If your policy or issue-focused organization is like most, then chances are good that you maintain an online information library for your key audiences, with content organized around a pre-defined taxonomy. Can you improve your users' ability to find information by relying upon tagging? Well Infoworld.com, a very well respected, and well-read online publisher says yes.

Matt McAlister's recent post describes how Inforworld staff are using tagging - not a central taxonomy - to create each article's "related links" list:

What I like most in this new architecture is that the related links are now driven by del.icio.us. Our edit team is tagging content in del.icio.us. The engineers are pulling down the del.icio.us RSS feeds. And then we create matching logic based on the common tags. We also link back out to del.icio.us pages via the tags for the article on display.

You can see this tag-based related linking in action on today's Infoworld article about Adobe's acquisition of Macromedia.

This is the first example I have seen of a major, established online publisher making the investment to trust a folksonomy. Moreover, they are leveraging a free 3rd party service (del.icio.us) as a core component of the technical infrastructure. I will be watching closely to see how successful the initiative is. Do you think it will work? I think it has real promise.

technorati tags: nptech, folksonomy