Big Blue seems to get trendier all the time. First, they officially endorse Firefox and employee blogging. Now, we see that they are considering modifying their massive Intranet with the help of some kind of folksonomy. This is worth watching because it might well represent the first large-scale enterprise application of an evolving organic taxonomy.

Bud Gibson’s post is comprehensive, but understandably avoids some of the rancor that folksonomies are inspiring in IA. There are those that hate them and those that love them - and CoFactors itself has kicked the concept’s tires as well. The upshot here, however, is that IBM - of anyone - knows what it is getting into. Gibson’s post includes a link at the bottom for an exhaustive 90-plus slide powerpoint presentation detailing the history of internal intranet IA at IBM - as well as how they want to move forward. Depending on the ways they use tags and folksonomy, they could go a long way towards resolving some of the still-largely-theoretical facets to the hierarchy vs. populist schism in IA.

JF

This entry was posted on Friday, June 10th, 2005 at 11:56 am and is filed under General, Finds, User Interface Design.