[thelist] implementing a folksonomy in a cms
Sarah Adams
mrsanders at designshift.com
Mon Mar 13 13:27:09 CST 2006
One of my clients is a large NGO whose site is based on a custom-built
CMS. The site has a hierarchy of categories which each contain
sub-categories and/or documents. The hierarchy is based on how the
content managers for the site think about their information, which is
not necessarily how site users think about the same information. Some of
the category names make sense only to those who are intimately familiar
with the workings of the organization. Also, sometimes the people
posting information to the site just want to post it as quickly as
possible, and so the information isn't filled out as completely and
accurately as it could be.
My dilemma is in trying to make information on the site easy-to-find
despite the sometimes poor naming conventions and the frequent lack of
details provided by content managers. My thinking these days has been to
implement a folksonomy on the site, allowing both content managers and
site users to tag categories or documents with key words. The key words
would then become part of the searchable data, hopefully making
information easier to find.
I'm fairly confident that, if it's used a lot, this feature will be a
great improvement to the site, but I'm a little worried that I'll put in
the work to add this feature to the site and it just won't get used at
all. Does anyone have any suggestions of other strategies I can try, or
of ways I can make the folksonomy feature as popular as it needs to be
in order to be useful?
--
sarah adams
web developer & programmer
portfolio: http://sarah.designshift.com
blog: http://hardedge.ca
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