Social Tagging, Folksonomies and Vocabulary Support

The next step for social tagging is to allow personal free tagging and folksonomies to interface directly through what I would call “vocabulary support” applications that should logically emerge as extensions of e-mail, SMS, Blogging, VOIP, etc. This idea came to me as an extension of an idea I came across in a Greg Bear scifi novel where interlocutors generated little floating symbolic holograms that supported their speech and gestures. The symbols could indicate the same sort of things we use emoticons for today. Enhanced communication. Vocabulary support. Meaning enhancement. Meaning substructure. Hypercom messaging. Call it what you want.

A few years ago I did a high-level design for an application I called KWIS - Know What I’m Saying? The idea was that each individual would free tag resources either on the web or on their personal hard drive shared space. They would then build profiles of tags to be selected depending on who they were communicating with. The profiles and tags would be stored in a database.

For example, at work you would have a “business” profile that would refer to a set of tags in the business category. You would select that profile when communicating with colleagues and the tags used would support that communications environment. When communicating with friends, you would refer to another profile. With prospective mates, yet another profile. Each profile could have basically the same or largely different set of terms and attendant tags, but the tags would refer to different resources. Thus each profile would match with the intended results of communications efforts.

Using plug-ins or standalone apps, e-mail, SMS and other communications objects could be seeded with hyperlinks based on tags in the specified profile. This would happen on the fly. The words in your messages that corresponded to an existing tag in your profile would become hyperlinked automatically and refer to a single or multiple resources. It could happen locally (for local e-mail clients) or server-side (for e-mail apps on central services like GMail or SMS/IM providers).

As each message is composed you would select a profile for that message. Once finished composing you would view a preview of the message so you can check the tags being applied, and then send the message. Same for SMS and other communications environments. Ultimately, voice conversations could be supplemented for later review with the accumulated tags of a conversation, which would arrive as an attachment to the now completed conversation. Voice rec isn’t quite there yet, but one day it will be.

Once the user has built a decent set of tagged terms, the only real challenge is to properly apply the profile. You wouldn’t want to use the wrong profile and send offensive tags. I’m sure that can be managed in the same way we choose accounts.

On the business side the KWIS concept can be used for enhanced business communication. Sales forces can be empowered to provide better customer relations management by embedding FAQ content with each outgoing message. B2B can be enhanced and sped up by tagged content as well. I think the business side is where the money is to be made. Enterprise-level KWIS servers could become standard for large orgs that use a lot of e-mail, BlackBerry or other electronic communications. Even shared Word docs or PDF could be KWIS-enabled.

There can be no doubt that this kind of technology could deeply enhance and alter how we communicate using text. We’ve seen the language transform to support the contraints of cost-per-MB in SMS/IM messaging. We’ve seen whole vernaculars emerge in IRC and other forms of online chatting due to the need for speed.

Tagged textual communications could provide a very rich and deep communications experience. The juncture of personal free-tagging and folksonomies is the contemporary technological enabler. Building on one’s personal tagsonomy by accessing the folksonomies is how we learn to communicate anyway. Its really no different than the way we learn to speak. We try to express ourselves, then we get help from our community via language, intonation, etc.

Somebody build it.