Tagging inside the corporate firewall seems to me to be one of the great emerging hopes for this model of information management. Not only would it be cool if companies could use tags to help sort out their internal (and infernal) information haystacks, it might even be a money-spinner for software vendors. At Web 2.0, Josh Schachter of del.icio.us mentioned that he regularly gets requests from companies for ‘Intranet Delicious’, though he didn’t sound particularly interested in developing it as a business line. IBM appears to see things differently: David W reports that they have created ‘dogear’, a prototype corporate tagging system.

At Nature, we’ve had similar experiences to Josh’s with our own application, Connotea. Since our readers and other customers are largely academics, and since we’ve made Connotea Code available under the GPL, the main trend has been for academic institutions to download it and experiment with their own internal instances (though there’s been plenty of interest from pharma and biotech companies too). Most of this attention has been focused on the use of tagging to organise research information at these institutions, but this overlooks another key activity at many of them: education.

That’s is one reason why I was so interested in this email to the Connotea discussion list by Tony Hirst from the Open University in the UK, which has long been at the forefront of using technology in education, particularly in distance learning. Tony has been thinking about how to use social bookmarking and tagging as ways for students and teachers to share information during a course. He has in mind a controlled model in which there would be at least some level of moderation. In some ways this runs counter to the free and open nature of social bookmarking, at least on sites like del.icio.us. Tony is clearly conscious of this and gives the following reasons for taking a more conservative route, at least initially:

• social bookmarking could become a value-adding service, the reliable provision of which forms part of the institution’s contract with the student; as such, liveness and reliability need to be guaranteed; uniformity of provision (and a guaranteed high quality of provision) to students
• if social bookmarking is to be introduced as part of the learning strategy, some would argue that its use needs to be carefully managed to ensure that it is capable of delivering whatever the learning designer requires; (unfortunately, this approach reminds somewhat of unintended learning as a bad thing);
• integration with other cohort related batch processes (e.g. registering all new students, or setting particular group privileges for a particular cohort);
• Educational establishments need to be wary of what gets published on their domains. List of links to adult resources, for example, are unlikely to be tolerated.

He goes on to give an example of how social bookmarking could be used in practice during a real course.

He then signs off his email with:

This is all very ‘possible’ and ‘potential’ at the moment, but if my institution goes for this, they may go for it in a big way….