Jonathan Feinberg

Dogear: Social bookmarking in the enterprise

We describe a social bookmarking service de-signed for a large enterprise. We discuss design principles addressing online identity, privacy, information discovery (including search and pivot browsing), and service extensi-bility based on a web-friendly architectural style. In addi-tion we describe the key design features of our implementa-tion. We provide the results of an eight week field trial of this enterprise social bookmarking service, including a de-scription of user activities, based on log file analysis. We share the results of a user survey focused on the benefits of the service. The feedback from the user trial, comprising survey results, log file analysis and informal communica-tions, is quite positive and suggests several promising en-hancements to the service. Finally, we discuss potential extension and integration of social bookmarking services with other corporate collaborative applications.

Participatory Visualization with Wordle

We discuss the design and usage of ldquoWordle,rdquo a Web-based tool for visualizing text. Wordle creates tag-cloud-like displays that give careful attention to typography, color, and composition. We describe the algorithms used to balance various aesthetic criteria and create the distinctive Wordle layouts. We then present the results of a study of Wordle usage, based both on spontaneous behaviour observed in the wild, and on a large-scale survey of Wordle users. The results suggest that Wordles have become a kind of medium of expression, and that a ldquoparticipatory culturerdquo has arisen around them.

Social Bookmarking in the Enterprise

One of the greatest challenges facing people who use large information spaces is to remember and retrieve items that they have previously found and thought to be interesting. One approach to this problem is to allow individuals to save particular search strings to re-create the search in the future. Another approach has been to allow people to create personal collections of material. Collections of citations can be created manually by readers or through execution of (and alerting to) a saved search.

Social bookmarking and exploratory search

In this paper, we explore various search tasks that are supported by a social bookmarking service. These bookmarking services hold great potential to powerfully combine personal tagging of information sources with interactive browsing, resulting in better social navigation. While there has been considerable interest in social tagging systems in recent years, little is known about their actual usage. In this paper, we present the results of a field study of a social bookmarking service that has been deployed in a large enterprise. We present new qualitative and quantitative data on how a corporate social tagging system was used, through both event logs (click level analysis) and interviews. We observed three types of search activities: community browsing, personal search, and explicit search. Community browsing was the most frequently used, and confirms the value of the social aspects of the system. We conclude that social bookmarking services support various kinds of exploratory search, and provide better personal bookmark management and enhance social navigation.

Patterns of usage in an enterprise file-sharing service: publicizing, discovering, and telling the news

How do people use an enterprise file-sharing service? We describe patterns of usage in a social file-sharing service that was deployed in a large multinational enterprise. Factor analyses revealed four factors: Upload & Publicize (regarding ones own files); Annotate & Watch (add information to files and maintain awareness); Discover & Tell (find files uploaded by other users, and communicate to additional users about those files); and Refind (re-use ones own files). We explore the attributes of users who score highly on each of these factors, and we propose implications for design to encourage innovation in usage.

Information Curators in an Enterprise File-Sharing Service

We report on a social-software file-sharing service within a large company. User-created collections of files were associated with increased usage of the uploaded files, especially the sharing of files from one employee to another. Employees innovated in the use of the collections features as “information curators,” an emergent lead-user role in which one employee creates named, described collections of resource for use by other employees. This role suggests new work practices and new features.