (added by the community not Library-supplied): e.g., geotags and Iconclass tags

VII. Variant forms (representing terms already tagged but in a different form, such as synonyms (e.g., WW2, WWII, World War II, worldwarii) or plural/singular differences (e.g., transparency/transparencies)

VIII. Foreign language (tags in foreign languages/scripts, whether they are translations of English-language tags, or new tags)

IX. Miscellaneous (tags that are not readily understood, that provide corrections to LC descriptions or to other taggers (e.g., not peaches), or tags later removed

Some of the Future Tag Analysis Interests (page 29) are also quite interesting such as actually incorporating popular concepts or variants into the LC's own controlled vocabularies (yeah something i advocate in the hybrid approach!), bringing the tags into the LC's search environment, populate bibliographic records with tags (although that have already added the Flickr URL to the "additional version available" field (MARC field 530) in some catalog records which leads users to the appropriate Flickr page that might provide historical information etc. on the image that is vaulable- see sample on page 36).

In the report they also share some of the experiences the staff learned from using Web2.0 tools in interacting with patrons that might be different from the traditional reference desk exchanges (page 37).

The good news? Skip to page 38 of the full report to see the recommendations and conculsions including details of headcount that is necessary for the program to continue and expand. But the report ends with the following good news:

"It should come as no surprise, then, that the Flickr team recommends that this experiment in Web 2.0 cease to be characterized as a pilot and evolve to an expanded involvement in this growing community (and other appropriate social networking opportunities that may arise) as resources permit. The benefits appear to far outweigh the costs and risks. "


The entire set of tags that have been applied can be seen alphabetically or as a tag cloud of the 150 most popular tags.

Many thanks to the Library of Congress staff for taking on this project and continuous sharing their progress through their blog and other resources (see Appendix C) and to the authors of the project report: Michelle Springer, Beth Dulabahn, Phil Michel, Barbara Natanson, David Reser, David Woodward, and Helena Zinkham!

So to date- my favorite feedback on my ebook on Folksonomies and Taxonomies in the Enterprise that was launched on Sunday for the start of the Special Library Association (SLA) conference in Seattle was from a fellow co-worker. In her email she congratulated me on a job well done, that the ebook looked great and that "Maybe you can get someone to animate your character and you can get her to do some of your work for you?" Oh boy...only if i could!

I have been on the road for what seems like ages- conference season is at hand, Semantic Technologies conference, Internet Retailer and now Special Library Association- awesome stuff but boy am i behind- if only i could get my ebook avatar to indeed give me a hand.

This ebook is nothing like i have seen been produced by Factiva/Dow Jones in the 8+ years i have been here. My marketing project manager for this ebook, Kelly Minervini did a spectacular job with putting it together and i am extremely grateful to her as well as the rest of the folks that worked on the team to get this out- it is beautifully designed and laid out, fun to read and provides a great description of my thoughts around the hybrid options around Enterprises leveraging hybrid approaches to Folksonomies and Taxonomies as part of their information strategy.

This ebook is laid out as a “Cookbook” in an effort to help readers find the best “recipe” for their enterprise metadata needs. It is divided into chapters and subheads, each titled with a play on words about the art of cooking. We wanted to make it a fun piece for the audience to read, so it contains cooking/food illustrations as they relate to the taxonomy/folksonomy theory described.

If you have been reading my blog for a while, you know that social tagging is a topic i am very interested in as it relates to information delivery and organization.

The ebook discusses:

• The business value of a taxonomy/folksonomy and how you can deploy a solution that will grow with an organization
• The impact of social networking tools on the enterprise
• The governance tools that can be or should be applied
• How to (and if you really should) merge folksonomies with existing taxonomies
• Best practices
• Common challenges and obstacles
  

Some of the key messages and take-aways i was trying to illustrate:

• The taxonomy versus folksonomy issue is not an “either/or” debate, but an opportunity for mutual progress. By combining the virtues of each approach into a working hybrid model, the enterprise can achieve its goal: a user-friendly system that encourages collaboration and makes information easier to find.
• Good content management tools are not necessarily those with the most features or the greatest power, but those that encourage participation by being easy to use.
• There is no one right way to incorporate a folksonomy into an enterprise. Instead, there are levels of engagement ranging from free and loose social tagging with little supervision to closely monitored tagging built around a tightly controlled core taxonomy. By precisely identifying your goals, you can more effectively determine the balance between community freedom and centralized control that is right for your enterprise.
• Today, the state of enterprise folksonomies is comparable to the state of corporate intranets and portals a decade ago – a learn-as-you-go period of trial-and-error experimentation.
• There is no end to the possibilities of a hybrid approach to enterprise taxonomies and folksonomies. In fact, the important conclusions are not the ones the ebook draw, but the ones that the reader reaches after careful consideration of their enterprise needs and ambitions.

You can download the ebook here - all download forms come directly to me, so i am not going to spam you. You will get an automatic thank you note from me. If you want to contact me directly please email me at daniela.barbosa{@}dowjones.com

Thanks again to all the great folks that helped me in finalizing this ebook and for Dow Jones for the opportunity to publish this it!

How the hell am i going to get through all 3,115 and growing photos ?

Via the Library of Congress Blog and Dave Winer's twitter message (how stoked is he because of FlickrFan) - What an AWESOME use of a Flickr Pro account for the Library of Congress...so glad my taxpayer money is supporting that hefty fee of $24.95 per year ;-) (OK it is a partnership so maybe they aren't paying for a Pro account).

Aside from the fact that we all now have access to great quality images from the archives that many of us would probably never see, the Library of Congress is not only doing this for our own viewing pleasure and to make Dave Winer's photo display application even cooler when we are procrastinating on Flickr - there is a purpose and very important one.

From their blog post:
If all goes according to plan, the project will help address at least two major challenges: how to ensure better and better access to our collections, and how to ensure that we have the best possible information about those collections for the benefit of researchers and posterity. In many senses, we are looking to enhance our metadata.

Imagine telling these young women "Backstage" at the "girlie" show at the Rutland Vermont state fair in 1941 that in 2008, some random person in San Francisco, looking at the photo in the 'cloud' would tag it with the word tuxedo?

Yes. Using user tagging the Library of Congress wants to enhance their metadata. The October/November 2007- Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology- Special Section on Folksonomies (multiple articles) had a couple of articles on images tagging by end users that addresses tagging images.

Important facts from their FAQs:

Q: How were the items selected/why did you pick these pictures?

A: We picked two sets of popular images, for which no restrictions on publication or distribution are known, and for which high quality files are available. Because we are also interested in tags and comments on the photos, we picked one set (George Grantham Bain Collection) for which we have minimal identifying information, and another (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information color photographs) that has some subject indexing.

Calculated choices in order to gather some real use cases for tagging collections. They will be able to compare the usefulness of the tags by matching and comparing a well indexed collection with one that is not.

Q: Will the Library do anything with the tagging info once I add it to the Flickr photos?

A: The Library will decide what to do with data added through Flickr once the pilot is over. Because resources to update catalog records are limited, the Library cannot promise to incorporate contributed data into its own records.

Can't wait to hear what the final outcome is an how Flickr will be able to provide that data back to the Library of Congress to include 'clean' tags back into their systems.

It also seems that each picture has bibliographic information available (although not segmented but only in the notes field) as follows which is probably the typical current 'catalog' record with their controlled vocabulary (shame that Flickr wasn't able to pre-populate at minimum subject tags)

***An important Pilot FAQ on their site:
Q: How long will these photos be available on Flickr?
A: The length of the pilot will be determined by the amount of user interest and tagging activity related to the materials.

Well what are you waiting for? Go check out some great photos and tag your way into metadata history!

As i had announced on this blog back in December i was asked by the Dow Jones Info Pro Alliance group to conduct a Webcast on Folksonomies and Taxonomies in the Enterprise. One of the group's outreach programs is the Info Pro Alliance portal which provides various resources for information professionals in the Enterprise space. I used this opportunity to share some of the information discussed at the recent round table event we coordinated here in Silicon Valley and to share some of the things i have come across in the last year in this space. It was OK- i wouldn't say it was my best 'performance'!

As part of the follow up i have created a Wiki for the community to participate and share with each other on the rather new topic of using both Folksonomies and Taxonomies in the Enterprise. From the Wiki you can also link to the recorded Webcast or the Slide deck that i have posted on Slideshare. I still have a lot to do on the Wiki (e.g. finishing the Q&A from the session)- but i hope that others will also assist in making the Wiki a useful place for those who are interested in the topic. If you know someone in the Enterprise that is looking into Folksonomies please send them a link to the Wiki (thanks!).

If this is a subject of interest, please be sure to check out the wiki and share additional resources or thoughts on the issue.

Many thanks to Lorraine Bell for all her assistance in coordinating this WebCast!

In January i will be leading a Webinar organized by the Dow Jones InfoPro Alliance about Folksonomies & Taxonomies in the Enterprise.

From the e-mail invite:

Enterprises today face a critical challenge: How to manage an abundance of increasingly complex and disparate information assets in an environment of constant change and technological complexity. How do you provide tools that your users are used to using in the commercial world in order for them to stay competitive and enable collaboration?

Results from a recent round table event on Folksonomies & Taxonomies that discussed these challenges will be shared as well other research work that has been focused on the topic.

Other topics to be discussed include:

* What is the business value of a taxonomy/folksonomy and how can you deploy a solution that will grow with the organization?
* What’s the impact of social networking tools on the enterprise?
* Which governance tools can or should be applied?
* How do you merge folksonomies and existing taxonomies – or should you?
* Some best practices and common obstacles

Date: Thursday, 10 January
Time: 11:00 a.m. US Eastern Time/8amPST
to register please follow this link.

If you have items that you would like for me to address or you that would like to share with the audience about your experiences with Folksonomies in the Enterprise space, please drop me a line at daniela{dot}barbosa{@}dowjones.com - thank you in advance!

Via the Bivings Report and Jeff Jarvis last month some thoughts on Editor 2.0 in the online news media business. The conversation was started as we see media sites starting to allow users to tag content and organizations like the Guardian are looking for people with experience in the value of metadata (job post is no longer up so good luck to the lucky chap!).

From Jarvis's post the position calls for:
Guardian Unlimited requires a keyword manager to look after the labelling of our content online to ensure that it is consistent with the needs of the reader and the editorial values of the Guardian and Observer. The role requires attention to the demands both of a considerable content archive and of a fast-moving news operation, and involves work across media; from text to cartoons, video to podcasts. It would suit either a journalist with a particular interest in archiving, or someone with a background in information science who possesses a keen editorial sense.

Media room Editors that are responsible for adding metadata to articles are nothing new-like the ones at The New York Times. As media sites begin allowing user generated tags it will certainly add immense value for their readers as well as for their own editorial staff since they can learn new terminology that their readers are using much quicker then the traditional methods. Media sites whose core business is to deliver news content however need a robust yet flexible standard taxonomy that drives the type of news that is being published. A combination of both types with 'Editor 2.0' editorial purview will allow a rich display of aboutness of the news content outside of the standard tags clouds and lists we are used to seeing when sites open up tagging to users and i am looking forward to seeing some of these implementations.

Interested in discussing a similar topic of Folksonomies and Taxonomies but focusing in the Enterprise space? Perhaps you can join us for an upcoming round table event.

Over the next few weeks i will be sharing resources and my thoughts on Folksonomies and Taxonomies in the Enterprise a topic that i have frequently blogged about before as i discuss Enterprise social tagging tools. The topic continues to be a topic of conversation at many of my clients and more and more the conversation is moving beyond the 'should we do it' but to the "how do we do it" and "how do we tie it in with our existing taxonomy and corporate taxonomy management tools".

On Tuesday December 4th at our Wall Street Journal printing plant location in Palo Alto, CA we will be hosting a round table event for Enterprise practitioners that are looking to deploy or have deployed tools in their enterprise that provide tagging capabilities. The round table portion will be from 2-4pm and then from 4-5pm we will get an exclusive tour of The Wall Street Journal printing plant which I arranged thinking that it would be a nice 'old media' meet 'new media' type of activity.

We still have some spots open for the round table if you or someone you know is working in implementing in the Enterprise and i am also hoping to open the printing plant tour and cocktail hour to more people who are interested in discussing the topic with other attendees while taking a peak at printing plant (hey who knows how much longer these will be around for!)- so drop me a line if you are interested daniela[dot]barbosa[@]dowjones.com