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and YouTube (enabling individuals or groups to produce multi-media con-
tent for others to view) provide everyone the opportunity to author con-
tent that others can read or view – many people are now actively engaged
in either producing or consuming this user-generated content.
4. Tags – allow individuals to have control of categorizing the content of their
digital material (e.g. del-icio.us allows users to tag websites with bookmarks).
These user-generated categorization systems are called folksonomies – a folk-
sonomy emerges over time depending on what users find useful to group
together based on the information structures and relationships that are actu-
ally used in practice.

5. Extensions – systems can also go beyond this tagging process to develop algo-
rithms based on the pattern of use of different information which then allows
for automatic referrals to individuals who have shown interest in a certain
type of content. This is done by Amazon very effectively to make recommen-
dations to their customers of other books they might enjoy reading, based
on their pattern of consumption to-date as compared to the millions of other
customers.
6. Signals – given the sheer amount of information that is digitally available, it
can also be helpful to have certain information automatically pushed to users
based on their interests. Signals are the means of doing this, alerting users to
the fact that new information is available that they may be interested in. RSS
(really simple syndication) is now a popular technology that provides this
kind of signal.

All of these features of 2.0 technologies suggest a very different environment as
compared to a repository environment. McAfee (2006), thus, argues, that

Enterprise 2.0 technologies have the potential to let an intranet become what the Inter-
net already is – an online platform with a constantly changing structure built by distrib-
uted autonomous and largely self-interested peers. On this platform, authoring creates
content; links and tags knit it together; and search, extensions, tags and signals make
emergent structures and patterns in the content visible and help people stay on top of it all.
(p. 26)
In reality, however, many organizations have yet to take advantage of 2.0 tech-
nologies. A major reason is that they can reduce managerial control and may be
used by some to express negativity, which many senior managers want to avoid.
For example, individuals can use blogs to broadcast weaknesses in a company’s
strategy or to deride organizational decision-makers. Some may fear that chaos
may rein if knowledge workers are allowed to add or change content on their
departmental website without this being vetted by a central authority. Never-
theless, we can expect that KMS will change over time in organizations as the
potential of these new 2.0 technologies become more fully understood, espe-
cially in support of knowledge work, and more accepted in practice. For now,
repository systems remain dominant.

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