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.

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:  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.

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.

TechSoup invited me to be part of their online event on Web 2.0 this week. Since I was on call for a discussion about social bookmarking and aggregation, I put together a short overview of how aggregation can help nonprofits, and another on how social bookmarking can help nonprofits.

Here’s my quick take on three crucial ways that nonprofits can use RSS and aggregation to work more effectively:

1. Automatically populate websites with up-to-date content: It’s very expensive to create original content on a regular basis. If you set up a series of RSS feeds on a particular topic that can pump useful content onto your organization’s web site; you’re adding value to that content by selecting a particular combination of topics and sources. For example, an organization that advocates for women with HIV might create an RSS-driven news section on its web site that pulls relevant web resources from del.icio.us, photos from Flickr, and blog posts from Technorati (a bit tricky to set up as a RSS feed, but doable; the trick is to set up the search as a “watchlist”, and then subscribe to the RSS feed for the watchlist.)
2. Create a media monitoring site: You can create a media monitoring tool for internal use only. Something as simple as a Bloglines account can become a clearinghouse for information that helps with your work. That can include RSS feeds for Google or Yahoo news searches on particular search terms; del.icio.us feeds for resources related to your work; or news feeds for major publications in your field.

   I’d figure that most nonprofits would benefit from setting up a media monitoring site with RSS feeds that cover the following:

   • Search of major news feeds (try Google News or Yahoo News) for the name of your organization, acronym (if any), major sub-brands/projects, and/or name of your organization’s President/E.D.
   • Search of major news feeds for keywords on the issues you need to track. Play with the search terms until you get the right volume of news; if you’re an organization that works on a major policy area (e.g. healthcare) you may need to narrow down your search until it gives you a manageable amount of news [e.g. "healthcare policy (Congress or President)"].
   • Search of blogs (using Technorati or Feedster) for your organization and name of your organization’s President/E.D.
   • Search of blogs for your issue keywords.
   • del.icio.us, Furl & Flickr tag pages for your organization’s name and key issue areas. Don’t forget that del.icio.us lets you set up feeds that are narrowed down by using multiple tags (e.g. http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/healthcare+policy)
   • del.icio.us, Furl & blog (Technorati/Feedster) search on your chosen team tag (see below)
   • For a local organization, search feeds that search your issue keywords within the news feeds for all your major local papers and broadcast outlets (you can set up a Bloglines account that includes all your local media, then set up a keyword search that searches all the feeds in your account; then set up a second Bloglines account as your main media monitoring site, and subscribe to the keyword search from the first account).
3. Choose a team tag: Choose a tag that your staff, board and volunteers can use to share information and resources. Encourage your team to use del.icio.us, furl or another social bookmarking service to save web resources they find personally useful or want to share with the team. Encourage bloggers to use that tag on any post they want team members to read. And then make sure your team monitors the tag regularly by visiting your media monitoring site, or adding the RSS feed for the tag (from del.icio.us, Furl and Technorati) to their personal home pages in Google.

I hope this is helpful. Tips on how nonprofits can use social bookmarking will follow shortly.

I’m delighted to announce the launch of Social Signal. Social Signal’s goal is to support online communities and distributed collaboration networks — networks of communities that share content and relationships by using the latest generation of web tools. This practice builds on my consulting, research and writing in the fields of online community, public participation, and social software, but extends its value and capacity with the strengths of a new partner: Rob Cottingham, a communications consultant with long experience in online advocacy and web development.

Appropriately enough, the Social Signal web site launched on the same day as our latest project, TechSoup’s Net². Net² is an online community and conference that will celebate the achievements of the nonprofit web, while asking the ever-fascinating “what’s next?”

What’s next is a crop of technologies that work the way healthy communities work: decentralized, bottom-up, and participatory. Tech memes like blogging, tagging and RSS — sometimes described as “Web 2.0″ technologies — allow individual non-profits, community organizations and campaigns to work together effectively, while still maintaining their individual identities. Each organization has its own web site and/or blog, but shares content with other like-minded organizations by using RSS to move news, stories and information from one site to the other; tagging provides a way of structuring this information into particular topics.

This kind of decentralized collaboration parallels the best practices that have emerged out of research and experience in the fields of social capital, public engagement, planning, public consultation, and public participation. For the past twenty or thirty years — and gaining ground dramatically in the past decade — public servants and community service organizations have been exploring ways of bringing the public into organizational decision-making. They’ve discovered that decisions that have been meaningfully shaped by public input not only enjoy broader public support, but are more effective and more sustainable. It turns out that the most successful public decision-making processes are — you guessed it! — decentralized, bottom-up, and participatory.

Social movements and community activists have found a similar path. You can’t get people to support a cause by offering a laundry list of ideological justifications. You get people to participate in a political movement by listening to them, letting them set the agenda, and providing ways for them to participate wherever, whenever and however it works for them. It turns out that the most successful social movements and political campaigns are decentralized, bottom-up, and participatory.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that the Web is finally offering tools that match the best practices in public decision-making and community organizing. The Internet grew from the same cultural wellspring that inspired many civic engagement practitioners and many social movement organizers. The 1960s counterculture has been cited as a parent of hacker culture, which gave birth to the open source movement. Open source software development takes a participatory approach to the creation of computer code, allowing many people to collaboratively contribute to one or more related programs. It turns out that the fastest and most secure way of writing code is decentralized, bottom-up, and participatory.

Software developers, public planners, collaboration consultants, community organizers — they’ve all ended up on the same page, working from something like the same play book. They all see the power and joy of a decentralized, bottom-up, participatory model of collaboration. And they’re all trying to build the structures — technological, organizational, and social — that will make this form of collaboration the new standard for how to do business, make policy, create art, or communicate.

What’s exciting about Web 2.0 — yes, we really need another name for it! — is that it offers the technological infrastructure for decentralized, bottom-up, participatory collaboration. Instead of creating another community group to compete for foundation funding, like-minded members of existing community organizations can use a wiki to develop a joint proposal. Instead of distributing government surveys, public servants can access spontaneous, focused feedback by aggregating blog-based policy discussions. Instead of focusing on fundraising in order to pay campaign staff, activist groups can create far-reaching information campaigns that are powered by their members’ RSS feeds.

We’re still in the early days of discovering how the collaborative toolkit of blogging, tagging and RSS — not to mention other tools that are just emerging — can transform our organizational, social and economic structures. Net² is part of this process of discovery. So are the other “Web 2.0″ projects I’m working on, like telecentre.org.

Community-based projects like these — projects that engage with the decentralized, bottom-up, and participatory potential of Web 2.0 tools — are crucial to unleashing the transformative power of the next-generation Internet. We hope Social Signal will help to enable that transformation.

At the suggestion of Nancy White, I’ve just posted an introduction to tagging for people who are creating online resources for post-Katrina disaster recovery. It covers some suggestions for tag choice as well as overall tips on tagging. It’s online at You’re It.

I’ve been talking a lot about RSS on this site for some time now. And lately I’ve been talking about Treos too. Now you can have both great flavours in one thanks to this little demo of how the best sources of custom RSS feeds can help you find everything you want to know about Treo.

If you’ve just started using a newsreader like Bloglines or Newsgator, odds are that you’re subscribing to RSS or Atom feeds from your favourite blogs and news sites. But there are lots of other great sources of RSS feeds, including feeds that are tailored to your particular interests. So here are some of my favourite sources of high-value RSS feeds.

And if, like me, you are exploring the wide world of Treo, you might be interested in checking out the sample feeds below. If you click on each one you’ll be taken to an example: an RSS feed for “treo” from that source. Want to see how that can rock your world? Want to know more about Treo? Check out my 100% RSS Treo page.

1. the Technorati tag page will feed you blog posts about Treo
2. a Pubsub blog subscription will give you slightly broader results than you’re likely to get from Technorati, since it will be searching for Treo as a keyword rather than as a tag
3. PubSub newsgroup subscription will do the same thing for usenet group discussions
4. Dulance lets you set up an RSS search to track prices for products
5. a del.icio.us tag feed will give you all the latest web resources that people are storing on a given topic
6. BlogMarks offers more tag-based bookmark subscriptions, like the one from del.icio.us
7. the flickr feed will show you pictures taken on a Treo or of a Treo
8. the Organic Broadcast Network gives you an RSS feed linking to streaming video content about Treo
9. a Yahoo! news search will give you mainstream news sources on a given topic
10. and giving Yahoo! a run for its money is everyone’s favourite new kid on the RSS block, Google news

Bonus RSS feed: It’s not a Treo-related feed, but while on the subject of custom RSS feeds I have to tip my hat to the eternal geniuses that be Apple, where you can set up RSS feeds from the iTunes store, which let yo know about new albums in your favourite genres.

RSS hall of awkward blushes and shuffling feet…if not actual shame. These are the big mysteries — the sites that should offer custom RSS feeds but don’t:

Amazon should let me subscribe to an RSS feed that notifies me when they add a Treo-related item to their store.
eBay should let me subscribe to an RSS feed that notifies me when a new Treo-related item goes on sale.
The CNET/ZDNet empire should be downright embarrassed to be run tech news sites that don’t offer search-based topical RSS feeds.
• The generally wise and wonderful people over at 43things offer a nice range of RSS feeds, but they won’t let you subscribe to a search result on Treo. So how will I keep track of those who share my Treo dream? That reminds me…time to cross “get a Treo” off my list.
• Rojo is all about the feeds, and even lets you create a custom search on stories that have been tagged Treo, but does it then offer you an RSS feed of the search? No! Where will this madness end?
• a href=”http://www.consumating.com”>Consumating People lets you create tag-based searches of people you might want to date…like Treo owners. Really. So how is it that people this visionary realize that people who find dates via tags probably want to take care of the whole thing via RSS? It’s at moments like this that I sure am glad I’m married..and that they hadn’t invented RSS or tags back in my single days. How could anyone settle down when that perfect tag set could be one feed refresh away?

Debra Roby, one of the folks at our powerbloghers session, blogged & emailed with these questions:

1. Tagging. why should I care? and how do I do it?
2. Social bookmarking. same question.
3. 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:

1. 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.
2. To organize, retrieve or share your photos. The big player in the photo-tagging world is Flickr.
3. 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.

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!