Co-render.com

As forward thinking companies try to graft meta data and social tagging practices onto corporate communication procedures, we can’t help but wonder if what they’re really creating is a folksonomy Frankenstein. Given that the essential premise of a TagCloud, or a Technorati type service is to create new frames of reference from the bottom up, imposing these practices from the top down just seems like a new way to re-package old corporate jargon.

While IBM has buzzword bingo, a more pointed (pointless?) satirical “solution” would leverage the TagCloud format.

All kidding aside, Amazon.com is one major enterprise that has managed to seamlessly incorporate social tagging into profitable knowledge sharing practices;

“Look at any Amazon page for a given book, and you will find a taxonomy (represented by formal subject categories), user-contributed tags, links to other books bought by other people who bought this book, booklists compiled by users on related topics, suggestions for other books based on a complex algorithm combining your past behaviours and those of others, and so on. All of these mechanisms for purposefully finding – or serendipitously discovering – books, co-exist, and compete.” (via Green Chameleon)

The main takeaway from the Amazon example is this; taxonomies flourish in a competitive context. Though taxonomies appeal to the corporate mind as a standard communication system, their primary application is for finding, not framing information and insight.