Ed Brill

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1. 1  Bruce Elgort http://www.TakingNotesPodcast.com | 8/31/2006 12:07:27 AM

   I hear ya Ed. I wrote about this back in April when I gave the Seattle and Portland Lotusphere Comes To You presentations.

   { Link }

   I also found that many of my high tech. co-workers also were not aware of wikis, RSS and blogs.

   Great post my "friend".

1. 2  Wild Bill http://www.billbuchan.com | 8/31/2006 3:57:47 AM

   "relentlessly boring" ?

   Ah. Makes sense now.. :-)

   --* Bill

1. 3  Volker Weber http://vowe.net | 8/31/2006 4:22:07 AM

   UDDDI :-)

1. 4  Andy B http://andy.the-broyles.com | 8/31/2006 7:03:15 AM

   This is a post that the whole tech industry should pay attention to...especially those that want to make inroads into the SMB marketplace.

   My company, an insurance carrier, is very atypical in a lot of ways because of our use of Notes and Domino AND we are very small (30 total employees.) We try our best to leverage technology to address our needs in communicating with our agents and policyholders. However, we are never able to fully do this because a lot of our business relationships still depend on the use of faxes to move crital information around (I have to say that this has improved in the last three years, but we still get a slight margin more BUSINESS related communication via fax then we do via email; TOTAL email volume still far exceeds faxes though.)

   I suppose you can make jokes and comments that my location, the heartland of Indiana, is at the root of my experience, but I don't truly think so.

   Some of our customers have extremely hi-tech businesses, but rarely do they buy technology for the sake of technology. If their HR department can't justify an HRIS, they don't get one. If they can't see the reason to have email on the factory floor...it isn't going to happen. Business blogging...you mean sharing information, even if only internally, that our staffs can see...whoa there partner. A lot of the infrastructure for even basic collaborative work just simply doesn't exist.

   Good post Ed!

1. 5  Curt Stone http://curtsisland.blogspot.com | 8/31/2006 7:03:44 AM

   Great post Ed. I read your blog and many others everyday and I didn't know about LinkedIn. (Will be going over there soon today) I'm amazed how I saw SameTime promoted several years ago at Lotusphere and my current company is struggling in incorporating this technology throughout. My purple SameTime drinking cup has long lost the paint on the side and the tee shirt is starting to match some of my Grateful Dead shirts(holes).

   You mention "Someone asked about the business value of blogging and real-time collaboration". Could you give the answer to this question, post another note on the blog or point to some resources? I'll be participating in a project soon with business people and this could be very valuable information. Thanks!

1. 6  Warren Elsmore http://www.elsmore.net | 8/31/2006 7:14:23 AM

   Sorry to say (or am I?), that this sounds very familiar. I'd say about 50% of IT people I meet don't know RSS/wikis/blogs etc, and around 90% of end users don't.

   There's certainly a teritory difference, but at least in the UK, the most emphasis on any upgrade is on the little things like address book selection from the server first. Those things take up all the time and no-one would know what to do with a blog template anyway.

   That's not to say IBM shouldn't deliver solutions in these areas - we have a long tradition of being first! - but that the core areas are just as important to Joe end user.

1. 7  Alan Lepofsky http://www.alanlepofsky.net/ | 8/31/2006 8:05:11 AM

   Great post Ed. I'd add tagging and Eclipse to your list of "things IBM is talking about that people may not understand". It is unfortunate that we (the industry, not just IBM) often talk technology not function when something is new. For example, RSS and ATOM, as opposed to "subscribing to content". In general email is not talked about as "SMTP transfer of messages", surfing the web is not talked about as "HTTP drawing of page content in a browser", and directories are not talked about as "LDAP schema of contact records." Keep it simple.

1. 8  Axel  | 8/31/2006 9:04:19 AM

   @3: In the SOA-debates UDDI was given up as a concept 3 years ago or so. Yet the 2005 or 2004 SOA literature used to talk about it as a abandoned concept.

   Some people are excited by blogging, wikis and all those shiny things web. Others by business integration topics like SOA.*

   An exchange about usage patterns of wikis and blogs inside organizations might be very interesting. From my experience people adopt intranet-blogging and wiki very differently.

   * And yet others by playing extension point bingo in their plugin.xml file of their never-ending eclipse project (hmm. org.eclipse.core.resources.natures. that sounds nifty)

1. 9  Keith Brooks http://www.kbmsg.blogspot.com/ | 8/31/2006 9:35:47 AM

   In parallel to your other post about SMb size and perspective, I think you have begun to see that the Tower does indeed arise beyond the populace.

   Business users are not college students or teenagers who care about wikis/blogs et al.

   It is almost like Lotus is catering to the 15-25 group but talking to their parents or worse their grandparents.

   What is a wiki? A discussion db or a live faq db.

   What is a blog? A discussion db renamed or journal db.

   what is RSS feeds? Data agents which notify users of updates. Like event monitiors in Domino.

   Linked in, well social networking is in my experience not so useful for the over 30 set. But even that is the KM(knowledge management)which we all tried to set up 5 years ago or more with some extras added in.

   When my next door neighbor, a partner in a law firm and under 40 has no clue about IE versions or updates then there is a real issue with education of the masses.

   I used to hate giving the roadmap presentations because unless you were at a client who was at the latest and greatest, you were talking WAY above most companies. Yes, that is how you entice them to upgrade but sometimes you have to take a step back and do last years presentation first to show how they get there.

   Then again Europe is much more technically knowledgable so you probably get better feedback over there. But then I would say that wouldn't I being an x-EMEA person.

1. 10  Charles Robinson http://cubert-codepoet.blogspot.com | 8/31/2006 9:47:34 AM

   Great post, Ed. I'm honestly relieved to see I'm not the only IT person who is in the dark on so much of this. Many of the buzzwords seem incredibly complicated until you strip back the layers and can see what's underneath the hype. That takes time, which I don't have, and they keep coming at a breakneck speed. I finally hit my limit and just gave up trying to keep up.

   @4 - Our last survey of our customers showed fewer than 10% have computers, so I feel your pain on the fax issue. We finally implemented a fax server to make it easier on us.

   @7 - You can add "activity-centric computing" to your list, too. What's tagging? (That's a serious question.)

1. 11  Alan Lepofsky http://www.alanlepofsky.net/ | 8/31/2006 10:04:53 AM

   @10 - Tagging is the buzz word for assigning categories to content. Instead of a "Categorized view" they way you are used to in Notes today, tags are groups into what are called "tag clouds". Tag clouds allow you to visually see which tags are the most popular, by displaying the most commonly used tags in a larger font. Take a look at Flickr { Link } and del.icio.us { Link } for two of the most popular examples. Now picture within your own company, how powerful it would be to visually see tag clouds of the content on your intranet. I guess since the point of this blog entry to discuss new technologies, I should point to the tag cloud entry on Wikipedia! { Link }

1. 12  Karen  | 8/31/2006 10:09:21 AM

   I think you should take it a step further; not only should the discussions include what things are, but why they are. If you tell me what something is, sure, now I see what it is. If you tell me what it is and why it's valuable to other people (and therefore maybe me too)... NOW I'm knowledgeable and interested.

1. 13  Samuel deHuszar Allen  | 8/31/2006 10:57:05 AM

   More than just not making assumption, we all need to challenge what we view as fact to see if, those are also assumptions which seemed irrefutable in a different time and place. In the "getting Notes" thread I linked to Kathy Sierra's blog. She's got a GREAT post on how all assumptions should be treated like a carton of milk and assigned an expiration date.

   Here's the permalink again for those who don't want to go trudging through that gargantuan thread:

   { Link }

1. 14  Keith Brooks http://www.kbmsg.blogspot.com/ | 8/31/2006 11:03:02 AM

   @11 Alan, why would I care about tag clouds on my intranet?

   To see if people are reading it? Or to see how they view it?

   As long as we have a search of some sort on our intranet to find what I want, what benefit is there to a tag cloud?

   Or is this to replace the intranet search mechanism?

   Just playing CXO/VP for a minute in line with Eds discussion.

1. 15  Bernard Devlin  | 8/31/2006 12:50:59 PM

   "Now picture within your own company, how powerful it would be to visually see tag clouds of the content on your intranet."

   @11 Alan, I personally loathe and despise 'tag clouds'.

   Other developers are catching up on Lotus awareness of the importance of 'categories' (or 'tags' as you young'uns like to call them). Lotus Agenda and Lotus Notes grasped the fundamental importance of this very long ago.

   The cloud aspect is just silly. Since civilizations acquired the abstraction provided by numbers, we don't need a bigger physical symbol to understand that one group contains more elements than another.

   Jeez, I think there are even experiments that show that chimpanzess understand that something can symbolically indicate that box A contains more nuts than box B, without the chimps actually having to see the bigger mound of nuts inside box A.

   To see just how dumb tag clouds are (with anything other than a group of about 15 tags), have a look at this:

   { Link }

   I really, really hope that page is supposed to be a joke (but I don't think so). It's like the worst days of the <blink> tag.

   Don't get me started on the other travesties of design and communication on the web. My friend who has lost some colour vision in just one eye cannot read anything on the de.licio.us page, yet manages the rest of his life without any problem. (And don't get me started on their stupid domain name either, I can never remember how to spell it -- uh oh, I think I'm beginning to sound like my grandfather...)

1. 16  Mike "5 Things Wrong with SharePoint" Drips http://forevervoyaging.blogspot.com/ | 8/31/2006 1:06:45 PM

   Any backward 19th century audience that is still using Notes/Domino probably doesn't need the technical challenge of moving forward into the blogging/rss/wiki world of nerds/geeks/losers-with-no-life/twenty-nothings.

1. 17  Alan Lepofsky http://www.alanlepofsky.net/ | 8/31/2006 3:08:24 PM

   Keith, excellent questions: "Why would I care about tag clouds on my intranet?" and "As long as we have a search of some sort on our intranet to find what I want, what benefit is there to a tag cloud?".

   Tag clouds provide you a visual representation of the content that your company has, and most people interact well with "visual" interfaces. The clouds surface data you may not have otherwise known was even there. You can quickly (at a glance) see the most common topic areas, a "search bar" does not show you that data at all. When you search, you tend to know what you are after. Tag clouds also enable you to discover subject matter experts on given topics quickly. For example, who has the most content labeled under "Lotus Notes"? Well, click on the cloud, and I am taken to the list of items, and I can quickly and easily see the top contributors.

   Let me give you a real world example. IBM internally has a very advanced social book-marking tool (which you will be hearing a lot about soon!). As I go about my day, I bookmark most of the sites I visit. This provides other IBMers knowledge about what I've been looking at, therefore to some degree defining my areas of interest. The other day I was tagging a page with "Zoho" (the name of the company). The tag cloud ended up connecting me to related tags such as "Office 2.0", "Web 2.0", "Ajax", etc. Clicking on the cloud for Office 2.0 allowed me to see bookmarks similar to the one I had marked, as well as connected me with the people who had book-marked those sites. I was able to find a few web sites related to Zoho, as well as web sites about other competitors that I had never heard off. I was also able to discover other people in IBM that were reading about Zoho, and was able to form a virtual team so that could share information, reducing duplication. I never would have searched for those competitor's names, since I did not know them.

   Does that make sense? I realize these types of scenarios are new to many people, and IBM is going to have to make sure we clearly explain these powerful new technologies. Hopefully you'll be at Lotusphere to hear all about it, use the products in the labs, and certainly feel free to ask me any questions you'd like!

1. 18  Alan Lepofsky http://www.alanlepofsky.net/ | 8/31/2006 3:16:24 PM

   @15 - You're certainly entitled to your opinion, mine and many others happens to be different. I'm not going to try and convince you with words, hopefully our products will do the job for me.

1. 19  Karen  | 8/31/2006 4:16:53 PM

   I'm with @15 (tag clouds, are you kidding me?). I can't imagine the audience for tag clouds would be very large, but it sounds like IBM can.

   We're in manufacturing. You can count the interest in tag clouds on our Intranet as 0. And that includes the Notes developer who built and maintains the Intranet (me). I'm sure there are compelling reasons to use it - just not in my world.

1. 20  Richard Schwartz http://www.rhs.com/poweroftheschwartz | 8/31/2006 4:39:06 PM

   Clouds, shmouds! That's just the visual representation.

   The proposed value of tagging is the creation of a "folksonomy". A classification based on whatever information readers collectively sees in content, as opposed to what information the author says is in the content, whatever information the KM experts expect people to see, or whatever information can be gleaned through search results.

   The real problem with tags is that they are one dimensional. The tag "Lotus" is likely to be applied to information about IBM brand of IBM, the products sold under that brand, things built witht he products sold under that brand, a car manufacturer, the cars produced by that manufacturer, and various other things. This can be overcome, but not easily. Software has to learn from your tagging habits and infer how you would tag it. I.e., similar to the way SwiftFile works, but instead of just analyzing content it could also analyze what tags other people have applied to the same content.

1. 21  David Bell  | 8/31/2006 4:52:13 PM

   @19 - so you have information on your Intranet that I would hope your users have some interest in ?

   How do they find out about new information - as Alan said - if I don't know it's there, how do I search for it ?

   Also, smaller scale sites tend to allow discovery more easily. I just searched IBM's intranet for the word "tag" and got 47K hits. You don't easily stumble on that much content if you're not actively searching. But with visual cues, a casual browse can turn up something new.

   Let's try a different perspective. Your users don't care about tag clouds, but would they be interested to visit the Intranet and see a visual clue that there is some new information that is also appealing to others, like maybe a new bonus scheme (maybe poor example because you would communicate this sort of thing directly, but hopefully enough to illustrate a point).

   This is just one metaphor being researched and explored to help connect people and information.

1. 22  Charles Robinson http://cubert-codepoet.blogspot.com | 8/31/2006 4:55:01 PM

   @11/17 - Okay, so a tag cloud is a weighted list. It is incredibly interesting to me that I was familiar with the concept you were trying to convey, just not the terminology you used. I wonder if this same situation applies to Ed's audience.

   Personally I find many of the buzzwords to be inane. "Tag cloud" means absolutely nothing and I can't even comprehend how it was derived. "Tagging" content doesn't mean anything to me, but "categorizing" content does. Why can't anyone use the word that means that they're doing instead of constantly having to come up with something hip and cool?

1. 23  David Bell  | 8/31/2006 5:02:47 PM

   Thought about this as I posted the last comment.

   This type of classification also represents a viewer ranking of content. Instead of you the developer of the Intranet deciding on what's hot, the user's themselves are determining this by their actions.

   There is a term in use in IBM, not sure if we coined the phrase or not but have not heard it outside, that I think is very apt. It is "the wisdom of crowds".

   Tag clouds are visual representations of what the populace of the organization deems relevant/important to their work, and no-one has to maintain that. People gravitate to and organize around the information they are using / contributing in their work life. And being able to discover who and what are important concepts in collaborating more effectively.

1. 24  David Bell  | 8/31/2006 5:18:33 PM

   Went searching for the difference between categories and tafs on google and turned up some interesting stuff.

   This discussion makes some points about it:

   { Link }

   I think the main relevance is this:

   "Categories tells us to which domain this class of posts belong.

   Tags signals what matters this special post discusses, and might very well cross domains.

   Categories and tags are complimentary markup systems for finding articles of interest and should be kept in separate spaces."

   So, categories organize and define information of a similar nature or topic, tags are more fine grained about each piece of information.

   As is said elsewhere, tags can be categories, but categories are not tags.

1. 25  Bernard Devlin  | 8/31/2006 6:45:55 PM

   @17 says:

   "clouds surface data you may not have otherwise known was even there. You can quickly (at a glance) see the most common topic areas, a "search bar" does not show you that data at all."

   @20 says:

   'proposed value of tagging is the creation of a "folksonomy". A classification based on whatever information readers collectively sees in content, as opposed to what information the author says is in the content...'

   @23 says

   "This type of classification also represents a viewer ranking of content. Instead of you the developer of the Intranet deciding on what's hot, the user's themselves are determining this by their actions."

   @24 says

   "tags can be categories, but categories are not tags"

   Are you really telling us that user-updatable categories are a great leap forward? This functionality has been built into the Notes client since the bronze age... How is this different from a plain old Discussion.nsf with categorized columns and user-updatable keyword lists.

   Is the significance that other people can effectively 'nominate' a new category and then others can effectivel' vote' on the relevance of that tag/category to some content?

   If so, do you really think that this is such a revolutionary feature to add to a Notes app? I would say it is trivial to do it in Notes - so I'm sure, like me, many people have done this before.

   Hopefully someone will enlighten me. The link in @24 doesn't - that page is pure bluster: 'if you go searching for posts tagged with “administration” in technorati, you will find everything from system administration tips to posts regarding the NASA, the NSA". In what way is 'administration' there a tag and not a category?'

1. 26  Ian Randall http://www.emsoft.com.au | 8/31/2006 6:54:12 PM

   Categories are used to provide context. People also use Folders (such as in the file system) to provide this context.

   One advantage that Categories has over folders is that a single document can have multiple categories (if the field used for categorization is a multi value field).

   However placing a document in multiple categories simultaneously can be confusing for end users because they expect categories to behave like folders and don't understand that if you delete a document in one category, it also disappears in the other categories.

   Perhaps IBM should modify Hannover to warn the end user when they delete a document if it is displayed in multiple categories, so they are given the option to delete the document or simply delete the current category from the multiple value field.

1. 27  Karen  | 8/31/2006 8:17:27 PM

   My beef with the tag cloud is, who (outside of a geek) knows what they are/mean? My users aren't spending all day online. They need the information and then they've got to GO. What do they know about a bold link vs. a non-bold link, or a 16px link vs. a 9px link, all grouped together in no apparent order? It's just not intuitive, even to me, and I'm a geek.

   "Instead of you the developer of the Intranet deciding on what's hot, the user's themselves are determining this by their actions."

   Way more effective than me deciding, yes.

   "Tag clouds are visual representations of what the populace of the organization deems relevant/important to their work, and no-one has to maintain that."

   I love the "most visited news stories" section on the online papers (like the NYT). That's a representation of what the populace deems relevant/important. But, it's a list. That, I get, as does every other person who sees it. Font size isn't the universal symbol for "others found this worthwhile", imo.

1. 28  Alan Lepofsky http://www.alanlepofsky.net/ | 8/31/2006 8:49:33 PM

   Great comments everyone. Please keep them coming, lots of people here at Lotus are reading them. Remember, there are no right or wrong comments. We want to hear what you have to say.

   Please keep in mind the user segmentation our (and anyone's really) products need to address. While some of you don't feel bold vs. non-bold, or font size differences are intuitive, others, such as the up and coming generation of new hire employees find it completely common place. Similarly for "tagging, why don't you just call it what it is.. categories", some people have never used the term category, but are used to "tagging" items all day long.

   It used to be that we talked about new technologies (such as chat) as "Yeah, my kids use that at home". Now those conversation are often "Yeah, our new hire MBA and CompSci graduates use that, and are expecting it at the office". The work force is changing.

   Different strokes... and that is why conversations like this are valuable.

1. 29  Thomas Schulte  | 9/1/2006 12:13:06 AM

   And there is another problem with tags. A problem that does not come in mind easily but it is there.

   If you use tag clouds you limit most of the users to the tags already mentioned there and by doing this you direct their thinking into a one way street. It is the same as it was with search engines. If a thema cannot be found in the first 100 entries most of the people using them will assume it is not there.

   I talked to some university teachers lately about how students use the i-net more and more to get their work done and some of them told me that they can see the ability to think for themselves of their students falling constantly, because they all are able to get the same material via search engines. They tend to look at the first 10 to 100 entries and are doing their work from there.

   Tag clouds i think will in thelong run do the same. They deliver a broad path one could follow with ease. But they will also keep most people from thinking for themselves. I would call them the "BILD" newspaper of the internet. Lots of headlines and most of the time no real valuable content behind them.

   I do not know if tag clouds in the intranet will really work. I do not think so because, lets face it, every bit of information a person has is used to get or defend his or her position in company world. It might be that this is not the truth in a sphere like the notes community, but i have seen this in most of the companies i worked for.

1. 30  Axel  | 9/1/2006 2:43:56 AM

   @Thomas: I see no reason to be so negative.

   What companies are you working for or are your clients?

   From my experience knowledge sharing is very commonplace in the corporate world.

   I know it really depends on the organization. I am far more productive in an environment who do live a culture of sharing.

   This is in synch with academia as business studies like organizational theory and organizational psychology and even in pure econimcs theory.

   I know from friends & family who work in disparate areas as marketing for a car manufacturer, wind energy and tv productions that all are surounded by an environment of happy knowledge sharing. At least 2 of the organizations they work for are no freak shows but are founded in the 19th century.

1. 31  Thilo Hamberger  | 9/1/2006 4:24:14 AM

   Tagging in Notes is done through Document->Properties->Meta, right? Does anybody really use it? Do your users know about it?

1. 32  Bernard Devlin  | 9/1/2006 5:28:30 AM

   @31

   That can also be opened up to a web interface ($$Categories would need to be updated). That 'meta' feature has existed in Notes since at least 1999 (possibly earlier). There are also ways to do it so that the number of users who had categorized a particular document could be shown along with the category (although not using that 'Meta' tab). So, I still can't see how tagging is any different from categorizing.

   Bizarrely IBM seems to suffer from a reverse 'Not-Invented-Here' syndrome. It's a bit like the buzz around AJAX: before the term 'AJAX' was coigned Lotus had been implementing the same thing about 5 years ago in K-Station. According to one of the principal developers of K-Station, it was "a sacrificial lamb in a company (IBM) that only really understands server-side middleware"):

   { Link }

1. 33  Karen  | 9/1/2006 8:33:46 AM

   @28 - I agree the work force is changing. And new technologies drive and are driven by that change. My comments are about today, though. Today in this manufacturing corporation that I work for.

   I realize there's a market for technologies we don't happen use. I'm just suggesting that in today's workplace, we're not all addressing the business needs of the wireless and LinkedIn, which was the whole point of Ed's entry, I believe. Make no assumptions.

1. 34  Charles Robinson http://cubert-codepoet.blogspot.com | 9/1/2006 9:50:02 AM

   Wow, lots of good discussion here...

   RSS/Atom, podcasting, blogs, wikis, tikis, WiFi, social networking and some form of contextual visualization are all useful when used appropriately. Their applicability to businesses varies widely, and I'm a little uncomfortable with the rumblings that people who don't use them are somehow less savvy or remedial when compared to the ones who do. It bothers me that I see techies who are using these technologies browbeating or being derisive of others who aren't. Maybe I'm taking it personally since I'm in that latter group.

   On the subject of tag clouds, my brain is wired so that when I see words, I read them. If they are different font sizes, weights, or colors it is more difficult, but I still struggle to read what is written and infer a context between the words themselves. That makes tag clouds more annoying than useful to me.

   Compare that to a different visualization method: { Link } (This is a tree map visualization, not a weighted list, but the same visualization could be applied to either.) Now that makes sense. The graphics break things up so I can focus on them rather than the words. And since it's an abstract visual element I can quickly filter them mentally and focus on what I find interesting. Finally, after that happens, I can read what is in the box. Maybe I'm weird, but that's how my brain works.

   @23/24 - Okay, that helps even more. The link didn't, really, but your explanation did. Essentially tags are keywords. How to get Notes to accept different keywords for each user is a technical matter I'll leave alone for now. My question is why can't they be called keywords? "Tag" is a word with its own definition, to bastardize it to also mean "keyword" just makes it more confusing (at least to me). Why invent new definitions for existing words when there is already a word for it? It's like people around here calling IM, "ping". I'm baffled how those two got mixed up, but it's the source of endless confusion for me.

   [Note: I do not intend the following to be disrespectful of anyone.]

   @28 - I agree that the workforce is changing and the language we use in business will evolve. However I emphatically do **NOT** think it is acceptable to lower expectations or radically alter that language because new workers aren't familiar with it.

   Your comments fit well with Thomas' comments @29. The newer workers I have seen are just being taught to find the most expedient solution. That presents itself as doing the bare minimum, research, objectivity and critical thinking be damned. I see the business world caving in and, for lack of a better term, dumbing things down so the newer college graduates can appear to be successful. What happens, at least where I work, is a more senior person ends up taking up the slack. I can't help but wonder what happens when the people who really know how to do the work are all gone and the business world is left with people who are mostly clueless and never had to step their game up because someone else was always covering for them. Perhaps this is a situation unique to my current employer.

   @31 - I have no clue what you're talking about, but I went into document properties and found the Keywords field. I've been a Notes developer since 1999, PCLP since 2003, and I'm still finding new stuff. :p Now to figure out what to *do* with that...

1. 35  Charles Robinson http://cubert-codepoet.blogspot.com | 9/1/2006 9:51:25 AM

   I keep adding periods to the end of my links.. the proper link for the marumushi newsmap is { Link }

1. 36  Alan Lepofsky http://www.alanlepofsky.net/ | 9/1/2006 10:46:23 AM

   On the surface, I think tags, categories, keywords, labels, etc are all obviously very similar. The fact that we need to dive into discussions about them proves that it is a confusing situation, one not to be taken lightly.

   Personally, the first thing I think of when I hear "tag" is the little white square on the back of my t-shirts. They provide me information such as the size, material, and how to wash it. In other words, they provide me information about the object. "Meta-tags" have been doing the same thing for years on the internet, on document properties, etc. So for me tags (dropping the geeky meta) don't seem like something new, they are simply a way to provide context about the object. Whether or not "clouds" or "lists" are the right way to display groups of that information is obviously up for debate.

   As for ping, I have to assume it comes from the standard sound that you hear when a new window pops up.

   The Notes document properties meta tab is used in conjunction with Domino Domain Search's Content Maps feature. From Domino Administration Help: "Content Maps let users browse for information rather than search for it using full-text search. Content maps organize documents by topics, or content, into categories that are similar to the categories on sites such as AltaVista and Yahoo!

1. 37  Keith Brooks http://www.kbmsg.blogspot.com/ | 9/1/2006 11:03:04 AM

   Alan, Thank you for the reply and example.

   It is most amusing to me that no matter how hard we try, we still end up building file cabinets of the mind or in virtual space, a la a Notes db.

   While I can see your view about the sharing of like minded individuals, on one level I can understand, as an example, wanting to read what Warren Buffet reads or one's mgr or ceo.

   On the other hand, when I go looking for information within a company I call/IM/email the person direct if I know, or ask until I find them to get the information.

   My point is in business you know what you are looking for, if not, you probably need a new job or are brand new or in marketing looking for the next big thing.

   Thus the joke in Lotus when new people start and ask a question, the answer is always "It's in a database".

   So if I follow your thoughts, this tag cloud helps by telling me about the popularity contest for the topic or site? Which is how it appears to me, on the internet side.

   On a business side I presume the more tags the better the information or more important it might be.

   But then it's just a bookmark to me so I can find it again.

   Perhaps I am of the few non-visual people in the world. I accept that. Ray davies would be upset with me I guess for those that recall the "Think Visual" album/tour.

   Maybe you guys should get him to play at Lotusphere.

1. 38  David Bell  | 9/1/2006 4:35:19 PM

   I put in the link because it was where I got some of the quotes I posted.

   @25 - they are not user updatable categories and this is not about nomination and voting.

   When I contribute content I "tag" it with keywords I think relevant to the individual piece of content. A category is not specific to an individual piece of content. Over time, others contribute content too. If they "tag" their content with the same tags I have used, then we have more content that is tagged similarly and thus that "tag" name in the cloud starts to stand out from others. This gives me some clue as to the relavant weight of the content behind the tag in the context of my colleagues.

   "How is this different from a plain old Discussion.nsf with categorized columns and user-updatable keyword lists."

   It's similar, but different. Content typically falls into a few broad classifications, usually termed categories, whereas one piece of content can have lots of tags associated with it.

   Now there is an argument there at the extreme, that if you put all content in a set of categories that have the same names as all tags, then in this instance categories = tags.

   @27 - true, but a list is just another visual representation of the same data. Ways of representing data evolve all the time. Those that have used one way for a while will naturally be more familiar with it over some new format, but that does not in itself make the newer format bad.

   @37 - but you have to ask how many people to find what you want ? Is that efficient ? This technology and data represenation is about making that collaboration easier by helping you to locate the person/info you want.

   In a company the size of IBM, there is a ton of useful information that you don't know about. There is just too much in existence and being created every day to keep up. Alan had a great example of some competitors that he had never heard of but a tag on some content "led" him, not him asking around, to discover those competitors thus enhancing his knowledge.

   As with all of these things, the usefulness is directly correlated to how well people use the technologies and in this case "tag" their content appropriately.

1. 39  Bernard Devlin  | 9/1/2006 6:36:38 PM

   @38

   David, you say about tags:'they are not user updatable categories and this is not about nomination and voting.

   When I contribute content I "tag" it with keywords I think relevant to the individual piece of content. A category is not specific to an individual piece of content. Over time, others contribute content too. If they "tag" their content with the same tags I have used, then we have more content that is tagged similarly and thus that "tag" name in the cloud starts to stand out from others. This gives me some clue as to the relavant weight of the content behind the tag in the context of my colleagues."

   Please explain to me how that differs from you adding a new category/tag to some document/content (nominating a new category), and how it it differs from others 'voting' that some category/tag is relevant to that document//content.

   You also say:

   "Content typically falls into a few broad classifications, usually termed categories, whereas one piece of content can have lots of tags associated with it."

   Look, if you are going to defend the distinction that 'tags' are somehow different from 'categories' you are going to have come up with something substantive. Who says categories must be broad/imprecise, whilst tags are specific/multiple? The world (or if one goes deep enough, consciousness) is a manifold - it is capapble of being distinquished in many different ways. This process of distinguishing one thing from another (and the association of that distinction with symbols or words) is exactly what is going on with categorization or tagging. In this whole discussion (with people who supposedly have seen this Brave New World of tags, wikis, RSS, etc.) none have you have come up with anything substantive concerning how 'tag clouds' (or even tags alone) produce some new benefit.

   I really am shocked by this - some of you are really great thinkers. I call shenanigans. This is clearly the Emporer's new clothses.

   David, you also say:

   'In a company the size of IBM, there is a ton of useful information that you don't know about. There is just too much in existence and being created every day to keep up. Alan had a great example of some competitors that he had never heard of but a tag on some content "led" him, not him asking around, to discover those competitors thus enhancing his knowledge.

   As with all of these things, the usefulness is directly correlated with how well people use the technologies and in this case "tag" their content appropriately.'

   No-one is disputing the importance of knowledge, or the importance of how that knowledge is categorized/tagged/labelled. It is all about how we can cognitively manage the plethora of information that is available to us. Twenty years ago, we were lucky if we had access to a good university library. In many ways the internet has massively surpassed that (on a more profound level, a university library offers something quite different). Of course we need to find ways to get to relevant content (Google is a good start...)

   None of you have yet to answer how any of this is superior to what has been available in Lotus Notes since 1999.

   In a moment of self-doubt I decided to consult my dictionaries. In the Collins dictionary the #1 meaning of 'category' is: "a class or group of things, people, etc. possessing some quality or qualities in common"

   The #1 meaning of 'tag' is: "a piece of paper, leather, etc. for attaching to something as a mark or label". Which of those seems like the more appropriate definition for people assigning words that summarise content and enable content to be grouped?

   The Readers Digest universal dictionary describes 'category' as: "a specifically defined division in a classification: a class". It's definition of 'tag' agrees with Collins.

   Clearly the Readers Digest definition of category accords more with your fixed conception of what 'category' means. However, my whole point is that categories in Notes are not that inflexible, and, in fact, that very flexibility was built into the system. Why else does Notes have a UI facility for users to add their own categories to content? Documents can belong to multiple categories. It requires as little thought in Notes to relate document <-> people <-> category in Notes as it does in some relational database.

   Could an advocate of tagging actually produce a substantive explanation of how it differs from what is available and possible with Notes categories? Or should I just accept that you are playing buzzword-bingo and I am by definition going to lose?

1. 40  Richard Schwartz http://www.rhs.com/poweroftheschwartz | 9/1/2006 7:50:01 PM

   @39 re "None of you have yet to answer how any of this is superior to what has been available in Lotus Notes since 1999"...

   The concept of tagging is this: if you can access it, and if it has a URL, you can tag it. Also, you can choose to make your tags accessible to others. You don't have to be the content creator. You don't need any special rights. In Notes terms, you can tag it and share your tags even if you only have Reader rights.

   One could design any Notes database to allow this of course, via response documents and Write Public permission, but this still falls short of what we're talking about with respect to tagging, because tagging is global. Tagging cuts across sites, repositories, etc. Tags are external to the data. With Notes, categories only apply within a given database, because the categories are data in the database.

   It's useful to think of tagging as shared, categorized bookmarks. And in some tagging systems, you can annotate tags and have comment threads on the tags. I've wanted that in Notes since even before 1999, actually, but it's not there. Anyone could build a shared bookmark database (for both web and doclink bookmarks) in Notes. All the features of every Internet tagging system could be built into it, and a standard mechanism for exposing tags within Notes applications could be developed and developers would be free to integrate it -- but it's not a built-in part of the product, and it is clearly more than just categorization.

1. 41  Bernard Devlin  | 9/2/2006 4:05:05 AM

   @40

   Thanks, Richard. Your post has clarified things for me.

   But I don't see that your fundmantal distinction between tags and categories holds:

   "The concept of tagging is this: if you can access it, and if it has a URL, you can tag it ... Tags are external to the data. With Notes, categories only apply within a given database, because the categories are data in the database."

   Catalog.nsf contains Content Documents which point to content (Notes or web pages), and the categories are external to the data (the 'tagged' content). In its simplest form, a Notes document's Categories field are obviously not external. So, by this definition of tagging, Notes was still years ahead back in 1999.

   It looks to me the fundamental difference between tagging and categorization is that tagging keeps a reference to who has tagged some content, and thus enables the display of the relevance of a particular tag. We can agree that it is not difficult for a Notes developer to add this to an application, even if such tracking of user-categorization is not built into the architecture of Notes.

   Since Notes users have access to databases where they can place documents in folders of their own making, there is little need for 'tagging' as an aide-memoire - unlike most user's experiences of web browsing, where the content may well be hard to find again without some kind of 'tag'. The emergence of value from seeing how people have tagged content is something else, and clearly has value.

   Surely the Lotus KM applications must have been working in this direction?

   Well, thanks folks ... I feel I have achieved some clarity about this distinction. I still think tag clouds are an abomination :-)

1. 42  Richard Schwartz http://www.rhs.com/poweroftheschwartz | 9/2/2006 9:13:42 AM

   @41: re "there is little need for 'tagging as an aide-memoire".

   Tagging for yourself is not the point. Tagging for others is the point. Tagging is an act of sharing your way of classifying information, so that other people can benefit from your assessment, and so that analytical programs can combine your assessments with other peoples' in order to build a collective taxonomy (aka "folksonomy") that reflects what users really think is important about data. That's not going to happen with private folders that nobody else sees.

   re "Surely the Lotus KM applications must have been working in this direction."

   Around this direction, maybe, but not really in this direction. Early KM was built too much around a centrally managed taxonomy. Tagging is a counter-reaction to this. It's KM minus the busload of expert management and information science consultants.

1. 43  David Bell  | 9/2/2006 1:45:50 PM

   @40 - good post - I think that really helps.

   @39,41 - I wonder if we are a little at odds because I am talking about categories and tags, devoid of any implementation specifics, whereas your context is related directly to the implementation specifics of categories and folders in Notes. And therefore, it seems you are trying to understand how the concept maps to that one specific implementation.

   In response to your question: "Please explain to me how that differs from you adding a new category/tag to some document/content (nominating a new category), and how it it differs from others 'voting' that some category/tag is relevant to that document//content."

   Behind the scenes, this may appear to be what is going on. The results of tagging indicates how others perceive the relative weight of content. But as a tagger, my motivation is not to ask others to agree or disagree with me which is fundamentally what voting is about.

   The weight of content relevance grows organically without me telling others, "hey if you agree with me, tag your content like this too". I do not play any part in how others tag, nor they in mine. Hopefully the amalgamation of those individual, unprompted results together, is of use in organizing around content.

   Whatever the names, agreement on the definitions is obviously important. Since your research in the dictionary would support that you can equate these things if you are prepared to accept that category is as granular as tag - which I had proposed in my post was true at the extreme where a category that applied to only one piece of content is allowed. But maybe to many people, something that is that granular is not what they would call a category.

   Are there any semantic rules which indicate that a category (per the Readers Digest definition) must contain a class of elements whose count is > 1 ? I don't know, but I think that would not be too much of an assumption to make.

   I too would like to see a real definitive distinction that is acceptable to all, but I think it needs to be implementation agnostic in its terms. Maybe we should ask the question of Carol Jones, IBM Distinguished Engineer, and someone who has spent much time recently studying upcoming collaborative technologies and techniques and researching how they are or can be applied to today's problems.

   Obviously, I have not been terribly successful in communicating one :)

   Good discussion, nonetheless.

1. 44  David Bell  | 9/2/2006 1:51:19 PM

   Ooops - Carol is an IBM Fellow, not Distinguished Engineer. My apologies.

1. 45  David Bell  | 9/2/2006 1:58:13 PM

   So I searched for tagging on Carol's blog, and smack bang in the middle of the last result was this:

   "There's nothing earth-shattering about tagging (or some would call it "categorizing"). So why does it work?"

   I had to laugh :)

1. 46  Bernard Devlin  | 9/2/2006 3:18:27 PM

   @42

   "Tagging for yourself is not the point. Tagging for others is the point. Tagging is an act of sharing your way of classifying information, so that other people can benefit from your assessment, and so that analytical programs can combine your assessments with other peoples' in order to build a collective taxonomy"

   This is something else I don't agree with. Where the user is not being paid to tag content that s/he did not author, I think that the act of tagging or categorizing is primarily done for the benefit of the user. Additional value emerges from this that can benefit other users, or even the owner of the tagging system.

   I can imagine there are some fairly egotistical bloggers who tout their del.icious bookmarks, or who want to have their pages added to digg, etc. They may well see that their primary motivation in tagging is to let others benefit from their wisdom. But if they constitute the majority, then I don't see that as a folksonomy (more a self-selecting group of self-promoting people).

   I suppose in the end both of these types of motivation are driven by self-interest. But unless the tagger is someone with an internet persona they want/need to maintain, they are going to be tagging for their own benefit, not someone else's. So I would argue that the person who is 'tagging for others' is ultimately doing it for their own self-serving ends (payment or self-promotion).

   @45 Well, it's good to know that a nobody like me is in distinguished company :-)

1. 47  David Bell  | 9/2/2006 7:39:06 PM

   "I suppose in the end both of these types of motivation are driven by self-interest. But unless the tagger is someone with an internet persona they want/need to maintain, they are going to be tagging for their own benefit, not someone else's. So I would argue that the person who is 'tagging for others' is ultimately doing it for their own self-serving ends (payment or self-promotion)."

   This might be true in the context of blogs, personal sites, etc. on the Internet where your goal is to attract visitors and/or promote one's self.

   But think of this in the context of an Intranet, where the audience or users of the tagging metadata are a more closed group where there is no inherent benefit or need for self-promotion. And where the goal is to use this metadata to support content promotion and awareness of other relevant information, that is useful rather than the more self-serving need to attract traffic.

1. 48  Bernard Devlin  | 9/3/2006 4:54:09 AM

   @47

   David, I did think of that (hence my reference to 'being paid') :-) And if on an intranet one can be identified by one's tags, then there is the possibility of being judged by the number and the quality of one's actions.

   Something similar happened in my work environment, where I used to get much larger pay increases every year than most of my colleagues. It seemed that one of the criteria management used was how many contributions one made to the knowledgebase (a Notes app) - but also how many documents one read in the knowledgebase that were authored by others.

   I can see that one might argue that the users of an intranet are some form of community (a folk) in a way that the users of the internet are not. In a sense bloggers who are 'tagging for others' might also be construed to be a community.

1. 49  Keith Brooks http://kbmsg.blogspot.com/ | 9/3/2006 1:35:09 PM

   @48 so we should just tag a million sites to get a bonus?

   Excellent, is your place hiring soon?

1. 50  Richard Schwartz http://www.rhs.com/poweroftheschwartz | 9/3/2006 8:20:33 PM

   @46 Point taken, but in a sense it doesn't really matter if your motive is to tag for your own benefit or others. If you do tag, and your tags are visible to others, and they are subject to analytical software, then your tags can benefit others.