October 11, 2006

Sharing Information is About Tagging

The secret to any database or collaborative project is to ensure the data you put in can be found. Google's success was not just because it could index billions of web pages - many businesses do that. Google's success was because when you input a search query you get back good results - ideally speaking.

Social bookmarking, the king of which is del.icio.us allows you to bookmark a web page and use keywords to "tag the content". You can use this free service or look into using a commercial application.

Startupjournal.com writes 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 bookmarking 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."

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