Thomas Vander Wal is a man with at least two claims to fame. One was his invention of the term 'folksonomy' and the other his coining of another term, 'infocloud' or 'info cloud'. Anyone who's involved in social computing will have bumped into each of these phenomena. They are the way that ordinary folk tag and access information, rather than having to work with conventional rigid taxonomies.

So the man's no slouch when it comes to information, its organisation and architecture, especially in the digital social world. He's a pioneer and a deep thinker. And, this week, he brought a ray of sunshine into my life.

I'd been working on a content management, collaboration and web-publishing project. Trying to nail all the inputs, outputs, tags, relationships, and so on was not easy. But it seemed right that I should do this mapping without any consideration of the actual software tools that would eventually be brought to bear on the problem. The approach owed much to the clear thinking Lee Bryant of Headshift, who explained that he always works on user needs long before thinking of what solutions to apply.

So, having got all my ducks in a row, I decided it was time to investigate the software and services that would best deliver the elements. But a quick diversionary visit to Twitter revealed a message from Thomas Vander Wal. He'd posted 'The elements in the social software stack' on his blog. And he explained in considerable, and convincing, detail how and why social software worked. He even had a diagram to clarify how the bits hung together.

It was a perfect reality check for my own thinking. It explained the issues way beyond my own articulation. I won't spoil his story but I'll give you a clue: The running order for the elements to work is: Identity, Object (social object), Presence, Actions, Sharing, Reputation, Relationships, Conversation, Groups and collaboration.

If you're involved in introducing social software into your organisation, read this single post, even if you read nothing else.