Can a trusted social network become a personal taxonomy?

In order to gather information for this newsletter, I subscribe to blogs, Google searches and a myriad of sources where I collect and cull information. I use a number of tools to do this including Google Reader, but over the last couple of months, I'm finding that I get more and more of my source material from Twitter. When I mentioned this to Alfresco CTO John Newton (whom we interviewed One on One last fall), at AIIM this week, he suggested that this could be a natural progression of social networking.

Newton was one of the first people to explain the link to me between social networking and content management back at AIIM 2007, so it's interesting to me that he is beginning to see a move beyond the original Web 2.0 tools. We first had blogs and wikis, social tagging and social rating systems, and these are still important and still provide users with a way to select content more easily than a list of search results with no such context.

But my experience of increasingly using Twitter suggested to Newton that we might be moving beyond the folksonomy to a type of personal taxonomy where the people you follow (to use the Twitter model) provide you with links to the information you need. "We are so focused on pulling concepts and keywords," Newton says. "What's really important is who did it and who do you trust?"

I agree with this theory and this could represent a new way of thinking about social networking. As such, I will be looking for further evidence of the personal taxonomy idea and hope to explore it further in the coming months.

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