Bamblog

Achtung - das Bamblog wird seit Mitte Oktober 2007 nicht mehr aktualisiert. Bitte besuchen Sie mein neues Weblog unter http://www.schmidtmitdete.de. Danke! - Please note that this blog is no longer active. You can find my new blog at http://www.schmidtmitdete.de. Thanks for visiting!

[Update 09.January 2007] Since Thomas N. Burg referred to this posting I want to give a quick update: I’ve expanded the presentation to a full paper (alas, german only…) which will appear in an edited volume on “social software” sometime in spring 2007. Just mail me (jan.schmidt [aet] split.uni-bamberg.de) if you are interested in a preprint.

Last thursday I gave my presentation on “Bottom-up Classification of Content in Networked Organizational Communication” (.pdf 1,2MB) at the ICA conference in Dresden. It was part of the session “NetWorking: New Insights into Corporate Communication” which was proposed and organized by Annika Struppert, a graduate student from Erfurt University. She also presented on “Corporate Communication and Media Use in a Large German Broadcasting Company”; other presenters were Prof. Caja Thimm (Bonn) on “Leadership Online - Technological Facilitation of Leadership in Organizational Communication” and Katrin Bergmann, Nina Jaeger & Khanh Binh Le (Erfurt,) on “The Role of the Intranet in Knowledge Management and Networking”.

In my presentation, I first gave a short introduction to tagging, emphasizing its focus on individual information management as well as the emerging collaborative classification systems (”Folksonomies”). I then briefly covered the “Nextspace” technology Thomas N. Burg has developed and introduced to several organizations within the last year (Thomas was co-author, but couldn’t come to Dresden; he had presented some data on the “Social Skills durch Social Software”-workshop in Salzburg recently). We reported some early findings from a descriptive analysis of tagging within this innovative communication and collaboration platform, e.g.

• When comparing two platforms we found similar “tags per post” ratios of 2.4 / 2.7 tags per posting
• The occurence of individual tags follows a power law distribution; on both platforms the top 10 percent of tags account for about 58 percent of all tags used.

However, there are a lot of open questions when it comes to the organizational use of tagging, e.g. to what extent are individual tagging routines stabilizing, to what extent dynamic over time? To what extent do individual tagging routines converge within and across spaces/platforms/ services over time? Is there a minimum size of participants/activity to allow emergence of shared frames of reference? Which organizational characteristics hinder or assist implementation of tagging systems? I didn’t frame the questions or the presentation within my “practicy-theory approach” to social software (mostly because I had only 15 minutes..), but that’s something I’m planning to do for the next conference.

The audience consisted mostly of communication scholars from the field of organizational communication, and for most of them the concept of tagging/folksonomies was completely new: Only about 25-30% raised their hand when I asked at the beginning who has heard of these terms before. Bart van den Hoof, who responded/commented to all the papers, actually said some nice things about our research (”You’re riding in front of the wave here..”.. :)), but also raised a couple of other questions, for example regarding the motivation to contribute to these folksonomies. This is of course a crucial problem not only with tagging but with other ways of information- or knowledge management in general. However, I have the feeling that tagging resolves at least some of the motivational problems since it first and foremost adresses individual demands. But again, this is something to work out in more detail later..