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SoHo NEWS & TIPS
Helping You Make the Most of Your Small Office/Home Office
SoHoTIPS.com
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Greetings,
Does your job require finding and sharing a lot of
information? This can often lead to a lot of headaches,
right!? Well, with a new tool known as social bookmarking,
the task of finding and sharing information might become a
little less tedious...
Best,
Mandi
P.S. You can discuss this issue or any other topic in the
new SoHo News & Tips forum. Check it out here...
SoHo News & Tips Forum
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NEWS & TIDBITS
- Comair will impose wage cuts and changes in work
rules for its unionized flight attendants on 11/15....
- Tower Records is sold for $134M to Great
American Group, which plans to liquidate the music
retailer...
- Ford Motor Co. said it is recalling 140,000
vehicles whose defective door latches could freeze,
causing the doors to swing open in traffic...
- McAfee Inc. fired its president and said its
chief executive would retire after an internal
probe into the software maker's stock option
practices...
- Carphone Warehouse is buying AOL's UK internet
access business from Time Warner...
- Oracle will pay the US government US$98.5 million
to compensate for allegations that PeopleSoft, the
software company Oracle acquired last year, over-
charged government customers for years...
- Sovereign Bancorp Inc's long-running chief
executive Jay Sidhu resigned amid pressure from
shareholders unhappy about the sale of a major
stake to a Spanish banking giant...
- Private equity firm Apollo Management LP said
that it would pay $990 million in cash for Jacuzzi
Brands Inc...
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Question of the Week
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Tools Help Companies Find, Share Information
By MICHAEL TOTTY
Wouldn't it be nice to be able to easily locate
that online article you saved last week -- among
the hundreds of other files you've saved? Wouldn't
it be nice to know what articles your boss thought
were interesting enough to save on the same topic?
For those whose jobs require working with lots of
information, finding it and sharing it remain big
headaches. And locating information you've found
and filed is often harder than discovering it in
the first place.
Now some companies, including International
Business Machines Corp., are tackling the issue
with new products based on a technology called
social bookmarking that has been gaining adherents
among the tech cognoscenti.
Social bookmarking is seen as a simple way to
enhance search tools by letting users mark their
saved files with their own keywords, called "tags,"
which then can be used to organize, recall or
distribute the documents. "It's not complex
technology at all," says Jeff Nolan, director of a
strategy group at SAP AG in Palo Alto, Calif., who
is testing bookmarking software from two start-ups.
"People end up using it and getting great value out
of it."
'The Secret Sauce'
Social-bookmarking tools get much of their useful-
ness from the work that users themselves put in,
instead of relying on preset categories for
organizing information, as traditional information-
management tools do. "The secret sauce is the
people using them," says Mr. Nolan.
To understand how social bookmarking works,
imagine you're on a corporate team doing research
on outsourcing. Your assignment is code-named
Project Overseas. Typically, you'd do a Web search
and perhaps save relevant documents to your
computer's working folder. Each file would have
whatever name is on the document -- making it hard
to find any particular document when you want to
call it up later.
With social-bookmarking software, when you find a
page that's worth keeping, you click on the book-
marking button, and a window pops up that allows
you to create whatever tags you want to assign to
that document. The idea is to identify files with
words that reflect a document's meaning to you,
even if the term isn't in the document itself.
For one document, it could be "Project Overseas,"
"India" and "call center." For another, it could
be "Project Overseas," "Romania" and "software."
Afterward, you can click on the "tags" button and
see a list of all the tags you've created. You can
easily pick out the documents you need.
What's more -- and this is where the "social" part
comes in -- you can see the lists of tags created
by other people on the system. You can see who
else has tagged the same documents you've tagged.
Or you can pick anybody on the system, such as
your boss, and see what he or she has thought
worthy of tagging.
Continued below....
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What's Available
Social-bookmarking systems designed to be used
inside companies aren't yet widely available. IBM,
which has been testing a social-bookmarking service
called Dogear internally since July of 2005, plans
to add the technology to its Lotus collaboration
suite as part of a broad platform of so-called
social-networking tools as soon as early next
year.
BEA Systems Inc., a San Jose, Calif., software
maker, plans to add the ability to share and tag
bookmarks as part of its Aqualogic corporate-
portal product in the first half of next year; in
addition to Web pages, the product will enable
users to tag documents, some email messages and
multimedia files. AskMe Corp., in Bellevue, Wash.,
is adding tagging to a future version of its
knowledge-management software. And at least two
start-ups, ConnectBeam Inc. of Newark, Calif., and
Cogenz Ltd., based in the U.K., have been offering
test versions of their social-bookmarking software
to a few customers.
The way people at IBM have been using its Dogear
service illustrates how the tools can make it
easier to manage and share information inside a
company.
Dogear, developed by researchers at IBM's Watson
Research Center in Cambridge, Mass., lets employees
store links to pages on the company's intranet or
the larger Web and then label them with one or more
tags. Users can decide to keep private some or all
of their tagged bookmarks. So far, the service has
about 6,000 users and has collected about 100,000
bookmarks.
The system is already being used to improve
internal search results. When an employee uses
IBM's internal search engine, the first three
results are pages that have been stored in Dogear.
In about a quarter of the searches that deliver
results from Dogear, users are clicking on those
results instead of those delivered from the search
index.
Sharing With Others
Tagging also has made it easy to share documents
with others. For instance, David Millen, one of
the IBM researchers who developed Dogear, says he
was helping a team that was researching the motor-
cycle industry for a client. With Dogear, he could
tag his Web research, and the other team members
could easily find the documents by browsing the
tags.
"It was a fairly quick way to get a widely
distributed client team to be familiar with the
company and the industry," says Mr. Millen, a
group research manager at the Watson Research
Center.
Users can also have newly tagged items delivered
automatically, by subscribing to particular tags
or individuals' bookmarks. Mr. Millen says he
subscribes to the bookmarks of several "thought
leaders" from around IBM to see what kinds of
topics they're following. "There isn't a time that
I see their bookmarks without seeing something
I'm interested in," he says.
Moreover, Mr. Millen says, you don't need to have
everybody going public with their bookmarks to make
the system useful. "All you need is a small number
of people bookmarking" to get the benefits, he
says. "Freeloaders are welcome."
So what did you think about this issue? Drop me a line and let
me know at mailto:mandi@gophercentral.com
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