An older story from last summer: In a (cryptic) press release, Xerox writes that they have used insights from ethnography in product development:
Employing the same ethnographic methods used to observe the social order on a Polynesian atoll or document the culture of natives in southern Siberia, Xerox Corporation (NYSE: XRX) scientists have injected more human know-how into text mining, the practice of using computer analysis of documents to extract new information. The result is better categorization, with higher-quality, customized results.
>> read the whole press release
In their article Tag it as you see it, Computerworld explains us (in a more understandable way), what Xerox actually has found out: They go for using tags for organizing content - as on flickr and del.icio.us:
The best systems allow a combination of predetermined categories with the ability for the end user to create new tags on the fly and organize them in a way that has meaning to the individual as well as to the organization. Recent research at Xerox Corp. shows how this approach can achieve bottom-line results
>> read the whole story: Tag as you like it
SEE ALSO
The practice of classification by tags is also called Folksonomy. See Wikipedia article on folksonomy and article by Kerim Friedman on How folksonomy websites can be used by anthropologists
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