Rather than telling people where the information they want belongs in a set list of categories and subcategories, tagging lets users say--this is where I think this goes. Tagging has been used extensively in places like Flickr and del.icio.us and is a large part of what makes these services so useful to people. Now corporations are looking at what tagging can do for them:

Given their information density, Rosenfeld thinks intranets will be a prime testing ground for tagging at the corporate level. One company that has seen encouraging results using tags is IBM. "Tagging makes it easier for you to go back and find something," says Maria Arbusto, IBM's director for user experience who is responsible for how IBM presents its internal information, websites and applications to employees.

Arbusto says IBM is "still in the early days" of using the terms employees provide to improve discoverability. She says it has worked well in a pilot involving ThinkPlace, the intranet application IBM uses as an internal suggestion box for ideas the company should consider commercializing or developing and deploying to employees. In the system, employees can comment on the ideas and rate whether they should be pursued.

ThinkPlace originally classified ideas using terms from IBM's official taxonomies for content such as industry and products. But "we observed the users and saw that the terms they used didn't always match" the formal taxonomy, she says. So IBM created a way for users to enter keywords, or tags, that would be appended to the suggested terms from the formal taxonomy and thereby improve their ability to find relevant ideas. The results have been promising, says Arbusto. "You can see what your colleagues are interested in," she says. "From a collaboration and knowledge-sharing perspective, that's what's neat about folksonomies."

...via elearningpost