Lee Bryant from Headshift Moments is talking about Social Tagging. Am really enjoying his presentation. He shares how he implemented Social Tagging for BBC News. Bookmarked and tagged stories of interest.  Overcomes a limiting culture - fits the reboot/remixing culture - I tag and bookmark stories in my own way. Another example of local aggregation of news, blogs, links, photos, govt info for a small group in Brixton. Objective was to build up a body of content over the where surfacing themes and issues derived from linkages derived from text analysis. 18,000 keyword stems emerged.

A thrid application - perspective on Mental Health - one of the issues was to define the taxonomy - but that wouldn't work as it would be imposing a top-down view on the community.  So, combined top-down data with bottoms-up tagging.  Lesbian and gay groups started adopting tags early - themes emerging - a drive towards negotiating shared meaning in a vast field.

Social Tags Tomorrow - Lee suggests we need to humanise the enterprise by escaping the deadzone of taxonomies.  Instead, use aggregation for search, shared tags and bookmarks for structured language, weblogs as sense-making networks and wikis as action spaces. Benefit for users - they wont need to mess with messy CMS systems that dont work.

As a commenter at the session said, social tagging could well bypass really expensive market research projects!  My question to Lee was how do you get companies to accept and buy-in to this bottom-up approach, when it really means relinquishing control.  Lee's advice - point out what isn't working, show them how they can build on top of what they have. 

I'd love to discuss this some more - Ton has much to add here too.