Does social software have fangs? And, can it organize itself?

SuwCharman just wrapped up a talk at Google (Scary Monsters: DoesSocial Software Have Fangs?) around the adoption and use of socialsoftware such as wikis and blogs within businesses.  It was a good talkand the on-the-ground experience around corporate adoption wasparticularly valuable for me.

Suw reported that corporate users tend to impose their existingcorporate hierarchy on the flat namespace of their Wikis, which is finebut may not be exploiting the medium to its full potential.  And Wikisearch tends to be at best mediocre.  Has anyone looked at leveraginguser edit histories to infer page clusters?  I could imagine anautogenerated Wiki page which represented a suggested cluster, with away for people to edit the page and add meaningful titles andannotations to help with search, which could serve as an alternativeindex to at least part of a site.

Tags: social software, suw, wikis, clustering, scary monsters