Is it enough to present to an audience the many opportunities of the web and the “amazing” variety of web tools existing nowadays? From my previous presentation experiences throughout this year, I can say I doubt it. Surely you can catch the attention or curiosity of some of your audience, but they do not necessarily find it relevant to their work and context. Therefore, I have come to at least try to bring my presentations  to another level, in order to address the whole audience, from the sceptics to the absolute beginners. It is an often neglected fact that the majority of employees in organizations have not yet used the social web particularly for their work.

Tools to present take too long
A presentation leaves you definitely not enough time to explain a tool sufficiently enough. Alone del.icio.us, a social bookmarking tool,  can take up to an hour to train and discuss its different angles. I have had fascinating discussions just about tagging that could have continued for hours.

So is the case of the example of the invention of the desktop and folder system – the PC desktop was developed in the seventies portraying a normal desk with papers and folders on it. The problem about it is that in the digital space, as tagging proves,  relevance and links are in a three dimensional space and go potentially in every direction. So we still use our computer in a very primitive way one could say. I blogged about the connection to hierarchy here.

Constraints you encounter
In most cases there is little time to show the audience the potential for the social web for knowledge sharing – 20 minutes if you are lucky. Not only time is a challenge, but also the difference resistance you might face – listeners are overwhelmed by information, the amount of tools, or simply bored of listing to words such as “social media”, web 2.0, Blog, Podcast, Twitter and so on. Instead, it is important to address the audience demand or talk about their biggest problems and catch them by the strength of examples. Sometimes I like to ask if somebody wants to play the devil advocate, which often triggers interesting discussions and shows how little we focus on how we work and so much on what we work.

How to approach your audience?
From the knowledge management perspective not much has changed and the deficits are the same: Finding the right information and the person behind it when needed; how to tackle the information overload; create spaces of creative exchange.
During a presentation I try focusing on these basic questions and showing the audience examples and approaches to use different tools to tackle some challenges. My key lesson learnt throughout the year is to focus on scenarios and leave out tools and all the fancy new words. In addition, I like to leave it up to the audience how and what they actually like to pick up. In most cases, I assume, anyway, the wrong tool as the one to get the most attention. The context and the different ways of personal work styles vary just too much.

Examples of approaches

I gave a presentation at the European Commission last Monday and did not know exactly what kind of an audience to expect. So I started with the usual challenges of  a knowledge worker such as information overload, difficult to find first hand experiences, exhausting complex team collaborations and problems about how often we reinvent the wheel. In the next slide I presented different approaches of companies and organizations tackling these problems with social web applications.

I talked about how Hewlett Packard wants to untap the experiences “lost” in email boxes and encourage employees to post their answers in forums. By the way Luis Suarez has a great experience going on working with as little email as possible.  Explaining email as a challenge for knowledge management triggers quite interesting dicussions. Then I explained the example of Sun Microsystem and the one I did internally myself with GTZ. I ended with an older study around the use of Wikis in Dresdner Bank, where they have reduced emails considerably (unfortunately the study is not anymore available on the social-text website). Having alone documents at a central place open to everyone is quite convincing. For the rest of the presentation I went on quite different topics such as networks for development cooperations, which triggered different attention. When I was talking about wiki, I simply recited the example of Wikipedia, which in most cases works perfectly.

For another presentation I tried encountering it from the well known knowledge management circle.  It goes as follows (1) start and orientation, (2) research, (3) strengthen competencies, (4) apply learning, (5) store knowledge, (6) exchange knowledge and (7) evaluate knowledge. The circle can vary in many ways, but it helps to present the concept of knowledge management relatively easy and then attach to each point some potential scenarios, where you can use social software. (1) RSS/Feeds – subscribe the web, (2) social bookmarking, (3) blogging, (4) outside the web, (5) tagging, (6) social networks and (7) easy engagement through rating and commenting. This circle can be applied of course to all kinds of purposes but can be focused on the personal knowledge management of each person. I was inspired by a presentation by Dirk Röhrborn (German).

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A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Let’s face it, when you deal with knowledge sharing in an organization, it becomes quickly obvious that most knowledge is shared personally, face-to-face over the telephone or in the cafeteria. In a personal conversation people can describe issues in length, reply to questions and tell the “real” story. Formal meetings often do not give space for vibrant discussions and are often not the forum to describe the pros and cons. Although by listening to the experiences of others, best learning can be achieved.

An ordinary organization has usually a top-down controlled Intranet, where the different departments add their contributions. Sometimes there is even a forum, but in many cases hardly used at all — it is somewhere hidden or a hassle to access. The organizational life is happening somewhere else and employees on a business trip or in a different branch are cut off.

Social software offers at least three new ways for organization to benefit from:

1. To get a picture of what is really happening in an organization. What are the major topics? What is it what staff discusses and cares about? Not all is going to be public, but a lot more than a top-down Intranet or internal communication by the corporate communication department. Is your organization ready for that?
2. To bring people with same interests together without typing with your numb finger over the telephone. Personal employee’s pages, such as yellow pages, can be easily linked through common key words (tags) by interests, competencies, blog posts, projects on wiki pages etc. Check your del.icio.us (a social bookmarking site) or this video and browse through it and see yourself how quickly you find like-minded people. On delicious it is often anonymous, but in an organization it is all linked to employees and their expertise, their projects and questions. Check out 20 things to do on a social network in the office.
3. To increase productivity and emphasize innovation. To imagine employees to network on a peer-to-peer basis. A transparent open network will not only brings synergies and avoids to reinvention of the wheel, but also offers innovations. Like-minded people collaborate on their preferred topics. Staff with similar ideas find each other or new ideas arose out of discussions between people who have different departments.

Why should they do it? It certainly needs transparency and trust but the benefit and mutual gain can come quickly. But this is of course a nightmare scenario to all those employees, who treat knowledge as power. Because in this kind of open horizontal community you are what you share!

How to start?

Here are some rather bottom-up approaches:

• Start a collaborative tagging experiment over del.icio.us with colleagues to see how easy the sharing of valuable information can be, or open up a room on friendfeed to discuss right away resources.
• Use external tools for your team to make project management easier. One example could be a blog for your project’s history, milestones and other management tasks.
• Connect with colleagues through existing social networks such as Xing, Linkedin or Facebook and use it for exchange.
• Extend informal activities on the web and make other colleagues be aware of it: bulletin board, liftsharing etc.
• As Joitske commented on my first blog post, you can address a specific problem and use social media for an open transparent discussion.

This is a blog post series about my experiences on web2.0 in an organization, consisting of at least 26 different blog posts highlighting potentials and challenges and focusing on success factors. Please feel free to comment, contact me for further information and/or let me know which other topics within this context you would be interested on.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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Since I finished reading “Everything is Miscellaneous” by David Weinberger, I have been trying to figure out how the third order of things and information in the digital age will change things. I already wrote some pieces here on tagging and how it changes the way we structure information. But, so far, I have struggled to explain easily the digital order and its implications. So here is my attempt. (Attention: simplified!)

First order

This photo represents pretty much the first order, where I simply sort things –  cutlery in three different boxes: forks, spoons and knives.

Second order

In the second order I can go a step further and use a table or list to sort information out by topic. If you want to present relevance from this listed points to many existing information, one way to do this would be to make another table for spoons and forks. You could go on and make a fourth list, which explains how and when these different cutlery was used. Whereas this approach is finite in the physical world, in the digital one it is infinite.

Third order

Now, in the digital age, all this information can be sorted out in infinite possibilities. So, imagine hundreds of lists for each unique perspective from a user. Imagine all sorts of lists are connected to one  another. If somebody is a collector of ancient spoons, he will sort them out differently (era, types of usage, material, culture etc. ) than a table etiquette expert (position of spoon on the table, sorts of food for each spoon etc.) However, through the internet, it is possible to link everything to give it a broader meaning, to change perspective. The social web is actually about that — users worldwide tagging the web to give it meaning or link articles in wikipedia.

This collective constructed network of knowledge free us from the boundaries and limitations in the physical world. Go to a library and research about a certain question; you will find out how you have to wander from book to book, from advice to advice. But even the digital world is still loaded with this dream second order categorization.

But why are we then still sorting out our information in the first order?

Because the physical world is full of hierarchical structured (ordered) things . One example are organizations.

In the digital world, information is not structured that way. And certainly an organization cannot work that way in the web.

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As you might have already noticed, I am a pretty big fan of tagging. I think tagging is often underestimated because it is trivial, but at the same time intuitive and meaningful.

A tag cloud (or weighted list in visual design) is a visual depiction of content tags (keywords) used on a website. Often, more frequently used tags are depicted in a larger font or otherwise emphasized, while the displayed order is generally alphabetical. Thus both finding a tag by alphabet and by popularity is possible. Selecting a single tag within a tag cloud will generally lead to a collection of items that are associated with that tag. (Wikipedia)

Last week, during the web2fordev conference, I presented some web2.0 tools on the webtaster day, and interestingly, tagging triggered greater discussions. Tag clouds show the power of tagging because they summarize the popular topics of a network, show the interest of a person or represent the demand of a community. They bring transparency, simplicity and relevance.

• Transparency of what a community drives and the community’s topics. It turns classical taxonomy (e.g. a website menu) upside down, so we do not have to rely on “smart” hierarchical structure.
• Simplicity in what the sea of information is about. It offers us meta-information about all kinds of content available, and it is easy to tag.
• Relevance of what is the meaning of one keyword to another (e.g. social bookmarking). It involves people, who link and connect information, which other no sophisticated search robot can do so far.

Lastly, it offers us the possibility to map the web ourselves and rely a bit less on search engine robots. It is more realistic than all the semantic web buzz. The following tag clouds represent different communities and their interests. In this regard, this tag clouds are magic because they are a respective representation of networks in their topics.

Afrigator blog aggregator offers an overview of how tags have evolved over time.

This tag cloud represents the last.fm website, with different tastes of music.

43 things is a social network website.

This tag cloud represents the popular tags of photos from a flickr user.

Tag clouds are also possible with texts such as this John F. Kennedy speech.

This tag cloud represents qype city guide highlighting the user’s interest.

A tag cloud representing the major topics of millions of blogs from Technorati.

Tagging, represented in tag clouds, can easily lead to generalization, but as delicious shows, it can also be represent in an individual perspective. In delicious you can browse through tags in all directions because hierarchical order is absent. But tag clouds can also be quite frightening since they can say a lot about person. Unfortunately, tagging has not evolved very much throughout the last years as Thomas Vanderwal point out in his blog post.

While there are examples that tagging services have moved forward, there is so much more room to advance and improve. As people’s own collection of tagged pages and objects have grown the tools are needed to better refind them.

David Weinberger has a nice description for tagging in his book “Everything is Miscellaneous”:

We are building this connected miscellany link by link and tag by tag. Its value is in the implicit relationship that turns it into an infrastructure of meaning.

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A great first day on the web2fordev conference lies behind me. I arrived on Sunday and already had the pleasure to sit around with my fellow bloggers – journalists from Africa. Lately they already made some very interesting podcasts and during the conference we will have video interviews, but also direct video coverage from selected sessions. It is so far a great atmosphere with people from all around the world as far as the Fidschi, South Sea. Today we focused on training for web2.0 beginners. I did two presentation on blogging and tagging together with Tobias Eigen, Karel Novotny and Pier Andrea Pirani and many more were involved.

We are the FAO headquarter in Rome and we already had interesting discussions on web2fordev. I really liked a presentation by Janyanta Chatterjee about Sharing farmers knowledge through audioblog, which shows the impressive potential of these new technologies. And it will become even more effective ones it goes over mobile phones.

I really liked the openness and high interest of all participants, which was very motivating as a presenter. Once again I experienced how complex web2.0 is and how many facets it has. Blogging was fairly easy to present, whereas the different purposes of blogging are often not known. I presented the personal blog approach, a perspective on an internal group blog, the Nata village blog and the Voices of the field blog.

Very intriguing was a discussion during our tagging presentation. Even though tagging sounds in general easy, I experienced once again, how different tagging is used and therefore how tricky it is to explain it. Nevertheless the interest by audience showed to me that many sense the power in it. I will write the next days more posts from the conference either here or at the web2fordev blog.

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Yesterday, I read a blog post about “How do you convince people to share failures?” and I also heard about an interesting lessons learnt website project which was implemented some years ago.

In that project station masters were asked to give regular information about their stations such as statistics. Secondly to list problems and challenges throughout the last years. They were asked to describe how they tackled the problems. What were the failures and the success? This information combined with some criteria were filled to a database. With that every station master could find colleagues with similar problems and could contact them.

To me, it seems like a simply mechanism with a great result. A knowledge sharing tool which concentrates on learning experiences and connects people and knowledge.
But how would you do this nowadays in the realm of web2.0? Two questions came up to my mind:

• Does web2.0 really help us exchange lessons learnt in such an effective manner?
• Can tagging be the right way to find each others lesson learnt easier?

Web2.0 and lesson learnt
I have my doubts whether web2.0 goes this far yet to connect the right people with same problems in such an effective way. Social network tools give you features such as recommendations, feedbacks and a whole range of perspectives. But is that all you are looking for in that moment? In the best case, you can have a community of practice where you can address your questions. Valuable experiences are still hidden behind numerous links, which I can identify easier with social bookmarking, but still have to hope that Google will deliver me good results.

Tagging
In my opinion tagging is very powerful, but often underestimated, because it gives us relevance. Look at a tag-cloud and imagine you can click through endless relevant sub-tag-clouds. You can navigate through an ocean of wisdom, connecting knowledge and the people behind it. Imagine tagging is used wider than to just give broader information (e.g. general topic) but includes many much more information such as the “character” of a lesson learnt (success, failure, slow, expensive, high impact etc.). Many people already do that in social bookmarking, though it is very individual.

• Would that mean I can connect experiences the way it was down with a sophisticated application for the station masters? I wonder whether tags for evaluation can work as good as the topic-wise ones.
• How could the word “slow” be separated in a tag cloud from the word “software” so they do not stand next to each other?
• Do I really need this, or do topic clouds bring me anyway quicker to the field of my interest, and comments deliver the evaluation to me?

My aim is to use the power of a network itself to connect to experiences directly. I think that in most cases an application such as the station master is too much of an effort. It needs criteria and complicated programming. Can’t this be done easier with web2.0 technology and the wisdom of crowd?

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I previously wrote on a post about the great effects that web2.0 tools can have in organizations or enterprises. This time I want to list 10 main challenges which organizations face when putting into action tools such as blogs, wikis, social bookmarking etc. I deem that it is much more about the working culture and willingness to communicate openly in a virtual network, than that of a technological question. Because these tools are all about communication and sharing, it is a decisive factor to get the participation of the users.

1. Culture: The need for an open, transparent, horizontal working culture. It is not always a prerequisite but it is conducive for effective and creative online knowledge sharing. For example, a wiki needs a certain degree of trust; not everyone wants to sit hours to check the amendments on a document.
2. Support: To have a commitment from the management for collaborative web tools. A shift to horizontal transparent communication opens new venues to present the organization’s life. It is also necessary to have support for the change management process.
3. Conviction: Having good arguments to proof why these tools are useful (needs another post). For example, they can even reduce the information overload. From my experience they clearly involve more work in the beginning, but additional value comes quickly by tagging or exchange experiences in blog posts. Idealistically, after a while, communication only shifts but is more efficient and creative.
4. Orientation: Developing a web-based communication culture needs orientation. Blogs are totally different from a workflow based intranet. Therefore a policy can help to explain the advantages and also show the limits of interaction.
5. Critical Mass: In the beginning usually only few users participate; that’s why a critical mass of contributors is important. Web2.0 tools are ideal for guerrilla marketing, where motivated contributors serve as multiplicator and can easily train others to join.
6. Resources: Be aware the tools are cheap and easy to install, but do not underestimate the resources you need. A facilitation for a blog or a wiki is very important especially in the beginning, so users are not frustrated in their first steps.
7. Patience: To incorporate web2.0 tools to an organization takes time. A few months can pass by before participation reaches a sufficient level, but on the mean time the process is exciting.
8. Training: Web2.0 might be easy but many people from the organization are totally new to the applications. Things such as tagging, RSS or basic upload functions have to be often explained.
9. Usability: Invest time in design and how to create visually your applications. Usability is very important because users shall take advantage of all features offered. For example many wikis especially lack usability. Therefore a design, documentation and help section (e.g. screencast) is decisive for users to participate.
10. Software: Implement a solution on your own server or rely on an application service provider. To which extent your organizational communication has to be internal? What can be exchanged within a networks of partner or even in public? Check out my post about how far sun microsystems went with their open blogging approach.

I also found some interesting additional information: One is an article called “Web 2.0: Ten Ways Non-Profits Can Start Leveraging Social Media“, and the second one is a nice presentation by Beth Kanter called 10 Simple Steps to Organization 2.0. Both are remixes from a great presentation by Marnie Webb.

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Lost in the old web
Throughout the last years I have had mixed emotions about the Internet. On one hand, I was amazed about people, news, themes etc., but on the other hand, I was not satisfied with the overwhelming load of information and the difficulty of obtaining it when needed.

Running around to collect information
I used Google to research all my information and often repeated the same steps to find the same websites. I looked endlessly through websites to find eventually some information. I relied on all sorts of websites in hope that they would post something appealing for me. Basically, I ran though the web to find relevant information without mayor results. I always knew there was more than that and I could not catch up with the latest information.

Watch out! A new web has arrived!
One day a friend of mine pointed me to delicious – a social bookmarking tool where people from all over the world share links. I imported my favourite links onto the server and saw that many other people had already bookmarked the same links as well, and even had many other interesting ones. I was convinced that people knew much better than search engines. I also discovered that there are many people out there in the web who write riveting thoughts in their blogs. And that these blogs and social bookmark sites are basically networks made out of links, information and people.

Kick the overload of information!
I knew of RSS, a universal content format, designed to make the content of a website everywhere available. But after a while I understood that I could grasp all kind of information through feeds. So I threw away my fishing rod and got a fishing net instead to bring all relevant information out there on the web to my laptop. Now I can see when friends upload new photos, see changes in our jointly used Google calendar and have all the information compiled to my needs.

Becoming part of a community
So far I was pretty passive and contributed only with bookmarks. But because I appreciated all the valuable information, I decided to get active and start a blog to reflect on it what I read and learn from the web (networked learning). Suddenly I became a node in a far reaching network and started to interact with many people who had an interest on the same topics. I left all portals behind me and began valuing the contribution to the web of so many people out there like wisdom of crowd.

Sharing is the key!
All the richness of information comes from the participation of many people. Therefore sharing is the overall premise. I finally understood much better the power of hyperlinks and discovered how even complex themes can be greatly connected through the web and used for learning. You can virtually see how information finds its way through the web. Lastly, I discovered that tagging is a great way of making sense for all this information, and it is okay if everything becomes miscellaneous.

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I remember when I came across those weird looking different size word aggregations on websites and wondered what were they? When I read about tagging and tag clouds I was first skeptical about it and asked myself what is the benefit of them?

Nowadays I am fascinated, how tags can solve or at least improve how we sort information and make relevance between different tags. Through the wisdom of crowd one can extract very precisely the connections of themes and show the pattern of a community. To me classical hierarchical folder structure is only two dimensional, whereas tags are three dimensional, as long as the semantic web has not been implemented.

With social bookmarking through de.icio.us a single tag can be used to share links collaboratively. Peter Ballantyne had the idea of using collaborative tagging for the knowledge management for development network back in 2005. Next week another KM4DEV workshop will take place in Holland where I will prepare some visualization of the efforts throughout the last two years for the nonprofit knowledge management for development (NPK4DEV) tag.

NPK4DEV Tag Cloud (popular tags)

Joitske, a contributor of NPK4DEV wonders whether this tag experiment can form a community?

Tagging seems so superficial in terms of knowledge creation, it is more a flow of information. Can we say there is learning going on or is it just sharing information more rapidly? If people start tagging can we all that a community of practice?

In my opinion this tag cloud shows quite impressively what people associate with knowledge management for development in methods, countries, organizations and themes. It is a great way to share certain kind of information. In this regard it might be a passive community of practice keeping each other updated about new and interesting documents or new approaches such as vlogging. Furthermore it connects you to the people behind it.

However to deepen the effect of sharing and to have a broader learning effect, further steps would be necessary. For example Beth Kanter summarizes in her posts all links for the nptech tag, which is very useful. The communication between each other over delicious is close to zero, and one does not know whether the information behind the link is useful or valuable to his or her background. Commenting is rarely used and rating is not possible, and only bloggers involved reflect transparently the shared information.

Lastly, it is interesting to see how you can analyze tags, in this timeline. In the picture you can see the recent tags. Thanks to the blogger from www.unthinkingly.com, who did this timeline very nice with the nptech tag.

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Imagine you can share your bookmarks with your colleagues, find your documents and emails quickly through tagging, write about your work experiences on your personal homepage (blog), and document all project team work in a wiki. The result is a revolutionary different way to share knowledge online within an organization.

How does it work and what is the trick? It simply needs to combine the already existing and freely available tools or open source applications in web.2.0.

The marker: Tagging
Tagging simply means to add key words to every link you save or blog entry you write. Basically you don’t sort anymore all your different files in hierarchical folders, you know anyhow that this is never perfectly possible. Because knowledge has always many domains e.g. a single article contains all sorts of information, each reader has a different perspectives on it. Through tags you can see where topics are overlapping and find information from different angles.

• Tagging in Wikipedia
• What is tagging?
• A social analysis of tagging with a nice visualization

The network: Social Bookmarking
Imagine your bookmarks are visible to your colleagues. You would be able to share links on similar working areas and browse via tags all imaginable topics of your organization. These links have a great value, because they are verified or even commented by your colleagues. So you find easily like minded people and identify quickly who works on a certain theme.

• Check out my bookmark tag cloud on the right column or go to my delicious network.
• Social bookmarking in Wikipedia
• Intranet Social Bookmarking: Tagging Behind the Firewall

The storyteller: Blogging
How often have you answered to the same question over again? Why don’t you make a blog post about it, so all your colleagues with the same problem could find answers in your blog. How can you exchange information without having to send a mass email? Post it on a project blog which documents the learning process of how a project has developed over time. Blogs can also become information boards, picturing the life of organizations.

• My blog post about Sun blogging
• Bookmarking, tagging, and social software comes to the Enterprise (nice podcast)

The white board: Wiki
Remember how you used to send word files around while working collaboratively on a text? Now you can have a wiki to include your project documentation in, and everyone on your team can access it form anywhere. On the Wiki, you can see how a text develops over time and browse through the organizational knowledge via tags. With a Wiki, while your team works on a memo during a meeting, you can also link topics to other relevant sources. Thus you keep track of the team work.

• Wiki in plain English
• Web 2.0 for the enterprise: Wisdom of the employees

The connector: Feed/RSS
RSS is a universal format for files which gives you, on the contrary to email, the power to filter information. A colleague always writes interesting blog posts which are relevant to your work. You want to share links in a comunity of practice, or you need to follow up certain projects. Via feeds you can subscribe to the information relevant to you. Feeds keep you posted with all sort of information, such as links, documents, audio, video, wiki changes, etc.

• RSS in plain English
• Changing the Way We Communicate Internally

Why all of this? What is the advantage?

• Simply because it connects in manifold ways all available resources and people behind it.
• It makes everybody’s work transparent and offers new potential for sharing and cooperation.
• It is very easy to use. Just look how many blogs are out there and see how successful flickr, youtube and delicious are.
• It turns communication and knowledge sharing upside down and emphasizes on expertises.

Is this realistic? Does it make an intranet obsolete? What do you think? There are of course many challenges, but I will write about it in another post.

Check out also out this nice presentation on enterprise2.0.

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I started using the social bookmarking service del.icio.us a year ago, without actually knowing if it was worth the effort. Although it took me quite a while to get behind its potential and I am still learning about it, I can now say I love del.icio.us. For those of you who have not heard about it and who have also experimented with it, I recapitulate my learning curve with the social bookmarking in 10 steps:

1. At first, I appreciated to access my bookmarks from everywhere but I never really used extensively my favorites in my browser.
2. Now I have to think about the tags (key words) for every bookmark and was puzzled about the sense of it and whether it is worth the time. Luckily I installed the browser plugin and just had to deal with a little pop up window.
3. I found the “saved by 1 other person” link and look through other link lists and can get lost in interesting and boring websites just like in Google search. Here and there I find very interesting documents but did not use it frequently because I searched mostly without a goal.
4. By tagging and checking other people’s tags, I discovered new information and connection in knowledge domains. I started integrating these into my tags and when needed I also reformulated them.
5. Thanks to Dorine Rüter, I joined another approach of an distant passive community of practice through a tag experiment called npk4dev (latest links are in the right sidebar), which is used by several people from different locations and organizations to share bookmarks on nonprofit knowledge for development issues. A bigger tag stream experiment is used through nptech (nonprofit technology).
6. I started adding interesting people to my network, so I can see their bookmarks as well. After a while, I realized how valuable most of there new bookmarks were. You can see how information is delivered and spread through the web and can follow network connections. I decided to put my network in my feed-reader.
7. I took a closer look at my tags and analyzed which ones are heavily used by other users and have interesting links (for example ICT4D) and add the RSS to my feed-reader. (Want to know what RSS are and why it is of advantage to use them? Check out this video!)
8. I started posted links to some people from my network and try to integrate colleagues and friends into the same sharing. I noticed that people observe very closely the links from other people, and I asked myself whether a tag could or might give to much information about a person. (Luckily I found the “not shared” feature).
9. I noticed that I referred more and more to delicious instead of Google to search for information, even though it is slower. With an easy keyword, the results are better and most important from other users evaluations.
10. I wondered why del.icio.us does not offer new features such as improved search, ability to form groups and send messages, or to use it better for collaborative tagging experiences. I wondered how I can use it better for my personal knowledge management and start using for instance a tag for a to-do-list.

And now I even started a blog and integrated my bookmarks and use the same tags to structure my writings and to enhance my learning. To summarize it, I really needed some time to learn how to use social bookmarking creatively and efficiently. And I am still amazed how tiny little details give new opportunities in how to use this tool. A great screencast for the benefit of tagging and social bookmarking has been made by Beth Kanter. I hope this is interesting for beginners and practitioners, and I am curious to hear about your experiences.

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