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.
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.
Web 2.0 glossary
.1.3 | No Comments »
March 1st, 2006 by Alex
I’m looking forward to the upcoming Nten conference, where I’ll be part of a panel on Blogging, tagging, flickring for the cause. As background info for Nten participants, I put together the following glossary of “Web 2.0″ terminology.
What’s Web 2.0? Well, it’s really just a buzzword summing up the latest generation of Internet technology — a generation that encompasses the tools and technologies described below.
aggregation: Gathering information from multiple web sites, typically via RSS. Aggregation lets web sites remix the information from multiple web sites, for example by republishing all the news related to a particular keyword.
blog: Originally short for “weblog”, a blog is just a web page that contains entries in reverse chronological order, with the most recent entry on top. But blogging has taken off because the explosion in blogging software and services — like Blogger, TypePad and WordPress — has turned blogging into one of the easiest ways for people to maintain a constantly updated web presence. In addition to the classic text blog, we now have photo blogs (consisting of uploaded photos), audio blogs (a.k.a. “podcasts”) and video blogs (which consist of regularly uploaded video files).
blogroll: A list of recommended sites that appears in the sidebar of a blog. These sites are typically sites that are either on similar topics, sites that the blogger reads regularly, or sites that belong to the blogger’s friends or colleagues. The term “blogroll” also evokes the concept of political logrolling (when legislators promise to vote for one another’s pet bills) — which is not unlike bloggers’ habit of reciprocating links by posting links to blogs that link back to their own blogs.
mashup: A web service or software tool that combines two or more tools to create a whole new service. A leading example is ChicagoCrime, which merges Google Maps with the Chicago police department’s crime tracking web site to offer a map of crime in different parts of Chicago.
moblogging: Short for mobile blogging, moblogging refers to posting blog updates from a cell phone, camera phone or pda (personal digital assistant). Mobloggers may update their web sites more frequently than other bloggers, because they don’t have to be at their computers in order to post.
newsreader:Â A newsreader gathers the news from multiple blogs or news sites via RSS (see below), allowing readers to access all their news from a single web site or program. Online newsreaders (like Bloglines, Pluck, or Newsgator) are web sites that let you read RSS feeds from within your web browser. Desktop newsreaders download the news to your computer, and let you read your news inside a dedicated software program.
podcast: An audio blog, typically updated weekly or daily. You don’t have to have an ipod to listen to a podcast; although you can download podcasts to an ipod, you can also listen to podcasts on a desktop computer, or many other mp3 players.
RSS: 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.
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.
social networking: Social networking sites help people discover new friends or colleagues by illuminating shared interests, related skills, or a common geographic location. Leading examples include Friendster, LinkedIn, and 43people.
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.
wiki: A collaboratively edited web page. The best known example is wikipedia, an encyclopedia that anyone in the world can help to write or update. Wikis are frequently used to allow people to write a document together, or to share reference material that lets colleagues or even members of the public contribute content.
Powerblogher questions: on tagging, bookmarking and wikis
.8.8 | 3 Comments »
August 8th, 2005 by Alex
Debra Roby, one of the folks at our powerbloghers session, blogged & emailed with these questions:
- Tagging. why should I care? and how do I do it?
- Social bookmarking. same question.
- Setting up a wiki?? Where, why and most importantly how??
Let me tackle each one in turn:
Tagging. Why should I care? and how do I do it?
I can’t resist the urge to refer tagging newbies to my article for the Toronto Star, which was meant to give people an overview of the why and hows of tagging. But let me also try for an abridged version.
Tagging is the ability to assign topical keywords to a wide range of digital content, like photos, bookmarks (favourite web sites) and blog posts. It matters because:
- Just like the Internet itself, it’s self-governing. Nobody’s choice of tag is the correct, authoritative tag for a given page or piece of content; everybody gets to choose for herself what word or words will help her find a piece of content again. Finally, information architecture that matches the structure and spirit of the Net!
- Tags are non-hierarchical: unlike the frequently-seen system of nested categories or nested folders (for example, “animals” is a category and “dogs” is a subcategory), tagging treats all topics as equal — so you can have associations among different tags without having one be “above” the other. In a related point…
- Tags are non-exclusive: you don’t have to choose which tag to use. So if you find a great piece of software to connect your Mac and your Treo (to take a hypothetical example) you can tag it “Mac” and “Treo” and “software”.
- Tags enable collaboration. The same tag that helps you find that Treo software can help everybody else find it too. Cool, huh?
- Tags make us into better human beings. Really. Because while I’m saving that Treo link it occurs to me that other people might think to look for it under “Palm”, so what the hell, I might as well save it with the tag “Palm”, too. How generous of me! Aren’t I nice person!
But that takes us to the “how” part. Basically the three most obvious ways to use tags are:
- To store, retrieve or share favourite web links (bookmarks). del.icio.us was the first service to offer tag-based bookmarking, but there are others — see my comments on social bookmarking, below.
- To organize, retrieve or share your photos. The big player in the photo-tagging world is Flickr.
- To organize or find blog posts. For now that pretty much relies on using Technorati to aggregate blog posts that share the same tag. For example, you can include the code:
<a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/powerbloghers” rel=”tag”>powerbloghers</a>
to include a post on the Technorati page for powerbloghers.
That last point brings us to the BIG “so what” of tagging: it allows for the distribution and aggregation of content via RSS. If you think of RSS feeds as structured web traffic, then tags are the road signs. Tags tell RSS feeds where to appear on web pages that are structured around RSS — pages like our Blogher Advanced Tools page. There’s no “real” content on that page — nothing that was posted directly to the blog. There are just a bunch of road signs that say “woohoo! over here!” whenever the tag “powerblogher” passes by in an RSS feed.
For more insights into the Meaning of Tags, check out You’re It.
Social bookmarking. same question.
Bottom line: social bookmarking sytems help you organize the web sites you want to find again in a way that makes it easy for you to find them. Unlike the “favorites” folders built into your web browser, using a social bookmarking system means you’ll be able to access your favourite web links from any computer with an Internet connection. And the same effort lets you share your links with other people who share your interest, find resources that they have recommended, and even turn your bookmarks into a great source of constantly updated content on your web page or blog.
For a great list of social bookmarking services and related resources, see Marnie Webb’s social bookmarking H20 playlist (H20 Playlist is a kind of social bookmarking system itself).
Setting up a wiki?? Where, why and most importantly how??
Wikis are web pages that people can edit collaboratively. Some uses for wikis include:
- Writing a document with a group of people or getting input/changes to a document you’ve written. Larry Lessig is revising a whole book this way.
- Taking notes on an event as a group, so that everyone shares the job of creating minutes and an event record. That’s how the folks at Aspiration use PurpleWiki, one wiki software tool.
- To organize your own notes in way that is easy, freeflowing and interlinked. Kris Krug put me onto TiddlyWiki, and a couple of comments on my recent blog post about switching from Entourage recommended VoodooPad, which I’m now trying out.
It seems like in the big world of social software there are Blog People and Wiki People. We may sometimes end up at the same conferences and we may even have interesting conversations about tagging, but if we mate we produce mutant offspring. (Nominees, anyone?)
I am afraid that I am a Blog Person — though I have great respect and affection for many Wiki People. So while I can tell you what I use for my own current, occasional wiki needs (Jotspot), I must defer wiki wisdom-seekers to people I know who are true WikiHeads.
If this were a wiki, WikiHeads would now be a hyperlink, waiting to be populated with an ever-growing list of fascinating Wiki People. But this is just a blog, so all I can do is encourage one of the Wiki People to start their own wiki of useful wiki links, and meanwhile point you towards Nancy White’s fabulous set of wiki resources.
I hope this is helpful to Debra and others — and that others will chime in with their own explanations and resources by using the powerbloghers tag.
Powerbloghers, please stand up
.8.8 | 1 Comment »
August 8th, 2005 by Alex
Last weekend I presented an Advanced Tools session at Blogher, which didn’t work out exactly as planned since we lost our Internet connection in minute 2 of the session. But the very generous and eager crowd bore with our reversion to flipcharts, and we made it through and I think helped folks get their minds around some of the possibilities of integrating RSS, tags, Flickr and del.icio.us into their blogging workflow.
We promised to follow up by posting some additional resources to our Advanced Tools session web page. We were going to demonstrate how you could add resources to the page via tags and RSS; our Internet outage meant that didn’t happen in the moment, but I’m going to keep to that vision by posting some additional resources via my own blog. That’s right, folks — if you’re reading this on the Advanced Tools page, you’ll be thrilled and amazed to discover that it got their automagically thanks to RSS plus this tag: powerbloghers. If you’re not reading this on the Advanced Tools page, please note that all you need to do in order to contribute your power blogging tips and links to the world of fabulous blogging women is to use the tag “powerbloghers” on del.icio.us, or include this bit of code in a blog post:
<a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/powerbloghers” rel=”tag”>powerbloghers</a>
My introduction to tagging and social bookmarking
My introduction to using an RSS newsreader — a great tool for subscribing to del.icio.us tags as well as other news and information sources
My blog posts about using del.icio.us
For more notes on choosing tags see my blog post
To really geek out on issues around tagsonomies, “folksonomies”, and tag selection, check out this blog (full disclosure: I’m on this blog too):
http://www.tagsonomy.com
And for event more del.icio.us-ness, see:
Tools that make del.icio.us even more life-altering
The del.icio.us tag page on del.icio.us — tons of resources!
H2O Playlist
.27.7 | 2 Comments »
July 27th, 2005 by Alex
The latest tool I’m exploring is H2O Playlist, a project of the Berkman Center. What is H20?
An H2O Playlist is a series of links to books, articles, and other materials that collectively explore an idea or set the stage for a course, discussion, or current event.
What this seems to boil down to is an inteface for creating a thoughtfully structured, annotated, nice-looking topical set of web links. Given the never-ending stream of social bookmarking tools that are now available to help me manage my web links, what are the circumstances under which I’d want to hive off a subset and turn them into an H20 Playlist?
The first thing to realize is that H20 Playlist doesn’t replace your primary tool for bookmark management. It still makes sense to use something like del.icio.us or Furl to manage your overall bookmark collection. (And it would sure be nice if H20 had an import mechanism that worked with these, perhaps by allowing import from a standard mozilla bookmark file….I don’t want to have to manually move over all the bookmarks for the particular tags I want represented in a playlist.)
Where H20 comes in handy is if you’re actually trying to turn your playlist into something…prototypically, a syllabus or some sort of guide. For example I could see H20 being a nice way of organizing and annotating my list of RSS resources. Or if I were going to teach my Internet & Politics course again, I might use it to structure the online readings.
But where H20 should really be useful is when it comes to groups of people collaborating in developing curricula or other learning resources. H20 doesn’t yet facilitate that kind of collaboration, as far as I can see; you can spin somebody else’s playlist into a version of your own, but you can’t invite someone else to add to or directly annotate a playlist.
If H20’s future iterations include true group collaboration on playlists, some serious import tools — or better yet, integration or mirroring of other social bookmarking systems so one can synch playlists with del.icio.us linklists — it could prove to be a very handy tool in the social bookmarking toolbox.
Beth’s Blog: Social Bookmarking Conversation Continues While Inventing New Words
.11.6 | 4 Comments »
June 11th, 2005 by Alex
Beth Kanter continues our bloggespondence on social bookmarking with the very well-taken point that a prettier del.icio.us (my summary of Jots may actually be worth something if it makes social bookmarking useful to a wider audience, though as she notes herself the biggest challenge in evangelizing deli.icio.us is that its bookmark collections thin out very quickly once you get beyond core geek interests like Linux or blogging. Beth’s approach is to provide people with a
“del.icio.us cheat sheet” — please, Beth, share it with the world! — but I wonder whether the geekocracy could help in another way: by making an extra special effort to tag non-geeky topics. If every del.icio.us user were to make an effort to bookmark 10 resources on a non-geeky subject of personal interest– and not with some general tag like “politics” or “books”, but something specific like “culturejamming” or “socialsecurity” — it would rapidly expand the utility of del.icio.us for non-geeks, and help atttract others to the tool.
Beth had a couple of other questions for me:
- What’s your take on “site-independent taggregation” services arena? As of yesterday, when Technorati launched its beta makeover, things are looking up. It’s now possible to pull an RSS feed that aggregates categorized posts from different blogs, by using the Technorati tag page. But aggregating bookmark tags is still a tag-by-tag, site-by-site job. While I know there are those who see aggregation as “reblogging” — i.e. free riding on someone else’s hard work — I think that there’s an important role for topical aggregators right now (at least until we get the social bookmarking equivalent of Technorati’s RSS feed for blog tags). By setting up a page that aggregates tags from multiple bookmarking sites to capture the full range of bookmarking for a given topic or set of tags, you can create a page that offers real value for people tracking that topic. That’s what I did with the very modest OD 2005 page of deliberation links.
- You described JOTS urls-to-tags ratio as impressive (2:1). Why is it impressive? How does it compare to del.icio.us? Actually I didn’t describe it as impressive (it isn’t). I just thought it was a neat stat to display.
YASBoS: Jots
.8.6 | 2 Comments »
June 8th, 2005 by Alex
Beth Kanter has added a great gnomz cartoon to our bloggespondence (Rob, please add this to your Lexicon for the New Millennium) on del.icio.us and social bookmarking. Beth’s latest post on the subject pointed me to Jots, yet another social bookmarking site (OK, lets add YASBoS to a list of Acronymns for the New Millennium). The most interesting thing on Jots so far is its prominent URL and tag stats (a ratio of about 2 urls per tag, at this point).
Other than that it’s not intuitively obvious to me what it has to offer over del.icio.us, other than a slightly prettier interface; at this point I figure any new YASBoS needs a prominent “what this can do for you that del.icio.us doesn’t” promise on its main page. Meanwhile the profliferation of YASBoS heightens the need for site-independent taggregation: some way of aggregating all the tagged content out there, so that you can easily track a single tag across del.icio.us, Furl, CiteULike, Jots, and whichever sites appear next week. PHP gods, where are you?