5 Ways to Continue Tagging

So here we go, January first, and I'm starting superfresh to read blogs and crossblog what I think is important (without thinking that it's a waste to pump around information). Marshall Kirkpatrick blogged about 5 ways you can fall in love with tagging again.

Though I've never falling out of love with tagging, it gives a good overview of the diverse applications of tagging to share resources. I'm still as ever fanaticly tagging webresources with my delicious account. Always when I find resources that I don't think I can read now, but sound like topics I may need in future, I tag them. For instance I tagged resources with the name 'widgets' and now I'm preparing an overview of blogwidgets and my delicious account is just a wealth of information. But I also tag resources I read that are powerful and mark them with top10 as a way to find good resources when I need them. I contribute to the collective NPK4dev tag (knowledge management for development resources) and I tag freelance resources (tagged with 'van_start') and feed their RSS feed our Ning forum for freelancers. Marshall also talks about his move from delicious to magnolia, something we are contemplating too.

Here are the 5 reasons Marshall wrote down (I shortened it a little, so if you want read the full blogpost):

1. Re-enforce your learning at the end of year
The inspiration for this post came from social media aficionado Tim Bonnemann's practice of tagging all the words he looks up online with the tag "dictionary." At the end of the year, he posted the full list of links to his blog. What a great way to deepen recall of the things you've learned!

2. Build a collaborative tag stream for a community of practice
One of the best things about tagging URLs is that all kinds of RSS feeds become available. One community of practice, a loose group of nonprofit technologists, uses the tag "nptech" to mark items of interest in del.icio.us, ma.gnolia, flickr, youtube and elsewhere. The feeds for nptech items in all of these services are then combined into one NPtech metafeed.

3. Create a shared items feed and put it on your web page
Many of our readers probably use the shared items feature in Google Reader. That service continues to grow more sophisticated - last week it added any shared items feeds from your Gmail contacts to your list of subscribed feeds, for example.
While that's pretty hot - there's something to be said for baking your own, too. If you tag items something like "toshare" in a service like del.icio.us or Ma.gnolia then you can share URLs that you find outside of Google Reader and you can switch feed readers/tagging services without loosing all your shared items subscribers. I did this on my personal blog this year by taking the feed from my items tagged "toshare" in del.icio.us and running it through the service FeedDigest. There I got a PHP snippet to display my links and notes on the sidebar of my blog

4. Tag into a mobile reader
In addition to tagging things "toshare" I've also taken recently to tagging items "toread" and pulling that feed into Netvibes. Adding my toread tag to Netvibes has made it easy for me to catch up on things I want to read while traveling around town. Sometimes I'll just read the most widely popular items from my toread feed, by running that feed through AideRSS and getting a new feed of the 20% of those items that were most tagged, Dugg, commented on and linked to. AideRSS can be applied on top of all of the methods on this list.

5. Tag your microblog posts
I know I'm not alone in finding it much easier to share information over Twitter than by blogging or tagging in a social bookmarking app. Enter Hashtags. Like tagging for Twitter, hashtags are terms you put after a # in a post. Hashtags.org then aggregates all the tweets using a given tag and publishes an RSS feed. Reading a feed of short messages sent from the #sandiegofires was very interesting, for example. Though you can certainly just subscribe to a search feed through a service like Terraminds - Hashtags let you do all the things in microblogging that you can do using the methods described in numbers 1 through 4 above. See also Dave Sifry's new project Hoosgot - a service he calls the Lazyweb for the age of Twitter.

Social bookmarking - the next steps for the NPK4DEV tagging experiment

During the knowledge management for development workshop participants engaged daily in projects which made it possible for participants to work on something together. We decided to do a project about our tagging experiment. We are using the unique tag NPK4dev (non-profit knowledge management for development) to tag resources on knowledge management in a development context (you can see the tagcloud here). We worked for one afternoon, after which everyone disappeared except Christian, George and myself. The three of us then continued to produce this video to explain the usefulness of social bookmarking for individuals and groups with a common interest. We used the commoncraft videos about RSS and wikis for our inspiration! We had to make it in roughly 1,5 hours, so we didn't have time to make more drawings. We had to do it three times (the first two times we made major mistakes). The first time we had placed the drawings neatly in a row, so our task of putting the images was easy. The third time, though, every thing was a mess, so we were crazily searching for the relevant images.

Click To Play

Christian was so nice to make a timeline of the NPK4Dev tag that we are using to tag resources about knowledge management in a development setting. (here's the blogpost) The timeline is brilliant, you can see blogging and 'howto' are big hits topic and recently agriculture scored high. If you'd be a facilitator of a community of practice and everyone (or the majority) of the people are tagging, it would be a perfect tools to monitor the interests.

Some new ideas I gained:

• The way Christian is able to digest flows of information and pick up interesting stuff amazed me as compared to other people who complaint about information overload when a list produces more than 3 mails per week. I guess the keeping track of RSS feeds and scanning information is a new skill. - let alone reading it. It also depends on how you define your professional need for keeping up with information and recent developments.

• We can make a next step with our tag by offering several subfeeds by combining tags. For instance npk4dev+blogging can make for a feed on blogging for development. npk4dev+news can generate a news feed.
  

• If you'd be a facilitator of a community of practice and everyone (or the majority) of the people are tagging, it would be a perfect tools to monitor the interests and it can help you in the preparation of events etc.
  

• You can combine the feed with a customized search engine eg. google coop to make searching in the links easier.
  

• It'd help to make sense of the flow if you could highlight excellent resources, either by rating, or by adding a tag like top10. Then you could highlight the top resources in another space (wiki, newsletter, whatever) for people for whom following the feed doesn't work.

• Generally speaking, you help the users (especially for people without broadband connections) by working on the information, by printing lists, printing top information, adding top resources in websites or wikis, sharing summaries in discussion lists, etc. (you'd have to work out what works for people).
  

• Magnolia seem to offer more and better features than delicious, like taggers profiles and community spaces and better tagcloud options. (hmm, should we all shift??)

Introduction to delicious: lots of resources

For a session next week about our npk4dev tagging experiment, I compiled a short introduction to del.icio.us, thanks for an easy start-up due to a blogpost by Dorine Ruter. I thought I might as well crosspost it here, will be easier for myself too to find it.

Delicious is a social bookmarking site that we are using to collectively gather websites, wikis, blogs and other online resources with interesting content about knowledge management in the context of development cooperation. We have chosen delicious because it is used by a large number of people, but have found out it is not so intuitive for everyone, so if you are new to delicious, it may take some time to get used to it.

But what is social bookmarking in the first place? Social bookmarking is the practice of saving bookmarks to a public website and 'tagging' them with keywords, meaning you add information about the content. The tagging allows you to find your resources lateron, but also to follow other people's resources with the same tag. If you like to know more: here are some good starter resources.

Del.icio.us basics

• http://del.icio.us – The del.icio.us website


• http://del.icio.us/help/ – Useful start-up information


• Del.icio.us cheat sheet – Explanation of del.icio.us by Beth Kanter


• Seven things you should know about social bookmarking – Introduction on social bookmarking in general


• http://slackermanager.com/2005/12/the_several_hab.html - the several habits of wildly successful delicious users with good tips for starting delicious users


• http://www.techsoup.org/learningcenter/webbuilding/page5508.cfm- 13 tips for effective tagging

Examples of del.icio.us users

• http://del.icio.us/joitske – Joitske Hulsebosch’s links on Communities of Practice, ICT4DEV / KM4DEV and online interaction


• http://del.icio.us/choconancy – Nancy White on online interaction and facilitation (tools and processes)


• http://del.icio.us/dorineruter – My own links on KM4DEV and online interaction

Examples of how del.icio.us is used by other development organisations or individuals

• http://del.icio.us/euforic – Use of del.icio.us within an organization / network


• http://euforic.org (click on RSS feeds) – Example of tag display (at bottom of page)


• http://www.iaald.org – Example of most recent bookmarks displayed elsewhere via an RSS feed


• http://www.km4dev.suprglu.com – Combined feeds of 6 people joining in a KM4DEV tagging experiment


• http://joitskehulsebosch.blogspot.com –my own example of npk4dev resources via the feed in the sidebar - just here on the right side


• http://www.r-mail.org/ – Tool (one of many) to keep track of new items via e-mail


• http://del.icio.us/dorineruter/bookmarking – Some of Dorine's bookmarks of del.icio.us related tools, to use once you have gotten to know del.icio.us

Learning more about delicious

• http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ydn-delicious/ - A yahoo group about delicious


• http://socialsourcecommons.org/tool/show/67/support - for more links about delicious


• http://www.twoantennas.com/projects/delicious-network-explorer/- to explore your own delicious network


• http://www.ivy.fr/revealicious/index.html - for visual representations of tags


• http://tagcrowd.com/ - to create a tagcloud
• http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/browse/visualizations - more visualizations including per tagger


• http://www.techsoup.org/learningcenter/webbuilding/page5719.cfmm - tips for tidying tags


• http://www.econsultant.com/delicious-by-function/index.html - delicious from A to Z
• http://www.unthinkingly.com/experiments/nptech/understanding_nptech.php - the amazing tagcloud of nptech

And here's a great and attractive presentation from Beth Kanter about tagging for collaboration and knowledge sharing:

Social bookmarking NPtech and NPK4dev

In Ghana (all flags around to celebrate the 50 years independence see picture) I finally have the time to catch up with my bloglines, missed CPsquare teleconferences and blogposts in my head. Though I couldn’t download the audio file (it would take 5 hours...), I read the chatnotes of a teleconference call on the community formed around the NPtech social bookmarking experience with Beth Kanter. I was interested in it because of our work with the NPk4dev tag (see feed in the sidebar of this blog). Something that has puzzled me is whether a tag can really form a community. Tagging seems so superficial in terms of knowledge creation, it is more a flow of information. Can we say there is learning going on or is it just sharing information more rapidly? If people start tagging can we all that a community of practice? So: off to the chatnotes.

In the chatnotes of the teleconference the metaphor of the firehose was mentioned. At first I didn’t understand it, but at the second referal I understood it this way: when you are thirsty, a firehose can not help you to drink. Internet is now considered as a firehose of information by many. There was also mention of fear of putting your keyboard into your mouth - I didn't get around to understanding that unfortunately….

A question discussed was whether the community formed around the tag or whether the community formed around three individuals. There is a transition between the "people are the hub" versus "the tag is the hub”. The difference between the librarian approach and tagging was described as: every book on the right shelf vs every book is on every shelf. Actually a great way of explaining the different rationale between tagging and categorizing. (which reminded me of a discussion I had about resistance by librarians to some of new ICT developments). Then there was a remark that there are hunters & taggers, not everyone has the same role.

All this inspires me to reflect on the npk4dev tag process, a feed with materials tagged about knowledge management in a development context (aggregated on superglu). First of all, this is the initiative of one person (Peter Ballantine) who invited three others to start an experiment. I knew about the nptech case through a session in CPsquare (with Beth). And through her, I joined the NP (non-profit) tagvocates and we decided to rename our tag into npk4dev. The case was described on the e-collaboration group blog. We announced the tag once through the km4dev discussion list. We set up a blog which is still empty, because no one really had the energy to pull that process. The next step will be taken during a face-to-ace meeting of the latter group.

Now what's the role of tagging in community formation in this case? I think it strengthening the collaboration between the initial 4 persons and in this case, they take the tagging experiment hopping along various groups (in which they are already active), learning here and there. In a way, the tagging experiment has brought a new member into the e-collaboration CoP, a person who might be an fanatic tagger (?). I don't think we can talk about a ‘tagging community’ because it is rather the other way around that the experiment could leverage various existing communities of practice. People who would not know could from the outside think that this is a tagging community though.

This case shows that use of a certain new tool (like tagging) can apparently bring about new connections and new members into a community of practice, or might encourage others to become active, because a different skill/interest may be aroused. Some tools seem to encourage the formalization of a certain level of membership (like signing up for the Dgroup). The constellation of CoPs as represented by the formal Nten, Netsquared, CPsquare, km4dev and e-collaboration communities is probably also worth a study in itself!