When a story titled Confession: I’m a car slob popped up in the RSS feed I use to track who’s linking to me, I figured that some recent passenger had decided to out me to the world. Turns out that Beth Kanter has identified the correlation between untidy cars and untidy tags: like me, she struggles with both.

As it happens, I recently undertook a reasonably successful tag clean-up after spending two years staring at a collection of seriously messed-up del.icio.us tags. I made the colossal mistake of comma-separating my tags when I first imported into del.icio.us, and ever since my tag cloud has included dozens of tags like “e-democracy,” alongside the correct “e-democracy”. I concluded that using the built-in del.icio.us tool for re-tagging was simply too painful, since it required me to go through each tag one at at time, refreshing the tag edit interface each time.

After looking around for options I finally hit upon cocoalicious, a del.icio.us client for the Mac. I’ve never really gotten into using it as a daily bookmarking tool because I prefer to interact with del.icio.us from within my browser (Firefox). But cocoalicious turns out to be a phenomenal solution for tidying up tags, once you have it set up to sync with your del.icio.us account (easy to do: just enter your del.icio.us account info). Once cocoalicious has downloaded your bookmarks from del.icio.us, a list of all your tags appear in the left-hand pane of its main window. Double-click on a tag to edit it, just the way you would edit a file name on your Mac’s desktop. If your new-and-improved tag happens to be the same as an existing tag, cocoalicious converges them. It took me all of half an hour to fix my disastrous tag collection once I hit upon this methodology.

Another tool that helped me with tag clean-up is del.icio.us’ own tool for bundling related tags. You can access this on del.icio.us under settings — experimental — tag bundles (or by going to the URL del.icio.us/settings/yourusername/bundle
The tag bundling interface is very easy and quick to use and makes it much easier to see how your tag cloud adds up. My one complaint is that del.icio.us doesn’t actually let you access the bookmarks collected in any one bundle: to see any of the bookmarks inside my “e-democracy” bundle I still have to click on one of the individual tags it contains (like e-politics or e-research).

Beth also recommends radically pruning one’s Bloglines subscriptions as another solution to tag clutter. My own approach (which feels like a cheat) was to set up a personalized Google homepage with a much much much smaller collection of RSS subscriptions. My Google homepage contains the essential feeds that I want to keep on top of throughout the day:

• top news from BC, Canada and the world, from several sources
• the del.icio.us “popular” tag (a nice window on what’s hot online)
• the del.icio.us tag “for:awsamuel” so I can find out what other people want me to see (see #11 in this blog post for an explanation of the “for:” tag)
• Technorati’s feed for the nptech (nonprofit technology) tag
• del.icio.us’ feed for the nptech (nonprofit technology) tag
• the NetSquared blog feed
• a “ego feed” via PubSub that sends me any blog post or article that includes my name or the term “Social Signal”

Before I set up my personalized Google homepage I was so overwhelmed by the mess of unread feeds on Bloglines that I began to dread visiting. Now I’m able to keep on top of the online news and items I really need to see — since my personalized Google homepage is my browser’s default page, it loads many times a day — and still use Bloglines when I want to find something to blog about, or have some time to catch up on a wider range of online stories.

As for tidying the car….well, unless Google radically expands its mandate, we’ll have to work harder at sticking to our “clean it out during every fill-up” resolution. But at the rate Google is expanding its empire, I’d put more hope in a Google solution than in us doing a monthly clean-out.

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.

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.

As you're poking around the Social Signal web site, you might notice the cluster of red words in the right-hand sidebar. This cluster is called a "tag cloud". It represents all the tags that we use on this site: the keywords that we've assigned to different pages or blog posts to indicate what each story is about.

Our tag cloud is a visual representation of the range of content on the site. The tags that appear in the biggest letters are the tags that we write about a lot (like "SocialSignal" or "SocialBookmarking"). The smaller tags (like "blogher" and "workshops") link to topics that we've only written about once or twice.

You can click on any tag to see all the stories we've written about that topic -- so the tag cloud is a handy way to navigate the site, as well as a quick picture of what we're thinking about.

We decided to use a tag cloud as one of the main ways to navigate our site because tags are so central to the kind of work we do. For many of the projects we work on -- especially web projects that build online communities by linking multiple web sites -- tags are central to how information is organized, circulated, and discovered.

We think tagging is one of the most exciting ways for people to work together online. We hope that our tag cloud will be a fun way for you to explore how tagging works as a way to organize and link information thematically. And we hope you'll use our tag cloud to learn more about tags and about tag-enabled services like social bookmarking and del.icio.us.

As you're poking around the Social Signal web site, you might notice the cluster of red words in the right-hand sidebar. This cluster is called a "tag cloud". It represents all the tags that we use on this site: the keywords that we've assigned to different pages or blog posts to indicate what each story is about.

Our tag cloud is a visual representation of the range of content on the site. The tags that appear in the biggest letters are the tags that we write about a lot (like "SocialSignal" or "SocialBookmarking"). The smaller tags (like "blogher" and "workshops") link to topics that we've only written about once or twice.

You can click on any tag to see all the stories we've written about that topic -- so the tag cloud is a handy way to navigate the site, as well as a quick picture of what we're thinking about.

We decided to use a tag cloud as one of the main ways to navigate our site because tags are so central to the kind of work we do. For many of the projects we work on -- especially web projects that build online communities by linking multiple web sites -- tags are central to how information is organized, circulated, and discovered.

We think tagging is one of the most exciting ways for people to work together online. We hope that our tag cloud will be a fun way for you to explore how tagging works as a way to organize and link information thematically. And we hope you'll use our tag cloud to learn more about tags and about tag-enabled services like social bookmarking and del.icio.us.