why Web2.0 is important to me

[Disclaimer: I am currently reading David Weinberger’s latest book “Everything is Miscellaneous”, which seems to be just as exciting as “The Cluetrain Manifesto” from 1999 (which I back then forwarded to my boss @ work) or my prof‘s “Cradle to Cradle” bible – books that inspired me and have a long-lasting effect…]

The organization I am currently working for (as an intern) has a relatively huge repository of technical datasheets with lots of interesting articles and archived knowledge. Most of these datasheets are saved as PDFs and published online, searchable through a site-internal search interface and only identifiable through their title. Obviously, a smart headline leads to proper search results.

The other system they are maintaining is a document management system (DMS) which is a nice step forward into the right direction. Only, what it lacks is a quality search.

Most of you have already started to appreciate the advantages of social bookmarking – where humans work as filters and often only save interesting pages, thus raising the quality of any obtained information. I prefer del.icio.us to most Google search results, unless I am e.g. looking for an image where I need to have the wider choice of search results.

Now with this above mentioned organization in mind that has in the past tried to backup its digital data into a file repository, what seems to be lacking is a tagging-mashup. Something like an add-on for the DMS (=> yeah, there goes the API question) that consists of another database which only stores a) quality keywords and b) the links to each document. So instead of doing an ordinary search on the DMS, which will return Google-alike search results (displaying all results on a certain keyword), the add-on would only deliver those results that have been declared as “quality content” by its users.

So you see, the basic idea behind this blog post was that while I know a lot of ppl are already fed up with Web2.0 terminologies and the hype around it, others have only just started to realize what this is actually all about. And while some private individuals are already power users of Flickr, Technorati & Delicious tagging-worlds, most companies still need to start realizing this huge potential. Just as many of them have never even heard of the Cluetrain Manifesto… *sigh*

(this is SUCH a huge market?!?!…)

Author: jke

Hi, I am an engineer who freelances in water & sanitation-related IT projects at Saniblog.org. You'll also find me on Twitter @jke and Instagram. View all posts by jke