Tagging, Social Networks, Interaction and Findability

Events the past days has got me thinking about the power of social tagging and its connection to findability. Thoughts that commend me to writing my most personal (and perhaps off topic) post yet on this blog. (All thoughts expressed in this post are my own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of my employer.)

Rumors about the shut down of Delicious have been circling the web. Even though it is still unconfirmed from Yahoo, my Twitter feed has been filled with comments about how to save your bookmarks, export bookmarks to other services, petitions to Yahoo about saving Delicious or making it open source.

Traditionally when talking about user tagging of content the topic is re-finding things. Users tag information on the web or an intranet in order to be able to find their way back to them. However most of the comments that I’ve seen about Delicious being shut down has nothing to do with this. As I see it, users don’t claim to be missing the bookmarks themselves, but the social network, research, collaboration and search capabilities that came with the bookmarking service. Delicious seems to have emerged from a service that helps you bookmark your things for re-finding them to a service that helps you find new things based on the tagging of others. Tagging, or social bookmarking may very well have started as a way of re-finding your information but has grown into a new way of discovering information, in parallel to search. (Maybe that is an explanation to the tweets wishing for Google to buy delicious from Yahoo?)

So, tagging can not only help you re-find your own stuff but also explore new things and spread information. One good example of this is what is currently going on in the swedish Twitterverse. It all started with one journalist’s discussion with her friends about the disbelief towards the women accusing Julian Assange of sexual assault. It quickly turned into so much more; a profound discussion about the fine lines of sexuality, what is OK, what we want and like and how to say no. Using the hash tag #prataomdet swedish twitter users are writing about and discussing their experiences in an effort to change the cultural climate so that people talk about it, start communicating with each other about sexuality. You can easily follow all the tweets real time and read blog posts on the topic at prataomdet.se. Many of the major news sites have now started reporting on this as well after the massive activity on twitter. (For non-swedish speaking readers an effort has also been made to start discussions in English as well at #talkaboutit on twitter.)

The feed in itself is thought provoking and can easily keep you busy for hours. Besides the content and openness of the discussions I find something else amazing. In a matter of hours this one tag joined together users, many of whom have never interacted with each other before, helping them share and find new information about something that was unspoken of earlier. Combining the power of social networks and tagging made this possible.

I usually write very different sorts of blog posts at this blog. This one time I just wanted to revel over the amazing possibilities for interaction that technology offers us today. Then maybe the next step is to think about how to tap into this power of interaction and how findability within the enterprise can benefit from this as well. In the mean time I recommend reading about What social networks reveal about interaction or how Västra Götalands Region are currently working on incorporating user tagging into their metadata.

Search as an Integrator of Social Intranets

Wikis, blogs, microblogs, comments, ratings…we all know the buzzwords around the “Social Intranet” by now. Can we consider search as an integrator of Social Intranets?

If the first trend was about getting people to use the new technology, the second seems to be about making sense of all the information that has been created by now.

I sat down with a number of our customers the other week to talk about intranets and internal portals and everyone seemed to face one particular challenge: making sense of the collaborative and social content. How do we make this sort of information searchable without losing the context? And how do we know who the sender is?

One approach which was discussed is to use the people card and search as an integrator between the social components. By using search we can easily integrate everything from microblogging-flows, to comments and contributes in different communities used in the enterprise. The search engine fetches the information and presents it real-time.

Social intranets and search

Social intranets and search

When searching for project One HR on the intranet you can, besides all search hits, get an overview of the owner of the project and all the related discussions that has been going on. Apart from this, networks i.e. people who has been involved can be shown – creating 360° view of the information.

What is your view of the future social intranets? Have you solved the issues with search in collaborative and social content?

IASummit – Information Architecture and Search

This upcoming week my colleague Lina and I will participate in the IASummit in Phoenix Arizona. Search, information architecture and user experience and the relationships between them is the focus for us this upcoming week. We look forward to hearing a lot of great talks, meeting interesting people and enjoying the sunny weather in Arizona.

We will be blogging from the conference but if you don’t want to wait for that you can follow me, Maria on twitter or follow the hashtag for the IASummit #ias10 so see what everyone is tweeting about.

Faceted Search by LinkedIn

My RSS feeds have been buzzing about the LinkedIn faceted search since it was first released from beta in December. So why is the new search at LinkedIn so interesting that people are almost constantly discussing it? I think it’s partly because LinkedIn is a site that is used by most professionals and searching for people is core functionality on LinkedIn. But the search interface on LinkedIn is also a very good example of faceted search.

I decided to have a closer look into their search. The first thing I realized was just how many different kinds of searches there are on LinkedIn. Not only the obvious people search but also, job, news, forum, group, company, address book, answers and reference search. LinkedIn has managed to integrate search so that it’s the natural way of finding information on the site. People search is the most prominent search functionality but not the only one.

I’ve seen several different people search implementations and they often have a tendency to work more or less like phone books. If you know the name you type it and get the number. And if you’re lucky you can also get the name if you only have the number. There is seldom anyway to search for people with a certain competence or from a geographic area. LinkedIn sets a good example of how searching for people could and should work.

LinkedIn has taken careful consideration of their users; What information they are looking for, how they want it presented and how they need to filter searches in order to find the right people. The details that I personally like are the possibility to search within filters for matching options (I worked on a similar solution last year) and how different filters are displayed (or at least in different order) depending on what query the user types. If you want to know more about how the faceted search at LinkedIn was designed, check out the blog post by Sara Alpern.

But LinkedIn is not only interesting because of the good search experience. It’s also interesting from a technical perspective. The LinkedIn search is built on open source so they have developed everything themselves. For those of you interested in the technology behind the new LinkedIn search I recommend “LinkedIn search a look beneath the hood”, by Daniel Tunkelang where he links to a presentation by John Wang search architect at LinkedIn.

Welcome to the Enterprise Search and Findability Blog!

The Enterprise Search and Findability Blog is here. As some of you already know, Findwise has been blogging at findwise.se for several years now. However, we thought it was time to separate the blog from our web site and create a forum especially dedicated to the exciting area of findability, the Enterprise Search and Findability Blog. From a Findwise perspective, findability is the art of making information easy to find by using (enterprise) search technology, this regardless of when the information is needed or where it may be stored.

Here we invite you to learn more about findability and we welcome you to give us feedback and keep a dialogue with us. We will, among other things, keep you updated on relevant research within the findability area, exciting search functionality and news about enterprise search vendors.

New Features at the Search and Findability Blog

Our new blog includes features that were not available in our previous blog. These are: rss subscription, Findwise Twitter feed and the possibility to share information via other social medias. We hope and believe our readers will appreciate these features and we are looking forward to discussing with you here at the Enterprise Search and Findability Blog.

Enterprise Search 2.0?

While visiting Enterprise Search Summit in San Jose I realized that enabling Enterprise 2.0 within enterprise search is the hottest trend at the moment. Is it Enterprise Search 2.0?

Andrew McAfee who coined the term Enterprise 2.0 and has released a book on the subject, spoke about how to use altruism to develop the enterprise. People are wired to help and if we stop obsessing about the risks and lower the bars for how people can help each other it is possible to make this work within a corporate environment.

He also spoke about how process control and how much workflow control. How much do we really need? Make it easy to correct mistake instead of making it hard to make them. With regards to innovation he pointed out that we need to question credentialism and build communities that people want to join. To leverage the intelligence aspects within the enterprise we should explore and experiment with collective intelligence such as prediction markets and open peer review processes. All in all make it easy for people to interconnect.

Very high improvement in access to knowledge, internal experts, satisfaction, increased innovation and customer satisfaction.

I also recommend to read Price Waterhouse Coopers Technology Forecast Summer 2008 to get a good overview of the available tools and technologies.

So how does this impact enterprise search? Search can be made to be the facilitator for Enterprise 2.0. Of course it is possible to index and make all blogs, wikipedias, tweets (yammer), online communities and social networks searchable, but that is only one way to make it this new environment more findable. If someone tweets or blogs about information we should use that information to impact on the search results and ranking. We could also track user behavior on a site to make certain information more visible with regards to implicitly expressed interests.

How Many Users Can You Afford to Annoy?

The second keynote at the Human Computer Interaction conference in Lancaster was given by Jared Spool who talked about Breaking through the invisible walls of usability research. Jared is a very inspiring and entertaining speaker. If you have the chance to listen to him, take it!

One of the things he talked about was the fact that the usability techniques that are widely used today were in fact not designed for large amounts of users. We have all kinds of data about the users’ behaviors online, but can we really use that data in a productive way? As Jared said;

“there is a big difference between data and information, we don’t know what inferences to make from the data we have.”

He also gave examples from a couple of large american ecommerce sites that have millions of users every day. With traditional usability measures you, according to Jacob Nielsens report, can identify 80% of the usability problems with as few as five users. But if you have one million customers, then you could say that 200.000 of the customers would be annoyed. Imagine how much money’s worth of lost revenue 200.000 users is. So how many nines to we need? (90, 99, 99,999?) How many percent is enough? It is apparent that we need to find methods that can solve these problems with usability evalutations and testing.

Jared Spool visualizes how few users actually spend money on an ecommerce site, and how few users the company relies on for their revenue.

Jared also talked about the consequences that web 2.0 have had for web applications and communities. He talked about what things that make people want to use “extra functionality”, as for example review functionality; what things delight people. Things that are excitement generators today soon come to be expected in every application. And when, as Jared said, HCI becomes HHHHHCI; when social networks are widely used, things that delight us or aggravate us, spread very fast. So instead of thinking about the five user rule, think about this next time you plan a release of a new product or application: How many users can you afford to annoy?

Search is Fun

Luckily, search is not all finding critical business information, it also is the ticket to finding new enjoyments. Recently Yahoo has launched a new audio search that lets you search multiple music libraries, including for example iTunes, containing millions of songs. In the search result you can see who provided the song and also listen to a free 30- second clip.

If you are more into video clips, check out the new video search Lumerias. It not only include videos from the large sites like Youtube, but also crawls the entire web for videos. Lumerias also lets you download you favorite clips, which is nice if you want to view them offline or are scared of forgetting where you found them.

Enjoy!

A Change of Focus to Search Driven; or Control vs Openness Part Two

The Shift Towards Portals with Search Driven Functionality

A lot of the people I meet in my work use these new web 2.0 tools daily. They ask me why metadata and taxonomies have to be so complicated when you can do “that web 2.0 stuff” with tagging. They say they prefer “the easy way” and prefer folksonomies over structures; they don’t think they can trust the structures anyway. People, who would like to work in an organization like Charlies.

Traditionally intranets are about control; we want to control what information people get and when and how they get it, instead of trying to make sure that people have the information they need when they need it.

I did some sketches for a search driven portal the other day. One of the comments I got was: “Wow! Why can’t we do that?” Actually, people are doing that. There are dozens of services out there like iGoogle and Superstart; all about customizing the experience for each user. This is like the intranet I want!

In order to achieve this, the companies need a change of focus. It is not about having control over every detail, or about just seizing control. It’s about finding a way to manage communication and make it easier for people to find what they want when they need it.

The search vendors have started to realize that. There is a shift towards portals with search driven functionality.

The design is not static, but reflects what is new and important to you, the specific user.
There are no menus in several levels; instead information about current events and information about what has happened since the last time you visited, take up the information space. Web 2.0 tools such as wikis and blogs can be used internally to improve communication and collaboration.

Are you looking for something special? Search for it! You don’t need to know where it is in order to find the information you are looking for.

This is off course the vision, where few organizations have dared to go. But there are off course exceptions to this. I have been working in a project where there is no fear of seizing control over every little detail. The aim is instead to understand how to best support the users in their work, using enterprise 2.0 tools and search as a vital part of the solution. I would like to see more organizations like Charlie’s…