Weblog
Aug 14, 02:57 pm: Get your social actions noticed
Peter Deitz over at Foik (soon to be renamed Social Actions) asks us to tag any group fundraising pleas with sa-topten. You can further promote the effort by plugging a widget into your site to republish some of those efforts (you can see what it looks like below).
I’ll certainly help spread the word. I think anything that can help get the word out and bring more visibility to nonprofit efforts is a good thing. Okay maybe not anything. But this thing is worth the old college try.
There are, though, some tweaks that might make it more likely to succeed:
- tell us what a group fundraising effort is. I hate to be dense and maybe I’m just speeding through the feedreader too quickly but I’m not sure what makes something qualify. How do I know what to plug in there?
- give us an easier tag. Probably too late for that one but I just can’t remember sa-topten. I keep having to make sure that I’ve got it right. And that’s even with, you know, getting that the tag is “social action top ten.”
- make it even easier. Peter made it dead easy to promote the resulting links. Make it even easier. Give me a little link for my browser that automatically adds the tag when I do my social bookmarking magic. Something that works like the del.icio.us buttons but already populates the tag field.
I’m quarterbacking here before the game’s even started but I’m taking my little focus group of one public.
So, you all, prove me wrong. Use the tag like wild fire and tell me why it works.
tagged: nptech, net2, fundraising, tagging, group, community
Mar 21, 04:51 am: Tagging, tagging and more tagging
A quick shout to colleague Beth Kanter and fine folks at NTEN who shared our little rant on NpTech Tagging Community. Beth made it easy to do the shared writing. And, I’ll be honest, any credit goes to her. A dynamo understates her energy level.
tagged: nptech, tagging, nptech, bethkanter, nten
Jul 17, 06:18 pm: What do you want from this BlogHer session?
With Charlene Li and I are tackling Tagging, Tracking…and what’s this structured blogging? on day one of the upcoming BlogHer conference. Elisa Camahort, one of the three BlogHer founders and an conference speaker session powerhouse, was kind enough to serve as focus group of one during a phone call with Charlene and me last week.
When we started talking about what attendees might get out of the session, Elisa started asking why should she care. I think, a piece of what she was asking, was: How can integrate this into my blogging workflow in way that increases my effectiveness? What tool(s) should I consider using and why and (by the way) can give you me enough detail about this all means so that I don’t feel like I’m doing algebra homework? You know, doing things with imaginary numbers and people keep saying, It doesn’t make sense now but if you get into more advanced maths you’ll understand the application of this.
So, to broaden the focus group a bit, what would you like from this session? Doesn’t matter if your attending BlogHer or not (though you should be attending!). BlogHer is recording and sharing the conference sessions so I’d love it to be valuable for a wider audience.
tagged: blogher, tagging, microformats, structured_blogging, blogging
Dec 9, 10:20 pm: del.icio.us: y.ah.oo!
del.icio.us joins the Yahoo! family—flickr and upcoming are previous acquisitions.
(thanks to Alexandra Samuel for dropping the news during a phone call)
tagged: del.icio.us,, tagging,, yahoo!,, purchase
Oct 29, 09:23 pm: [tagcamp] Suggestions for the nptech community
(post session notes capture)
Questions to ask:
- do leading tags change over time?
- talk to the users and gather their stories and experiences
- survey
- user habits
- demographics
- identify pathways to get to information
- popular tags for individual users as a way of identifying interest/expertise and connecting users explicitly
Oct 29, 08:58 pm: [tagcamp] Tag Usability
(all the dislaimers for live blogging apply: mistakes, misspellings, and misunderstandings)
Session info:
- MarshallKirkpatrick Usability, Teachability and Adoption’s Obstacles & Possibilities: – Lessons learned from teaching tagging
Session Notes
- his typical user is low tech; trying to expand beyond early adopters to extend the network effect
- doesn’t believe that tagging is easy
- level of adopters that he works with require a screencast to learn about bookmarklets
- tags have so many possibilities that it difficult to wrap your head around it
- another barrier has to do with the way that multiple tools wrap around each other
- pre-existing power dynamics are a barrier to participation (conversations during BlogHer
- potential solution: start working out how to teach teachers rather than going from no adoption to adoption
- question: how do I gradually expose people to a new set of behaviors?
- leading people along the ladder or participation with benefits each step along the way
- for the user, the interface is the application
- develop interface that reflects certain cognitive models
- use tag “tagusability”
Oct 29, 06:17 pm: [tagcamp] the hallway session
Today’s morning session, for me, was a hallway conversation with Lee Iverson. Lot’s of meaty information—feels like my brain is clogged, in fact. The big thing I took away, though, was the need to describe proposed activities in terms of utility. Okay. That’s not really a new concept but I ended up with some new ways to think about it and construct arguments around it.
Basically, it has to do with the fact that knowledge is more valuable when, like money, it’s unevenly distributed. With that in mind, nonprofits are incentivized to keep their knowledge (evaluation data, reports, databases even—as an artificat of their knowledge systems) locked up. So, the idea is to create a model where trading the knowledge gives them greater value then keeping it closed. For example, keeping knowledge private gives a single nonprofit a competitive edge with funders. But, if making that knowledge consumable and shareable, creates greater utility/value by making change to mission faster (and maybe even money) it will change a nonprofit’s incentive to share information and help them to make decisions about how to share that information.
The trick, of course,—and there’s always a trick—is figuring out how to make a model that helps to measure that so that the relative values of each practice are exposed. Right now, only the first practice is exposed (via successful grant proposals).
tagged: tagcamp, leeiverson, hallway, nptech, net2
Oct 29, 09:25 am: NPTech Tag MetaFeed - powered by FeedBurner
Sitting next to Marshall Kirkpatrick at TagCamp and we’re talking about the nptech tag metafeed. It pulls together all of the various nptech-related feeds. The nice part—the really nice part—is that it adds a layer of data to the nptech tagging project. If you want to contribute to the information stream around the attention stream, subscribe to this feed.
(via marshall kirkpatrick)
Oct 29, 05:28 am: [tagcamp] Socio-cultural aspects underlying tagging
(all the dislaimers for live blogging apply: mistakes, misspellings, and misunderstandings)
Session info:
- danah boyd – Socio-cultural aspects underlying tagging
Notes:
- What are people actually doing?
- Taking to indicate identity—tag photos with the device that takes them
- Tagging to share them with others
- Tagging for characteristics
- Tags are not necessarily meant to be collapsed
- look at technorati and the attempt to pull together photos, blog posts and links. Are these meant to be pulled together?
- go to the generic to share (“girl”) but that doesn’t provide enough detail
- Social Animal
- seeing tags promotes homogeneity
- most systems have 1 tag per item; it’s what we’re used to
- are people doing anti-tags?
- this is bad music, bad film
- what are people’s goals with tagging?
- in our digital interactions, we’re asked to provide information that we don’t do in the physical world
- most people keep print pictures in a shoebox
- if people don’t organize things normally, how can we expect them to tag?
- how do we get other people engaged in tagging? People that wouldn’t normally.
- what does it take to make people to play with data?
- start with ego; begin with the personal
- what are people doing to help people get less stuff?
- not how can I read less but how can I read in a controlled fashion; I want the things with the most relevancy
- slice up the attention network using a social network using tags
- how many free riders can tagging support?
- [makes me wonder how many people consume the nptech feed vs. how many contribute to it; Marshall has data on the nptech meta feed that shows the consumption. But it probably doesn’t have anything like that adoption as the work that people do in individual tools]
- An example of mixed contexts
- as tagging community gets bigger the tagging practices gets bigger
- Difficulty with controlled vocabularies being consumed by non-experts
Oct 29, 04:36 am: [tagcamp] Motivations for tagging
(all the dislaimers for live blogging apply: mistakes, misspellings, and misunderstandings)
Session info:
- SSriram – Motivations to tag
Notes
- how do I tag something for another person
- motivations about personal relationships
- tagging for self started this
- tagging for others is where profit is
- provide information for sponsors (using “tagcamp” could be a way for sponsors to idnetify me as a part of their target audience)
- social meaning is something that the sponsors are tapping into
- agreed upon tags allow you to attach context to a tag
- metadata for metadata
- social tagging has a bunch of other motivations built in
- give tags to get tags
- everyone is looking for a unique tag so they don’t have a cluttered space on tagging
- mention of nptech as a unique tag for a given community
- part of the motivation for tagging is that it can help fulfill a function
- tagging to push something to an RSS feed (for example)
tagged: tagging, tagcamp, motivation
