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.
(1 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)
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Two different problems, two different solutions. nptech allows humans to define the nptech space at a very ganular level (link, photo, post, etc.). CSE defines it at the publisher level. I doubt all of a single publisher’s work will cleanly fit into nonprofit tech alone.
I think the real use of nptech is not consuming the nptech stream which is a really big content space, but consuming nptech + “relevant tag” streams.
So choosing between consuming an nptech stream and using CSE, obviously the search engine. When monitoring a specific topic nptech+cms, for example, I’ll stick with nptech.
Allan,
Good points.
What you are describing are the pros/cons and differences between taxonomies and folksonomies, centralized versus decentralized, controlled vocabularies versus tags versus search.
I think that the mega tag stream is very broad and is like hose sometimes and many people probably don’t have the time or patient to mine it — hence the concept of an information curator or reference librarian – a human who has the content expertise to make meaning out of these distributed and aggregated resources.
I have to do a lot of web resource as part of work – developing curriculum, writing, etc – and I find that searching nptech + (other tag) in a socialbookmarking site to turn up much better and useful resources than a keyword search. However, I use both … it isn’t an either or.
and, if you were build the nptech taxonomy (which was drafted as part of techfinder at some point I seem to recall) – you’d probably start with an analysis of the tag terms used for nptech as a first step.
My guess is that the stream and CSE will merge in usage. Basically, future iterations of the CSE API will allow for both an incoming stream of tags and an outgoing stream of notifications. The current nptech tag stream actually creates a problem — nothing is ever tagged with a refined tag and this is because the tagging engine is fairly rudimentary in this aspect.
The current version of Google marker actually allows nptech-like definitions at the URL level or the site level. Your argument really needs more refinement because the publisher and tagger in a CSE environment are one and the same person. It wouldn’t be hard for a tagger to create a new refinement to the tag and then start tagging sites to that site. Clearly, this suggests that Google CSE allows you to have your cake and eat it too. I think you need to really take a look at Google’s new search technologies and the APIs they’re developing. They’re going to make del.icio.us and other tagging sites look oh so 2004
You’ll see that Google CSE is a far better paradigm for collaboration than del.icio.us or other social bookmarking sites. You didn’t answer the real point — all that lost work due to siloed data. There’s no equivalent at Feedburner or Feedjumbler to deal with the archival issue so it’s not even a matter of whether people have the patience to mine the stream. They simply can’t even if they wanted to.
With a Google CSE, you’re basically taking the incoming stream, reorganizing it, archiving it and then (in the future) creating yet another stream out of it. It’s a far more sophisticated feedback loop than the ones created by current social bookmarking sites. Those are JUST for tagging, there’s no way to get in there and help to reorganize it. I don’t think an nptech taxonomy is actually needed as that would be decided within the internal confines of the collaboration space of a CSE. Both the tagging AND the vocabularies are subject to a collaborative approach. With the CSE, there are NO artificial distinctions between a taxonomy and a folksonomy. It’s radically more decentralized than del.icio.us. Really. I mean it. Try it out.
Maybe I am thinking too old school here but I just wish people used the notes field more often when tagging something. I am not sure what the reluctance is … maybe people just dont feel like they have time … but when people write a little narrative in that space it actually gives us a glimpse into their intent.
Okay, I played with Manseo. It is cool.
But, I personally wouldn’t use it as the *only* source to find material when researching or to keep up to date.
It is good for retrieval to find stuff you’ve come across. Although, I find that if I retag and annotate resources from the volumes of stuff I read into my social bookmarking account, that I can easily retrieve what I need via my own account.
Is that your definition of silos?
Well, if your bookmarks are in a social bookmarking system, you have access to other people’s bookmarks via the tag. I actually find a lot of valuable resources browsing by tag and particular people’s tag collections in social bookmarking services. For example, Robin Good, makes his links public. He’s topic expert on online collaboration technology. I find precisely what I need from his collection because I have access to it because we use the same service and connect via the tag.
The drawback is that not all users are identified in places like delicious. Some of the other services, like magnolia, have groups where you know the people.
I’m curious. Have you done all the tagging by point of view, “for techies” “for marketers” etc.? Right? Does it have the ability for the group to do this versus one person?
I played with some searches and one thing that struck me is that it could be a different type of silo – field that doesn’t cross disciplines.
Thanks for continuing the discussion about the stream. What I mean by silos are the disparate areas where the tag is coming from, each social bookmarking site is a silo of data. That’s by design of course as each site needs to have that in order to create value for its members. I don’t really have a problem with it except of course when it comes to the lack of tagging that gfitz points out. Frankly, it drives me nuts to look at links on the nptech metastream where I don’t understand the intent of the tagger. And worse, there’s no way for someone else to go in there and retag the link. At THAT point, the siloing is bad because you have to figure out a way to find out where the link came from in the first place but none of the current social bookmarking sites have that capability to go in and retag someone or to create what Google CSE calls “refinements”.
Google Marker and manseo allows for this because of the unique technology behind Google Co-op. People are used to social bookmarking sites and I like them too but I was always wary of them because I felt that people can be sloppy and there was no inherent way to implement a second-tier of checking on the initial tags. Google CSEs have that built-in. It’s social bookmarking 2.0 in that sense.
Google CSE makes a great point in its documentation. Do NOT tag by keyword. Keyword searches are already handled well by Google’s search algorithms. However, search by audience (which implies intent and a level of human-only utility) is how I created the site. Also, unique sites that are difficult to pick out via keyword search are also in the list of refinements.
The first search in any Google CSE is against the entire list of URLs in the CSE’s database. The second search limits itself to a subset of the original set of URLs that are tagged by each refinement. This is not a silo because there’s no friction between the superset and subsets of data. Also, if you want to see other people’s tags on CSE, you see the tags set up by other collaborators on the CSE. My suspicion is that Google is going to put a lot of great engineers on CSE and ultimately, because of Google search technology and numerous APIs, will overtake the usefulness of old-school social bookmarking sites.