Simon Barratt

Knowledge in the Enterprise

Over the recent months I have been impressed with they way flickr and Technorati use tags to build their indexes.  In particular, the use of the variable font size to represent the most active tags.  This is a great indicator of where the most activity currently is.  flickr build on this by adding a few extra categories (most active in last 24 hours and over the last week).  Technorati seem more focussed on ranking the biggest and the best, in addition to tracking what is currently popular.


I believe this model of presentation really helps you decide on where to navigate to find something, but also, is self promoting, in that it helps draw attention to itself, by virtue of it's dynamic nature.  This would make for a great homepage for your corporate Intranet.  

Imagine if all your companies documents were tagged with author, various subject classifications and the physical location it pertains to, and that all these author links had on-line awareness embedded (pulling from calendars, geo position,  IM awareness, phone etc.) enabling you to locate and collaborate further with the author if required.

Can you imagine how much wasted time would be recovered from the current mishmash of offerings?  This reminds me a bit of the Discovery Server product, that used to spider your network and attempt to build a taxonomy for you based on it's findings.  I never had much success with developing a working taxonomy, but do remember being impressed by the affinity process, which tried to identify subject matter experts and keeping it updated.

So, a combination of superior indexing tools (Google Enterprise?) to index and tag your entire enterprises knowledge, Discovery Server like affinities, to associate experts with the content, and flickr style variable font size presentation to allow you to navigate and retrieve it all!  Additionally, all tags and authors would all have an associated RSS channel allowing you to monitor for changes in a particular area.  Now that would be something special!  Any takers out there?

Lastly, my recent post on flickr graph search, would begin to look really interesting if it started showing the relationships between knowledge, the authors and consumers.