Dogear: Social Bookmarking in the Enterprise
David R Millen, Jonathan Feinberg, Bernard Kerr
One Rogers Street. Cambridge, MA 02142
{david_r_millen, jdf, bernard_kerr}@us.ibm.com
+1-617-693-7490

ABSTRACT
In this paper we describe a social bookmarking service de-
signed for a large enterprise. We discuss design principles
addressing online identity, privacy, information discovery
(including search and pivot browsing), and service extensi-
bility based on a web-friendly architectural style. In addi-
tion we describe the key design features of our implementa-
tion. We provide the results of an eight week field trial of
this enterprise social bookmarking service, including a de-
scription of user activities, based on log file analysis. We
share the results of a user survey focused on the benefits of
the service. The feedback from the user trial, comprising
survey results, log file analysis and informal communica-
tions, is quite positive and suggests several promising en-
hancements to the service. Finally, we discuss potential
extension and integration of social bookmarking services
with other corporate collaborative applications.
Author Keywords
social software, social bookmarking, tags, folksonomies
ACM Classification Keywords
H.5.3 Group and Organization Interfaces: Collaborative
computing.
INTRODUCTION
One of the greatest challenges facing people who use large
information spaces is to remember and retrieve items that
they have previously found and thought to be interesting.
One approach to this problem is to allow individuals to save
particular “search” strings, in order to recreate the search in
the future [2]. Another approach has been to allow people
to create personal “collections” of material, such as the
electronic citation bundles (called binders) in the ACM
Digital Library. Collections of citations can be created
manually by readers or through execution (and alerting) of
a saved search.
Perhaps the most familiar approach to “re-finding” informa-
tion on the web has been the use of personal bookmarks, as
supported by various web browsers. For example, the
Mozilla browser supports the creation of collections of
URLs, which can be annotated using keywords or free-form
text, and then sorted on a variety of dimensions (e.g., time
last visited, keyword, location). An early study of book-
mark use showed that people created bookmarks based on
the quality of and personal interest in the content, high fre-
quency of current use, and a sense of potential for future
use [1]. Furthermore, the number of bookmarks contained
in an individual collection grew steadily and roughly line-
arly, and the use of folders to categorize bookmarks in-
creased as the size of the collection increased. A single
level of folders was reported for collections with fewer than
300 bookmarks, while a multi-tiered hierarchy was used for
larger collections.
The desire to find and share information among small
groups, teams and communities of practice has led, not sur-
prisingly, to the development of a number of shared book-
marking systems. Early shared bookmarking systems often
used automated techniques to support the creation and cate-
gorization of collections of web bookmarks [8.9.16]. These
innovative systems met with some success, although they
consistently seemed to fall short of their potential use. Sev-
eral explanations for their limited success have been of-
fered, including limited privacy protection, little support for
end-user tailorability and high requirements for active user
participation [7].
SOCIAL BOOKMARKING SYSTEMS
Recently, there has been an emergence of shared book-
marking applications. Their tremendous popularity and
growth of use have prompted a second look at this kind of
collaborative software. Introduced in 2003, the del.icio.us
[3] social bookmark manager was one of the first of this
kind of application, and has enjoyed an early and large base
of committed users. A flurry of similar offerings have since
been unveiled, including a recent beta release of Yahoo’s
“My Web 2.0” [11].
These systems share a number of features. First, these so-
cial bookmarking tools allow individuals to create personal
collections of bookmarks and instantly share their book-
marks with others. These centrally stored bookmark collec-
tions bring immediate personal benefit by providing a col-
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CHI 2006 Proceedings • Social Computing 1 April 22-27, 2006 • Montréal, Québec, Canada

lection that can be browsed from any web-accessible ma-
chine.
A second, and significant, enhancement in these systems is
the use of keywords or tags that are explicitly entered by
the user for each bookmark. These tags allow the individual
user to organize and display their collection with labels that
are meaningful to them. Furthermore, multiple tags allow
bookmarks to belong to more than one category, avoiding
one of the limitations of the hierarchically organized folders
found in most web browsers. The use of tags to create an
emergent classification system has been controversial and is
likely to spawn significant research in the short term [15].
The final distinguishing characteristic of these social
bookmark applications is the social nature of their use.
There is a bias towards increased transparency in these
tools. While bookmark collections are personally created
and maintained, they are typically also visible to others. A
number of user interface elements allow social browsing of
the bookmark space. For example, user names are “click-
able” links, and, when a name is clicked, the bookmark
collection for that user is presented. This allows someone to
get a sense of the topics of interest for a person. Tags are
also clickable, and when selected will result in a list of all
bookmarks that share that tag. This is a useful way to
browse through the entire bookmark collection to see other
information sources of interest. We call this ability to reori-
ent the view by clicking on tags or user names, “pivot
browsing”; it provides a lightweight mechanism to navigate
the aggregated bookmark collection.
SOCIAL BOOKMARKING FOR THE ENTERPRISE
While internet social bookmarking services, like del.icio.us,
are of great benefit for publicly accessible web resources,
they are problematic for web resources on most corporate
intranets. While services like del.icio.us do allow book-
marking of intranet pages, corporate firewalls prevent ac-
cess to these resources to anyone outside the organization.
Furthermore, public sharing of bookmarks to intranet re-
sources may be of concern as proprietary information, al-
beit limited in nature, could be leaked.
Nevertheless, the apparent success of internet-based social
bookmarking services begs the question of whether large
enterprises or organizations would also benefit from a so-
cial bookmarking system. We have been investigating this
question by designing and deploying an enterprise-scale
social bookmarking system. In this paper we describe the
important design decisions we made for the “dogear social
bookmarking service” (henceforth referred to as dogear).
We will then provide a description of the primary character-
istics of dogear, including a detailed presentation of the
user interface. And finally, we provide the results of a field
study of the dogear service.
DESIGN PRINCIPLES
Identity and transparency
The first significant design decision was whether user
“identity” in the application would be based on real names,
or whether pseudonyms would be allowed and supported.
We decided to require the use of real-world identity in the
bookmarking application for the following reasons. First,
one of the expected benefits of the system was to allow
users to make inferences about the interests and expertise of
others based on informal browsing of bookmark collections.
This discovery of people with shared (or complimentary)
interests would help to nurture the communities of practice
within the enterprise, and potentially allow searching for
and finding experts on specific topics to help solve business
problems. Real name identity would also allow users to
look up additional information about other users in various
corporate databases (e.g., corporate online directory and
enterprise web). In addition, real name identity would fa-
cilitate communication between users of the application
since the various corporate collaboration tools (e.g., corpo-
rate directories, email, chat,) all use real name identities.
Finally, there is a strong cultural norm within the organiza-
tion to use more formal names within the corporate applica-
tions.
It should be noted that while creating personal bookmark
collections requires authentication of real name identity, it
is possible to browse the enterprise bookmark collection
anonymously. This invisible participation is a form of
“lurking” and allows the benefits of bookmark sharing to
extend to the entire enterprise. Lurker behavior is counted
in application statistics (e.g., number of times a bookmark
is “clicked” to access a particular information resource).
While lurking in online environments has been character-
ized as a form of “free riding,” it has been shown to provide
a important supportive role in the sociability of online envi-
ronments [12].
A second important design decision concerned the degree
of support for access control within the application. While
the early public internet bookmarking services (e.g.,
del.icio.us) have provided open access to everyone’s book-
marks, there are valid reasons to consider limiting access to
some set of bookmarks. For example, a group may want to
create a collection of information sources in support of a
project that may be extremely confidential or bound by con-
tract to restricted access. Teams may want to create shared
bookmarks that are visible only to the group. We could also
see a need for “role” or job-based collection of information
sources. For example, managers might benefit from book-
marking and sharing certain information sources, while the
sales force would benefit from another. And finally, we saw
a need for private bookmarks. An informal survey of poten-
tial users of the system indicated that many people had
bookmarks that they considered personal and would not
want to make public. We did not want to force people to
use multiple bookmarking tools—a personal bookmarking
tool (e.g. in a browser) and a corporate tool for shared
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CHI 2006 Proceedings • Social Computing 1 April 22-27, 2006 • Montréal, Québec, Canada