As part of a report I am writing on collaboration, I have been mulling over the increasingly broad use of the words collaboration and collaborative and wondering how appropriate they are in certain contexts. Let me explain.

Collaboration literally means to work together. As I see it, this necessarily implies that the parties involved are conscious of their co-involvement in the activity.

However, increasingly the term collaborative is being used to describe tools where the central value is gained by the participation of a collection of users—but where the individual users' contribution is not made in the name of the collective—it is made for their own personal benefit. For example, users of social bookmarking systems may tag pages for their own reference or to help them find things again—not explicitly to add to the broader network of tagged content. But, since there is no explicit intention to participate in the collective activity, surely this cannot truly be collaboration? Just because there is a collective benefit from multiple people using the same system, doesn't mean the people involved shared the same goal.

It may be that the term collaboration is simply the best-fitting umbrella for these tools and methods, but with all the confusion in the market over what is meant by collaboration—especially with terms such as Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Office 2.0 etc adding to the mix—I think we need to be more careful about how we describe emerging social software and services.