I am at the opening day Keynote for Enterprise Search Summit West in San Jose today, rushing down from Pacifica on this beautiful morning driving (ok speeding) down 280 to make this early morning session. Obviously if you have been following me for a while over on my blog you know i have a 'thing' for social tagging and recently published an eBook on Hybrid approaches to Folksonomies and Taxonomies in the Enterprise so i did not want to miss it.

The Keynote is titled 'Tag, You're It: Social Tagging Strategies for the Enterprise' and is being lead by Gene Smith, Principal, nForm Experience. Gene is the author of the book 'Tagging People Powered Metadata for the Social Web'

Notes:
Why We're Here? (at the conference)
To figure out how to find *the good* Stuff

19th century explosion in paper records- flourishing of patten filings to store records and information. the one that emerged as the winner was vertical filing. folders and tabs where a key piece. Tabs in vertical filing are still seen in today's web User Interfaces.

Folders have been the dominant organizing principle - then links came into the scene.

Instead of Information explosion- think of it as a stream, immersion in the flow.
the challenge is keeping track and finding what we need later on - tags are
- fast
-simple
-social
-good enough

A tag (word) can mean a lot of different things.

Looking at different tools and why they are interesting:

Zigtag - semantic social bookmarking
When you are about to tag something, you type and pick from the list and it includes definition.
They have million of concepts- they mine public data sources for user generated content and built a inference engine to provide the concepts

LibraryThing
any person can make any two tags equivalent- but they can also remove it as well - "humor" and" "humour"- same word but different meaning in different cultures (america vs. UK) authors tagged to each are different.

Value chain of the LibraryThing features
>combine tags> tag mash search>tagsonomies (mapped to existing categories)

The big problem is getting people to use the tools you provide for them!

Cold-Start Problem-

• creating incentives- reward a person by identifying that that were the first person to tag or create social proof 'feature linker'- (who doesn't like to see their name in lights?)
• try to pre-populate the tag box- tags other people have used

Some other examples:
Wesabe - sticky tags- always applied to the item, but then allow 'not sticky' or one time tags. show you your spending habits by clustering your tags- giving benefits of the tags they used.

Dogear - built internally at IBM- architected it so it produces a RSS feed for every tag - what happened is that as people started using it- groups found interesting things to go with their RSS feeds like displaying the content into other environments- creating mashups- allowing innovation on the tags so that the value is created by the users needs.

Although this specific slide deck he used does not seem to be there yet- Gene shares his slides over at SlideShare and you can also follow Gene on Twitter @gsmith .