Jon Udell is one of my favorites and in this week's print edition of InfoWorld magazine his column really raises some
fundamental issues. The article was available a week ago online but just now caught my eye and is titled Reinventing the Intranet: Modern social software could be the key to building effective enterprise knowledge
systems. Anyone who's been reading much of Udell's writing will be unsurprised
by the basic premise of this piece, but the sense of historical perspective and the succinct questions the article
raises about translating what are so far largely consumer oriented services (Web 2.0) into truly powerful tools for
organization communication are refreshing and important.
Udell focuses on enterprise vs. general web search
and the impact of social bookmarking/tagging. He asks whether these technologies will be implemented
intelligently as organizations shift towards internal use. "Given the
opportunity," Udell write, "people will want to bookmark and tag the resources they publish internally.
It’s the easiest way to create, manage, and share dynamic lists of such resources. This system pays for itself in
improved personal productivity alone. Everything else is gravy, and there’s plenty of that." Makes it
sound simple, doesn't he? "Is this the next-generation intranet? If so, we
should sort out what we got wrong on the first try, and what we’ll get right this time around." It's
enough to make a person ask why only 14 of us have tagged Udell's article in del.ico.us so far.
Tagging has long been a focus of his column. Previous articles that set the stage for this
week's throwing down of the gauntlet include:
Collaborative Knowledge Gardening from
August '04
Tag mania sweeps the
web from July '05
Managing
Metadata from October '05 (the longest and most technical of the four articles.)
Udell's own del.icio.us
archive can also be seen, via his list of self-tagged
podcasts.
