From Corante: snail mail as a digital campaign tool
.27.3 | No Comments »
March 27th, 2006 by Alex
From my blog on Corante:
Anti-war e-activists have embraced one of the old standbys of pre-digital politics: snail mail. Bring Them Home Now is selling postage stamps with the “bring them home” symbol: a yellow ribbon super-imposed on a peace sign. BTHN is encouraging people to buy the stamps and use them to mail in their tax returns on April 15th.
Read the whole story on Civic Minded, Corante’s new e-democracy blog.
RSS, tags & social bookmarking: building blocks for nonprofit collaboration
.24.3 | No Comments »
March 24th, 2006 by Alex
I’m currently at NTen’s Nonprofit Technology Conference in Seattle, where I was part of a panel yesterday on “Blogging, Tagging, Flickring for the cause: New tools and new strategies.” Along with Victor d’Allant of Social Edge and Ruby Sinreich, I gave a kind of crash course/overview of how nonprofits can use the latest generation of Internet tools to work more effectively.
I’ve tidied up my presentation notes and I’ve posted them in the hope that they could be a useful reference for the folks in the room — who asked some great questions! — or for those who couldn’t make it. Read the rest of this post on Social Signal.
RSS, tags & social bookmarking: building blocks for nonprofit collaboration
.24.3 | No Comments »
March 24th, 2006 by Alex
I'm currently at NTen's Nonprofit Technology Conference in Seattle, where I was part of a panel yesterday on "Blogging, Tagging, Flickring for the cause: New tools and new strategies." Along with Victor d'Allant of Social Edge and Ruby Sinreich, I gave a kind of crash course/overview of how nonprofits can use the latest generation of Internet tools to work more effectively.
I've tidied up my presentation notes and I'm posting them here in the hope that they could be a useful reference for the folks in the room -- who asked some great questions! -- or for those who couldn't make it.
RSS, tags & social bookmarking: building blocks for nonprofit collaboration
I want to introduce you to three tools that are basic building blocks for a lot of the most exciting nonprofit technology projects -- as well as for a lot of commercial web sites. These are all covered in the Web 2.0 glossary handout.
These are:
RSS (really simple syndication): A format for storing online information in a way that makes that information readable by lots of different kinds of software. Many blogs and web sites feature RSS feeds: a constantly updated version of the site's latest content, in a form that can be read by a newsreader or aggregator (a program for reading lots of blogs in one place). (For more information see
tags: Keywords that describe the content of a web site, bookmark, photo or blog post. You can assign multiple tags to the same online resource, and different people can assign different tags to the same resource. Tag-enabled web services include social bookmarking sites (like del.icio.us), photo sharing sites (like Flickr) and blog tracking sites (like technorati). Tags provide a useful way of organizing, retrieving and discovering information.
social bookmarking: The collaborative equivalent of storing favorites or bookmarks within a web browser, social bookmarking services (like del.icio.us or Furl) let people store their favourite web sites online. Social bookmarking services also let people share their favourite web sites with other people, making them a great way to discover new sites or colleagues who share your interests.
Why should you care about these building blocks?
We'll talk about a few different reasons, but I'm going to focus on one: all three of these tools unlock momentous possibilities for collaboration, both within your organization AND across different organizations. I want to show you a couple of quick examples of how these technologies can combine to help different nonprofits work together effectively.
Example 1: nptech tag
Question: Who here is responsible for solving tech problems, finding new tech tools, or planning tech strategy in your organization? And who here, when you're working on a tech problem, sometimes has the sneaking feeling that somewhere out there is another person just like you, in another nonprofit not too different from yours, who has already been down this road and figured out this problem for you?
NPTech is a very simple way of finding that solution -- that solution somebody else has already discovered. NPtech is a tag that a bunch of people who work in nonprofit technology decided that they'd start using for any web resource, blog post or photo that had to do with nonprofit technology.
Some of those people use del.icio.us -- a social bookmarking service -- to save their web page favourites. If they're saving a web link that's related to nonprofit tech, they use the nptech tag as one of the tags for that link. As a result, there's a del.icio.us nptech page that is a great collection of resources anyone can access.
Some of those people blog, so when they write a blog post related to nonprofit tech, they tag their post "nptech", or pop that blog post into an "nptech" category they've created on their blog. As a result, there's a technorati page that includes all kinds of blog posts about nonprofit technolgy -- as well as weblinks from del.icio.us and photos from flickr.
And thanks to RSS, you don't have to visit technorati or del.icio.us everyday in order to stay on top of all these great resources. If you subscribe to the RSS feed for the nptech page on technorati or del.icio.us, these resources will show up in whatever you use to read RSS feeds -- it could be a simple as your google homepage.
The great lessons of the nptech project are:
1) these tools can make online collaboration CHEAP and EASY
2) you don't need to get everyone to agree on how to play nicely together -- if you have some people who you want to share resources with, just pick a tag and start using it. Others will join in if it's useful.
Now let me give you a more ambitious example:
Example 2: telecentre.org
(full disclosure: I worked on this project)
Telecentre.org is a venture of Canada's International Development Agency that is also receiving support from Microsoft and the Swiss government. Telecentres are community technology centres -- in many developing nations or in rural areas, this is often the only way people have Internet access, and may also be how they get access to phone service, too -- and training in how to use all these technologies. Local telecentres are supported by various regional networks around the world -- like CTCNet in the USA. But until now there's been no formal way for a network of telecentres in Africa to share resources with a network of telecentres in Latin America. Telecentre.org aims to change that by providing lots of training and networking opportunities -- and an online network to support learning and exchange among telecentre networks.
Any telecentre network in the world can create its own web site as part of the telecentre network.
And any telecentre training event can create a web site, too. All these individual web
sites are tied together via RSS and tags.
So for example, when telecentre.org conducted a major gathering of telecentre people at the World Summit on the Information Society, they set up a separate site at wsis.telecentre.org.
The main telecentre site then subscribed to the RSS feed from the WSIS site, and republished selected content onto the main site. This site was tagged "WSIS" so it would be easy to organize and find on the main site, too.
The great lessons of this project are:
1) RSS can provide an easy, low-effort way to tie diverse organizations' web sites into a loose network, in which each site selects the highlights from other organizations' sites that are most relevant to their own members, and remixes them into a fresh take.
2) As RSS makes it easy to add more and more content to your web site, you have to think about how to organize all this shared content so it's useful and accessible. Tagging can provide an easy, low-effort way to organize content on your own site, into loose categories.
I hope BOTH these examples will inspire you to take a fresh look at opportunities for informal or formal collaboration with other nonprofit organizations. It's just become a whole lot easier.
RSS, tags & social bookmarking: building blocks for nonprofit collaboration
.24.3 | No Comments »
March 24th, 2006 by Alex
I'm currently at NTen's Nonprofit Technology Conference in Seattle, where I was part of a panel yesterday on "Blogging, Tagging, Flickring for the cause: New tools and new strategies." Along with Victor d'Allant of Social Edge and Ruby Sinreich, I gave a kind of crash course/overview of how nonprofits can use the latest generation of Internet tools to work more effectively.
I've tidied up my presentation notes and I'm posting them here in the hope that they could be a useful reference for the folks in the room -- who asked some great questions! -- or for those who couldn't make it.
RSS, tags & social bookmarking: building blocks for nonprofit collaboration
I want to introduce you to three tools that are basic building blocks for a lot of the most exciting nonprofit technology projects -- as well as for a lot of commercial web sites. These are all covered in the Web 2.0 glossary handout.
These are:
RSS (really simple syndication): A format for storing online information in a way that makes that information readable by lots of different kinds of software. Many blogs and web sites feature RSS feeds: a constantly updated version of the site's latest content, in a form that can be read by a newsreader or aggregator (a program for reading lots of blogs in one place). (For more information see
tags: Keywords that describe the content of a web site, bookmark, photo or blog post. You can assign multiple tags to the same online resource, and different people can assign different tags to the same resource. Tag-enabled web services include social bookmarking sites (like del.icio.us), photo sharing sites (like Flickr) and blog tracking sites (like technorati). Tags provide a useful way of organizing, retrieving and discovering information.
social bookmarking: The collaborative equivalent of storing favorites or bookmarks within a web browser, social bookmarking services (like del.icio.us or Furl) let people store their favourite web sites online. Social bookmarking services also let people share their favourite web sites with other people, making them a great way to discover new sites or colleagues who share your interests.
Why should you care about these building blocks?
We'll talk about a few different reasons, but I'm going to focus on one: all three of these tools unlock momentous possibilities for collaboration, both within your organization AND across different organizations. I want to show you a couple of quick examples of how these technologies can combine to help different nonprofits work together effectively.
Example 1: nptech tag
Question: Who here is responsible for solving tech problems, finding new tech tools, or planning tech strategy in your organization? And who here, when you're working on a tech problem, sometimes has the sneaking feeling that somewhere out there is another person just like you, in another nonprofit not too different from yours, who has already been down this road and figured out this problem for you?
NPTech is a very simple way of finding that solution -- that solution somebody else has already discovered. NPtech is a tag that a bunch of people who work in nonprofit technology decided that they'd start using for any web resource, blog post or photo that had to do with nonprofit technology.
Some of those people use del.icio.us -- a social bookmarking service -- to save their web page favourites. If they're saving a web link that's related to nonprofit tech, they use the nptech tag as one of the tags for that link. As a result, there's a del.icio.us nptech page that is a great collection of resources anyone can access.
Some of those people blog, so when they write a blog post related to nonprofit tech, they tag their post "nptech", or pop that blog post into an "nptech" category they've created on their blog. As a result, there's a technorati page that includes all kinds of blog posts about nonprofit technolgy -- as well as weblinks from del.icio.us and photos from flickr.
And thanks to RSS, you don't have to visit technorati or del.icio.us everyday in order to stay on top of all these great resources. If you subscribe to the RSS feed for the nptech page on technorati or del.icio.us, these resources will show up in whatever you use to read RSS feeds -- it could be a simple as your google homepage.
The great lessons of the nptech project are:
1) these tools can make online collaboration CHEAP and EASY
2) you don't need to get everyone to agree on how to play nicely together -- if you have some people who you want to share resources with, just pick a tag and start using it. Others will join in if it's useful.
Now let me give you a more ambitious example:
Example 2: telecentre.org
(full disclosure: I worked on this project)
Telecentre.org is a venture of Canada's International Development Agency that is also receiving support from Microsoft and the Swiss government. Telecentres are community technology centres -- in many developing nations or in rural areas, this is often the only way people have Internet access, and may also be how they get access to phone service, too -- and training in how to use all these technologies. Local telecentres are supported by various regional networks around the world -- like CTCNet in the USA. But until now there's been no formal way for a network of telecentres in Africa to share resources with a network of telecentres in Latin America. Telecentre.org aims to change that by providing lots of training and networking opportunities -- and an online network to support learning and exchange among telecentre networks.
Any telecentre network in the world can create its own web site as part of the telecentre network.
And any telecentre training event can create a web site, too. All these individual web
sites are tied together via RSS and tags.
So for example, when telecentre.org conducted a major gathering of telecentre people at the World Summit on the Information Society, they set up a separate site at wsis.telecentre.org.
The main telecentre site then subscribed to the RSS feed from the WSIS site, and republished selected content onto the main site. This site was tagged "WSIS" so it would be easy to organize and find on the main site, too.
The great lessons of this project are:
1) RSS can provide an easy, low-effort way to tie diverse organizations' web sites into a loose network, in which each site selects the highlights from other organizations' sites that are most relevant to their own members, and remixes them into a fresh take.
2) As RSS makes it easy to add more and more content to your web site, you have to think about how to organize all this shared content so it's useful and accessible. Tagging can provide an easy, low-effort way to organize content on your own site, into loose categories.
I hope BOTH these examples will inspire you to take a fresh look at opportunities for informal or formal collaboration with other nonprofit organizations. It's just become a whole lot easier.
Business tunes into grassroots community
.15.3 | No Comments »
March 15th, 2006 by Alex
I'm just back from SXSW, where I was reminded that there are still a few people out there who are thinking about the Internet as a potential business opportunity rather than as a chance to reinvent democracy.
At the panel I was on -- Remixing Business for a Convergent World -- it seemed that what is really converging is how both business folks and political hacks are looking at the Net. Let's take, for example, the question of how to make strategic use of blogs -- a question that my fellow-panelist, Robert Scoble, addresses in his recent book Naked Conversations.
Thanks to blogs, businesses can no longer afford to ignore even their smallest customers. Traditional blue-chips are starting to recognize that their next p.r. crisis could be precipitated by a cranky shareholder or dissatisfied customer who blogs about the company. As for the latest generation of web start-ups -- sites like Squidoo, Frappr, or LinkedIn -- they're not only sensitive to customer perceptions: their entire business models are based on user (i.e. customer) contributed value.
Once you start to see customers are value creators, rather than value consumers, a lot of business truths get turned upside-down. Take, for example, the idea that businesses are primarily accountable to their boards or shareholders. Does anyone out there think that the success of del.icio.us or Flickr depends more on Yahoo shareholders than on the users who are contributing bookmarks, photos, and software plug-ins?
If businesses find themselves suddenly accountable to their users, that kind of accountability is old news to both government and civil society organizations. Governments have always been primarily (if imperfectly) accountable to citizen-voters, and civil society organizations (whether community service groups or political advocacy organizations) have always been primarily accountable to their members and donors.
The net result is that it's business that now needs to learn from civic and public organizations about how to enage at the grassroots level. It's not like public and nonprofit organizations have all the answers -- great examples of effective two-way member/voter engagement online are still rarer than the many examples of organizations that are still in "broadcast" mode -- but at least there's a decade of effort to look at.
For those of us who've been thinking about online democracy and grassroots engagement for something like that long, the rise in business interest should come as (mostly) good news. Sure, there's more competition for public attention: efforts at getting voters to participate in policy discussion now have to compete with businesses offering free ipods in return for customer feedback.
But there's also a rapidly expanding toolkit for grassroots community-building. Tools like Squidoo, Flickr, and del.icio.us offer entirely new ways of involving members and encouraging members to interact with one another. Just as important, the private sector's growing embrace of customer "community" may help to build a broader culture of pervasive engagement.
Business tunes into grassroots community
.15.3 | No Comments »
March 15th, 2006 by Alex
I'm just back from SXSW, where I was reminded that there are still a few people out there who are thinking about the Internet as a potential business opportunity rather than as a chance to reinvent democracy.
At the panel I was on -- Remixing Business for a Convergent World -- it seemed that what is really converging is how both business folks and political hacks are looking at the Net. Let's take, for example, the question of how to make strategic use of blogs -- a question that my fellow-panelist, Robert Scoble, addresses in his recent book Naked Conversations.
Thanks to blogs, businesses can no longer afford to ignore even their smallest customers. Traditional blue-chips are starting to recognize that their next p.r. crisis could be precipitated by a cranky shareholder or dissatisfied customer who blogs about the company. As for the latest generation of web start-ups -- sites like Squidoo, Frappr, or LinkedIn -- they're not only sensitive to customer perceptions: their entire business models are based on user (i.e. customer) contributed value.
Once you start to see customers are value creators, rather than value consumers, a lot of business truths get turned upside-down. Take, for example, the idea that businesses are primarily accountable to their boards or shareholders. Does anyone out there think that the success of del.icio.us or Flickr depends more on Yahoo shareholders than on the users who are contributing bookmarks, photos, and software plug-ins?
If businesses find themselves suddenly accountable to their users, that kind of accountability is old news to both government and civil society organizations. Governments have always been primarily (if imperfectly) accountable to citizen-voters, and civil society organizations (whether community service groups or political advocacy organizations) have always been primarily accountable to their members and donors.
The net result is that it's business that now needs to learn from civic and public organizations about how to enage at the grassroots level. It's not like public and nonprofit organizations have all the answers -- great examples of effective two-way member/voter engagement online are still rarer than the many examples of organizations that are still in "broadcast" mode -- but at least there's a decade of effort to look at.
For those of us who've been thinking about online democracy and grassroots engagement for something like that long, the rise in business interest should come as (mostly) good news. Sure, there's more competition for public attention: efforts at getting voters to participate in policy discussion now have to compete with businesses offering free ipods in return for customer feedback.
But there's also a rapidly expanding toolkit for grassroots community-building. Tools like Squidoo, Flickr, and del.icio.us offer entirely new ways of involving members and encouraging members to interact with one another. Just as important, the private sector's growing embrace of customer "community" may help to build a broader culture of pervasive engagement.
Monkey Love
.13.3 | No Comments »
March 13th, 2006 by Alex
Monkey love
My half-robot baby is Creative Commons licensed
.13.3 | No Comments »
March 13th, 2006 by Alex
My half-robot baby is Creative Commons licensed
Originally uploaded by Consultini
UPDATE: Choosing effective del.icio.us tags
.10.3 | 2 Comments »
March 10th, 2006 by Alex
I wrote this almost a year ago, as a relative del.icio.us newbie. Now that I’m a little more experienced, I’ve revised it to include some new tips to choosing effective del.icio.us bookmarks.
Step 1: Lie awake at night, wondering whether there isn’t something that can organize your favourite web links that will work better than your browser’s favourites collection.
Step 2: Lie awake at night, wondering whether you should use Furl or Spurl or del.icio.us.
Step 2a (optional): Lie awake at night, wishing you’d chosen del.icio.us.
Step 3: Lie awake at night, wondering which tags you should use for all the web pages you are now adding to del.icio.us.Once you make it to step 3, here are some things to keep in mind:
- Be a lemming. Check how other people are tagging the kinds of sites you want to remember. Delicious Linkbacks makes this very easy. Bear in mind that different people will bookmark the same site for different reasons: I might bookmark Terminus 1525 as a great example of a Drupal site, while you are saving it as a link to young Canadian artists.
- Follow the herd. When in doubt, pick the tag that seems to have the most links — this is the leading tag of the options you’re considering, so hopefully will emerge as the dominant focal point (so you don’t have to check open-source, opensource AND open_source to keep on top of the big world of open source). Del.icio.us deliberately obscures the question of how many links exist under any one tag, but you can get a rough sense by seeing how many pages exist for a given link by adding a number to the tag page you’re looking at, with the syntax http://del.icio.us/tag/opensource/25. For example, http://del.icio.us/tag/opensource/75 pulls up a nice healthy-sized page of links, whereas http://del.icio.us/tag/open-source/75 gives you no links at all — demonstrating that opensource is the more popular tag of the two.
- Avoid camels. Camel case (you know, CamelCase) doesn’t work — it just comes out as all lower case letters, with the words mushed together.
- Like nature, del.icio.us abhors a vacuum. Blank spaces don’t work either. So if you tag something “camel case” it will show up on the tag page for “camel” and the tag page for “case”.
- Punctuate with care. Underscores and dashes work ok. But before you create a tag with an underscore or a dash, ask yourself: Does this tag exist in a non-underscored form? For example, I don’t think the world is especially well-served by having three separate forks for open-source, open_source and opensource. Whatever you do, stay away from commas: while there are lots of tag-enabled web services that comma separate their tags, comma-separating your del.icio.us tags will add commas to your tags.
- Independence is a virtue. If your underscore or dash serves to separate two words, could each of the two words be more useful as independent tags? For example, tagging the Drupal site with the tags “open” and “source” — so that it shows up on separate pages for open and source — is a lot less useful than giving it the opensource tag. But rather than using the tag canadianpolitics, try using two tags: Canada and politics. That way your resource will show up under resources about Canada and about politics.
- Hang out at crossroads. If you’ve followed the guideline above to use two separate tags rather than smooshing two words into one tag, find the resources you’re interested in by using intersecting tags. For example, even if you use the tags politics, you can easily find all the del.icio.us links on Canadian politics by entering the URL http://del.icio.us/tag/Canada+politics into your browser’s address bar.
- Co-ordinate your efforts. If you’re part of a professional community or community of practice, consider establishing a common set of standards for how to tag resources you want to share among yourselves. A wiki can help do the job.
- Tags are written in pencil. Unlike a Tiffany engraving, a del.icio.us tag is not a permanent commitment. If you realize that you’ve used the wrong tag for a particular link, you can alway re-edit that link. Even more useful, del.icio.us will let you rename any of your tags — so if you tagged a bunch of stuff “food” that you later wish you’d tagged as “cooking”, you can re-tag them by visiting http://del.icio.us/settings/[yourdelicioususername]/tags. Bonus tip for Mac users: the Cocoalicious client (which offers another interface for accessing your del.icio.us bookmarks) is a really great tool for renaming tags. If you decide to do a major renovation of your tagging schema, Cocoalicious makes the job much faster and easier — you can just click on any tag to edit it, just the way you’d edit a file name in the finder.
- On del.icio.us, everyone knows you’re a dog. Or at least, they will know — if you tag a photo of yourself with the word “dog”. That’s right, you’re tagging in public, so think twice before adopting the tag “enemies” for your business competitors, or “prospects” for all the folks you’re pitching.
- Shh! This one’s for:you. There is one way to be discreet when you’re tagging on del.icio.us, which is to use the “for:” tag. (Thanks to Richard Eriksson for this tip.) If you know a friend or colleague’s del.icio.us username, you can send him or her a recommended link by tagging it “for:username”. So if you wanted to send me a link, for example, you’d tag it “for:awsamuel”.
- Spread the word. The very best way to refine your del.icio.us tagging practice is to embed yourself in a community of del.icio.us users. If your colleagues, friends and collaborators are fellow del.icio.us-users, that is a powerful incentive to tag your links in a way that makes them discoverable to your community. So start building that community today by encouraging everyone you know to leave browser favorites behind, and get del.icio.us.
Look who’s popular
.10.3 | No Comments »
March 10th, 2006 by Alex
When I opened up my custom Google home page this morning I noticed that one of the most popular del.icio.us links for today was a guide to creating a block hover effect for a list of links. This sounded cool -- basically, a neater-looking alternative to links that simply change colour when you mouse over them -- so I checked it out.
And what does this popular page turn out to be? A tribute to the brilliant work that NetSquared's designer, Veerle Pieters, has done in redesigning her own blog. So brilliant, in fact, that somebody went to the trouble of documenting exactly how she accomplished her link rollover effect.
Look who’s popular
.10.3 | No Comments »
March 10th, 2006 by Alex
When I opened up my custom Google home page this morning I noticed that one of the most popular del.icio.us links for today was a guide to creating a block hover effect for a list of links. This sounded cool -- basically, a neater-looking alternative to links that simply change colour when you mouse over them -- so I checked it out.
And what does this popular page turn out to be? A tribute to the brilliant work that NetSquared's designer, Veerle Pieters, has done in redesigning her own blog. So brilliant, in fact, that somebody went to the trouble of documenting exactly how she accomplished her link rollover effect.
Tag your way to del.icio.us domination
.9.3 | No Comments »
March 9th, 2006 by Alex
I wrote this almost a year ago, as a relative del.icio.us newbie. Now that I’m a little more experienced, I’ve revised it to include some new tips to choosing effective del.icio.us bookmarks.
Step 1: Lie awake at night, wondering whether there isn’t something that can organize your favourite web links that will work better than your browser’s favourites collection.
Step 2: Lie awake at night, wondering whether you should use Furl or Spurl or del.icio.us.
Step 2a (optional): Lie awake at night, wishing you’d chosen del.icio.us.
Step 3: Lie awake at night, wondering which tags you should use for all the web pages you are now adding to del.icio.us.Once you make it to step 3, here are some things to keep in mind:
- Be a lemming. Check how other people are tagging the kinds of sites you want to remember. Delicious Linkbacks makes this very easy. Bear in mind that different people will bookmark the same site for different reasons: I might bookmark Terminus 1525 as a great example of a Drupal site, while you are saving it as a link to young Canadian artists.
- Follow the herd. When in doubt, pick the tag that seems to have the most links — this is the leading tag of the options you’re considering, so hopefully will emerge as the dominant focal point (so you don’t have to check open-source, opensource AND open_source to keep on top of the big world of open source). Del.icio.us deliberately obscures the question of how many links exist under any one tag, but you can get a rough sense by seeing how many pages exist for a given link by adding a number to the tag page you’re looking at, with the syntax http://del.icio.us/tag/opensource/25. For example, http://del.icio.us/tag/opensource/75 pulls up a nice healthy-sized page of links, whereas http://del.icio.us/tag/open-source/75 gives you no links at all — demonstrating that opensource is the more popular tag of the two.
- Avoid camels. Camel case (you know, CamelCase) doesn’t work — it just comes out as all lower case letters, with the words mushed together.
- Like nature, del.icio.us abhors a vacuum. Blank spaces don’t work either. So if you tag something “camel case” it will show up on the tag page for “camel” and the tag page for “case”.
- Punctuate with care. Underscores and dashes work ok. But before you create a tag with an underscore or a dash, ask yourself: Does this tag exist in a non-underscored form? For example, I don’t think the world is especially well-served by having three separate forks for open-source, open_source and opensource. Whatever you do, stay away from commas: while there are lots of tag-enabled web services that comma separate their tags, comma-separating your del.icio.us tags will add commas to your tags.
- Independence is a virtue. If your underscore or dash serves to separate two words, could each of the two words be more useful as independent tags? For example, tagging the Drupal site with the tags “open” and “source” — so that it shows up on separate pages for open and source — is a lot less useful than giving it the opensource tag. But rather than using the tag canadianpolitics, try using two tags: Canada and politics. That way your resource will show up under resources about Canada and about politics.
- Hang out at crossroads. If you’ve followed the guideline above to use two separate tags rather than smooshing two words into one tag, find the resources you’re interested in by using intersecting tags. For example, even if you use the tags politics, you can easily find all the del.icio.us links on Canadian politics by entering the URL http://del.icio.us/tag/Canada+politics into your browser’s address bar.
- Co-ordinate your efforts. If you’re part of a professional community or community of practice, consider establishing a common set of standards for how to tag resources you want to share among yourselves. A wiki can help do the job.
- Tags are written in pencil. Unlike a Tiffany engraving, a del.icio.us tag is not a permanent commitment. If you realize that you’ve used the wrong tag for a particular link, you can alway re-edit that link. Even more useful, del.icio.us will let you rename any of your tags — so if you tagged a bunch of stuff “food” that you later wish you’d tagged as “cooking”, you can re-tag them by visiting http://del.icio.us/settings/[yourdelicioususername]/tags. Bonus tip for Mac users: the Cocoalicious client (which offers another interface for accessing your del.icio.us bookmarks) is a really great tool for renaming tags. If you decide to do a major renovation of your tagging schema, Cocoalicious makes the job much faster and easier — you can just click on any tag to edit it, just the way you’d edit a file name in the finder.
- On del.icio.us, everyone knows you’re a dog. Or at least, they will know — if you tag a photo of yourself with the word “dog”. That’s right, you’re tagging in public, so think twice before adopting the tag “enemies” for your business competitors, or “prospects” for all the folks you’re pitching.
- Shh! This one’s for:you. There is one way to be discreet when you’re tagging on del.icio.us, which is to use the “for:” tag. (Thanks to Richard Eriksson for this tip.) If you know a friend or colleague’s del.icio.us username, you can send him or her a recommended link by tagging it “for:username”. So if you wanted to send me a link, for example, you’d tag it “for:awsamuel”.
- Spread the word. The very best way to refine your del.icio.us tagging practice is to embed yourself in a community of del.icio.us users. If your colleagues, friends and collaborators are fellow del.icio.us-users, that is a powerful incentive to tag your links in a way that makes them discoverable to your community. So start building that community today by encouraging everyone you know to leave browser favorites behind, and get del.icio.us.