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Fetch!
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 Social bookmarking services have dramatically changed the way we find information on the Internet. Popularized by a service named del.icio.us, these Web-based applications provide a centralized place to store, organize and share Internet bookmarks. There are two distinguishing characteristics of social bookmarking systems. The first is the use of keywords, or tags, that a user enters to describe the links he or she saves. These tags allow users to organize and display their collection with labels that are meaningful to them. Furthermore, multiple tags allow bookmarks to belong to more than one category, a limitation of the traditional hierarchically organized folders found in most Web browsers. The second significant characteristic of these social bookmark applications is the social nature of their use. While bookmark collections are personally created and maintained, they are typically also visible to others. As a result, users benefit by getting pointers to new information from others while at the same time getting a general sense of what other people's interests are.
The dogear social bookmarking service is the first social bookmarking tool designed to support organizations and large corporations. Adapting social bookmarking to the corporate environment meant enhancing some of the technology's standard features. Rather than allow the use of pseudonyms, dogear requires the use of real names and authentication with a corporate directory. Real name identity allows doegear users to look-up additional information about other people in various corporate databases (e.g., corporate online directory and the enterprise Web). It also facilitates communication between users of dogear since most corporate collaboration tools (such as e-mail, and chat) use real name identities. For example, if someone is looking for a colleague who is knowledgeable about Java, he or she might look to see who has bookmarked articles on that topic and then send an e-mail to get more information. Finally, real name identity also promotes more responsible use of the system. A user who is required to identify himself or herself is far less likely than a pseudonymous user to post and share links to questionable material.
A second distinguishing characteristic of dogear is that it was designed to work behind corporate firewalls. This allows intranet resources to be bookmarked and shared among coworkers (e.g., human resource links, team or project resources, etc.) For example, if an employee wanted information on how to fill out expense report forms, he or she might search dogear using the tag "expense report" to find a list of intranet bookmarks that others in the company found useful.
Figure 1 shows the front page of dogear, featuring the bookmarks most recently added by a dogear user. The tabs at the top of the left-hand column (A) provide: a link to the user's tags; a list of people who have bookmarked the same URLs; and a list of the individual's bookmark subscriptions. The Active Tags (B) area shows an indexed tag cloud with a slider that can reduce the number of tags shown based on their frequency of appearance.
Figure 1. dogear makes it easy to share bookmarks in the enterprise.
A list of bookmarks runs down the center of the screen (C). Each bookmark includes a title, optional descriptive text, tags, when the bookmark was made, and information about the author. Clicking on the title takes you to the bookmarked site. Clicking on a tag takes you to a list of the other bookmarks that the author has tagged with the same keyword. Clicking on the author's name takes you to a list of the author's bookmarks. Dogear's robust search lets you search bookmarks by tag (D), person, or type of collection (all bookmarks/my bookmarks). Any dogear page can be viewed as an RSS or Atom feed and can be embedded as a blogroll via the JavaScript snippet on any other Web page (E).
Additional value through dogear mashups
An enterprise social bookmarking application like dogear increases the utility or value of various Internet and intranet information resources for the company's employees. There are a number of valuable mashups, or integration points, between dogear and other corporate applications.
First, the social bookmark link structure could be used to enhance enterprise search applications. Web resources with high bookmark counts are likely to be relevant and useful. An early variant of this search integration has already been developed as a Firefox plug-in. Intranet searches are augmented with a supplemental search of the dogear bookmark collection, and bookmark matches are presented, as a group, in the search result list. Figure 2 shows an example of the search results for the term "ajax." The top three dogear results are presented at the top of the page ("injected results") and the general enterprise search results are presented below.
Figure 2. Page showing integration of dogear and enterprise search results.
A second integration point would be to combine an individual's bookmarks with other information sources associated with that individual. A research prototype of an enhanced corporate directory service has enhanced an individual's directory information by embedding portions of that person's bookmark collection. The idea here is that an individual's bookmark collection is a meaningful reflection of the kinds of topics that generally interest him or her. This may be a powerful mechanism to provide dynamic updates to the "current interests" profiles for individuals. In a similar manner, corporate bloggers have embedded a list of recent personal bookmarks into their home blog page by using the JavaScript format provided by dogear.
Finally, bookmark collections could be culled from a number of individuals and then added to Web sites maintained to support various teams or projects. One team that focuses on e-learning has embedded a collection of bookmarks on its web site. Using the subscription services supported by the bookmarking application allows automatic updating of bookmarks. This promotes timely sharing of important information among team members.
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David R Millen is a research manager in the Collaborative User Experience group at IBM Research in Cambridge, MA. His group develops new social software applications and explores the social, business, and technological implications of these new tools.
Jonathan Feinberg is a senior software engineer in the Collaborative User Experience group at IBM Research. He considers himself a generalist, with particular interest in "glue programming"-- tying together disparate and otherwise mutually agnostic systems.
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