Non-Profit Tech Blog

Some of you may be aware that there is an RSS feed for all manners of things that are part of nonprofit technology. There are several versions of this feed which center around the use of the tag “nptech” in order to create a unifying label that forms the stream of items that compose the feed. The tags are mostly administered using Technorati’s or del.icio.us bookmarklets. Basically, you find a site that is relevant to nptech, click on the bookmarklet in your browser toolbar and voila! it’s been sent to the RSS feed. Alternatively, for bloggers like myself, all I have to do is categorize a new article with the tag “nptech” and it will eventually pop up in the RSS feed.

There are two versions of the feed: Marshall Kilpatrick’s version is at http://feeds.feedburner.com/NPTechMetaFeed and then there is lazytom’s version at http://feedjumbler.com/d3788af3/. I think it’s a wonderful way to give people a look over the shoulder at the screens of their fellow technologists. Our collective efforts create a kind of thin community where with very little individual effort we can build a great collaborative enterprise — tagging every and all pages that have something to do with nonprofit technology.

However, I believe that the feed doesn’t really meet our needs as a community and here’s why:

One of the unique and wickedly great things I love about the feed is that it takes tags from multiple sources such as Technorati (for the blog postings) and del.icio.us tags (for the people who like to browse for stuff). Unfortunately, there’s no unified database source. Because of the multiple streams, they’re aggregated into either the Feedburner or Feedjumbler feeds but neither of those feed services provide a database for permanent storage. This also means that there’s no way to look at versions of the feed in the past because one would have to go back to the original Technorati and del.icio.us sources. Basically, everyone’s work tagging nptech web sites is completely fragmented in multiple silos. This isn’t a good thing and it would be quite difficult to reconstruct the stream so that it can be played back in the time sequence it was originally presented.

There are no ways to refine subcategories underneath the monolithic “nptech” tag. When I look at some of the pages that are being cataloged for the feed, I feel that they’re either repeats or that even worse that they’re not really nptech links at all. That’s usually ok with me since the feed just keeps on rolling along waiting for other people to submit new tagged sources. However, it would be great if people were given the ability to tag it not only with the “nptech” tag but with an audience in mind or a unique resource. I’d love for the sites to be given additional taxonomical terms so that we would understand more of the tagger’s intent AND that other people can go back and retag it. Half the time I’m trying to understand how the tagger MEANT the tag to be relevant to nonprofit technology. This is increasingly difficult if we have other media like video or pictures. Sometimes, a picture or stream of pictures can be inexplicable to me if it didn’t have some sort of refinement to it. After all, tech conference pictures tend to be very similar to one another (you see one bunch of nerds you’ve seen them all).

I believe that a Google CSE is the way to resolve this issue. It has the ability to receive inputs from multiple collaborators and it will eventually have the ability to send out RSS to notify its collaborators of new additions to its input sources. Later, I’m sure Google CSE will be pingable in the way that Technorati is now. In this way, we would get the collaborative effect that we get with social bookmarking sites and we would get a permanent searchable database of links and eventually, the RSS feed that we’re getting now. Think about it for a bit. Mull it over. One database to rule them all and one engine to bind them.