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Features
Tagging, or social bookmarking, emerged in the internet this past year through popular sites like del.icio.us and Flickr. It allows people to put metadata (labels) on content, primarily internet links in the case of del.icio.us and photos at Flickr. Tagging is the “offspring” of keywords, but with some new twists. Anyone can tag anything any way they want; there is no agreed-upon or imposed taxonomy. In addition, multiple tags to the same object allow bookmarks to belong to more than one category, bypassing a limitation of the traditional hierarchically organized category systems.
There are other differences between tagging and conventional classification. Readers—not just writers and librarians—get to tag. The new tagging systems are web-based, so they can become accessible to all, and for these two reasons tagging becomes social. This social quality also allows taxonomies to be built from the ground up by users, rather than be determined by designated experts.
Email is the beloved and bane of corporate life in the digital era. It enhances real-time internal and external communication, but its simplicity and low learning curve make it the natural place for all employees to dump and distribute every kind of material. Email attachments become unregulated publishing systems; collaborations become confusing round-robin message loops with countless revised versions of the same documents; while critical communications with partners and clients are dispersed across multiple employee inboxes with no hope of tracking back important message and document exchanges.
For all these reasons and more, Austin-based information security and remote access provider Permeo sought an intranet solution that could help discipline internal and external communications as well as centralize document storage and distribution for sales and marketing departments. Rather than build its own, which the company estimates could have taken more than two years, it opted for a hosted content-storage solution from Minnesota-based iCentera that turns documents and communication exchanges into custom portals for both employees and partners.
Columns
As one might expect, user-centered design (UCD) principles can shift a website toward a user-centered focus. In my work, I have also effectively adapted a mix of UCD principals—personas, in particular—to support a major government intranet portal program.
Question: I have been asked to write a three-year business strategy for our intranet as a condition for getting additional funding. Do you have any advice on how to structure the document?
Read_Me_File
Reviewed this issue: Integrated Intellectual Asset Management; Beyond E-Learning; and The Gurteen
Knowledge Website
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