I have here a picture of what the tags for the Hope Meter project could look like.  As a quick reminder for someone who wandered onto this blog, the idea is that items would be rated according to whether they make the user feel more or less hopeful.  In this case, I have given positive-rated items a blue color and negative ones a red color.  The spectrum of things tagged would in most cases result in some shade of purple, assuming that most pages tagged would be a mixture of positive and negative things.   I think if you look at the example you'll get a better idea of what I am saying.

 Please remember that this is only an example and not neccessarily  representative of my personal opinions.  

Here's the link for a larger picture:

Slide from a slideshare called "Death by Powerpoint"

Flickr Photo from Julie K In Taiwan

Tags are keywords that describe digital resources such as blog posts, photos, videos, bookmarks, or anything on the Web. Tags can help facilitate knowledge sharing, particularly during conference events or an entire field (take for example the NpTech Tag) because information can be aggregated and easily scanned via an RSS feed or Yahoo Pipe.

Over at TechCrunch I've been reviewing more web 2.0 startups than you can shake a stick at; while the crowd over there is generally not focused on social change, an awful lot of interesting things come our way that could prove helpful in a nonprofit context. Here are some of my favorites from last week, in order of usefulness.

Would you like to participate in the NPTech attention stream but feel like it's too overwhelming? Is the whole idea new to you? Before describing the drastic measures I took to lighten a reader's load, here's the basics on what it's all about...

NPTech is a tag used by people to designate an item they find online as being of interest to the community of nonprofit technologists. People use nptech as one of any number of tags to describe an item online and that item is entered into the nptech attention stream, subscribable by RSS or email. Since it's in RSS format, you can do all kinds of things with it - see for example the feed of the tag net2 syndicated automatically in the sidebar of this site. ("Net2 elsewhere" is what it's titled.)

 

 

I enjoy playing with new permutations of the NPtech tagging project.  The latest one I've found, the NPTech Meta Feed, is based on a great concept, but it still needs a little debugging.

The feed was created by lazytom (whom I do not know) using FeedJumbler.  It draws on all the right sources, plus a few that are new to me:

Social bookmarking, or using tags to organize web pages into a publicly viewable archive online, is becoming increasingly common among nonprofit organizations and supporting technologists. Social bookmarking tools are preferable to browser bookmarks or favorites in a number of ways, including accessibility from any computer, superior detail in archiving and retrieval and the ability to share our bookmarks as a whole or by tag with other people.

Most of the time it seems to me that the conversation about social bookmarking starts with del.icio.us - probably the most popular social bookmarking tool online. There are many more options available, however, and I thought it would be useful to provide some brief explanation of a few alternatives and some things to consider in making your selection.

At our "Making it Happen" table, we discussed how we could use tagging to help make social change, not just organize our own work.  We decided that we should come up with a few tags for the nonprofit sector and start getting them out there by recruiting "Tagvocates" who vow to: 

1. Use the tags all over the place
2. Recruit other tagvocates for their tag(s)

The plan is to get a set of tags out there, the aggregate the content (maybe with Suprglu?), and then foster a discussion about how we can use the content that we're tagging for social change.  For example - can a legal services organization use a set of tags to help aggregate content about Seattle area housing for their clients and agreggate it on their site?  Can an enviro group use a tag to aggregate info about a local developer to expose ant-environmental practices?