I've just started reading Bill Ives blog which focuses on Portals and Knowledge Management. One article covers what IBM are doing in this space. I've been preparing for another presentation on Enterprise Social Networking and have been approaching it in a way of describing the consumer space and then how the Enterprise could leverage this.

Bill mentions David Millen's demonstrations on Enterprise Social bookmarking with a product called Dogear. In the consumer space this includes web sites such as de.licio.us and stumbled upon. It's an interesting angle IBM have progressed with in terms of showing colleagues who saved the same bookmarks and also view your colleagues bookmarks and save them to yours. This is a great way to show associations between colleagues and how they are connected.

There was also some great comments that made me laugh tonight from the Joho blog and coverage by Matt Hines also on this subject.

The My Links functionality is extremely low and only just ticks the box in Social bookmarking. Obviously this can be extended:

Tagging

Extending the category of each My Link List Item to have multiple categories (tags). A tag cloud could them be used to present the users My Links in a similar model to how the consumer tools do.

Filtering

de.licio.us filtering by clicking on relevant tags on the right hand side drill down into a collection of links either of a user or a search result list. This paradigm could be extended with My Links by spinning through all the categories and creating tag urls to results pages that add this tag filter to this.

Shared Links

A users My Links could have a count next to them to indicate whether the bookmark has been saved by anyone else. This count could link to a list of all users within the enterprise that have added this. In doing so, this would then show people with similar interests. The user could then view that colleagues My Link collection to see other bookmarks of interest...and even save them to their My Links.

RSS Feeds

The My Links could also be consumed as RSS feeds, and even filtered by category/tag which is currently not available out of the box.

When I first started thinking about this, I was wondering what kind of links employees in the Enterprise would tag. But anything of any relevance to the organisation would be useful and would show their interests. These bookmarks could be urls to internal portal pages, wiki pages, documents and blog articles. This is just another medium for employees to work in and collate information.

So who's up for writing these 'features' ?...