Collaborative Bookmarking
After attending the recent Blogs and Social Media Forum, I had lots of ideas about how we should be making more use of collaborative and “social” tools where I work. We’ve had a wiki in place of the intranet now for a couple of years, and so collaborative bookmarking seems like it would (should) be one of the easiest and next most useful things for us to implement.
I’ve used del.icio.us for a while now, and find it very handy indeed. Although I don’t really have much of a network on del.icio.us, the benefits of this type of application seem immense when used by a whole development team, or a sales team researching competitors and so on.
However, the draw-back with del.icio.us is the lack of group-level bookmarking and privacy. If our development team started bookmarking content related to new features that they may be working on/researching, then it would make it very clear to our competitors what we’re doing.
I’ve had a few thoughts on how we could get around this, but it would mean writing more code… and I’m sure it would be reinventing the wheel!
This is where the “enterprise collaboration bookmark server” steps in. But can I find a decent open source one? Well, not yet! In fairness I’ve not spent much time looking. Mike Gotta publishes a useful list of alternatives to del.icio.us, and through this I discovered that the code to connotea is available for download. Just need some time to have a play. I also need to look more at the XML Bookmark Exchange Language (XBEL) to see if that throws up any good ideas.
In the meantime, if anyone knows any good options for me here, please feel free to leave a comment!
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