I tend to agree with Omar Koudsi’s thoughts on whether we will have a taxonomy or not.  I think that content systems will begin to rely on folksonomy and search engines to self-organize.  I see this on the wiki I use every day.  I rely on type ahead search and on tags to get to what I want.  It’s so much easier than the browse method.

That said, web sites still need to have some structure because people still want to see and do from the home page.  Labels need to be correctly defined.   Information architecture or the navigation of the site needs to be determined.  This is especially important in the first couple levels of navigation on the site.  If you have opinions, go to his post and comments.

Update: Alan Weintraub has a different take on taxonomy:

A Taxonomy can address two aspects of finding information;

• Using content/ asset types and  metadata to find information with the highest accuracy.  The goal is always to find that one document or piece of information that will answer the question or help make a better informed decision
• Visually navigating to the set of content that contains the information that you are looking for.  While visual navigation may not be as useful with some of the new social media functionality (Wikis, Blogs, and Microblogs), it is still a critiacl aspect for casual users whlo want to find information stored in formal structures, such folders or other containers.

Read the whole thing.

I track a variety of blogs and news sources.  One is my colleague at Perficient Eric Roch who just blogged on Cloud Computing Security.   Worth a look.  Here’s an excerpt:

Security vulnerabilities are nothing new, but are a greater risk for cloud computing and will be a deterrent for many to make an early move to cloud computing applications and platforms.

While the expertise to assess network security vulnerabilities is widely available, most companies do not have the security expertise to architect a secure application from the ground up. This will be a barrier to build cloud computing applications for many.

Read the whole thing.

So my topics sometimes don’t dive deeply enough into the technical. My coding days are far behind but I can still point to articles and presentations.  Here’s a presentation on Spring Portlet MVC from John Lewis’ blog.

Yesterday I gave a presentation on social software implications in Enterprise Portals. In it, I discussed some of the trends we see, evolution of portals, and the various options you have in integrating social networking functionality to your portal.   Here it is:

By way of Frances Past’s blog, we see a Nielsen study that shows that not only are more of us hitting the social network sites but we spend more time on it.  Here are a couple excerpts:

Overall, the active unique audience to social networks grew nearly 30%, from 244.2M to 314.5M in the last year. In the U.S., the average active unique audience grew to 149.M from 115M in February 2009.

Across the 10 countries measured, Facebook drew the largest active unique audience globally and claimed nearly three times the sessions per user of MySpace, the next closest network. Facebook users also spent more time per session, logging nearly six hours per user across the globe.

So Matt Castle sent a link to me on how to monetize social media.  With all the hype out there about cool Web 2.0, it’s good to take a step back and figure out how an investment will give you pay back.  I should note that this is very focused on consumer type communities or experiences. Using social tools for employees would probably have a different theme. It’s still possible to see ROI from it, a different approach is needed though.

1. Set clear business goals
2. Create paths of continuous participation
3. Engage everyone, not just contributors
4. Make your efforts contextually relevant
5. Drive revenue not just web metrics (I like this one)

See the web page for a slightly deeper dive into these five items.

So I should keep up better on what Perficient is posting.  Shivam Kullar on the Communications Blog posted a short reference to an article on design challenges. As you all know, large sites have load that any corporate business would die for.  Read her take and the original article for more.

Network Effect from the Economist