Comments on: Our collective blindspot: nptech and del.icio.us

By: abenamer

abenamer — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 11:32:56 +0000

Well, that sounds pretty good. The problem I’ve found with the admin tasks associated with a server is that it’s a lot of work and generally unrewarding. You’re not actually doing anything cool or sexy, you’re just chopping wood. As a result, my general feeling is that I hate to impose that kind of work on anyone else. That’s why I’d rather we as a community outsource that work to people who are paid to do it. It’s more fun setting up new apps and new ways for those apps to interact then it is to look at disk usage stats and worrying about whether or not to get another drive.

This is why I still think a hosted solution is better. We can then get down to the development work that I’m sure people are willing to do. For my part, I’d rather just set up the pligg, set up the enhanced RSS feed and just manage the pligg and Google CSE. I don’t know what people actually plan to do with the Drupal side of things but it seems that it might be better if we all started eating our own dog food and start to plan out what we WANT from nptech.info. I’ve already stated what I think it should look like but other people should chime in.

That way, Peter can more easily assess whether or not his new responsibilities are more in line with nptech.info.

By: Peter Campbell

Peter Campbell — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 17:55:47 +0000

Just to clarify, here, admin inactivity is the exact opposite of the problem. It’s February 27th. after NTC, in early April, I’ll be in a new job situation that, with luck, will not be the 70 hour a week ordeal that I am still under with Goodwill. At that time, I will be able to assess whether I can properly manage nptech.info or not. I’ll be very realistic – if it isn’t going to happen, I will let all interested parties know. Hosting isn’t an issue – there are plenty of people willing to house it, but developing and administering it is.

By: abenamer

abenamer — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 17:38:12 +0000

Agreed. It’s a big set of tools but it is a big problem. I’m always looking to automate everything because no one has the time to do things manually. I hate to see the nptech.info site lose readership due to admin inactivity and this is a great reason to finally do something about it. Admittedly, all MY reasons are about creating an archive that I can search via Google CSE. Everyone has other agenda though so I think this set of tools is the only one that can accomodate both those different workflows and my needs.

I don’t think it really supplants bloggers. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if no one REALLY used the Pligg site at all. However, the feed from the Pligg back into the Google CSE will be absolutely useful for what I want to do. Again, the idea is to keep the infrastructure open so that everyone’s needs are met and not to foreclose on future opportunities.

By: Ben Sheldon

Ben Sheldon — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 15:10:24 +0000

It seems like a very sophisticated technology process that is actually pretty impressive all told. But it also seems like a pretty big sledgehammer for something that I didn’t realize was a large problem. Which isn’t to say that how the nonprofit tech community disseminates information couldn’t be improved but this seems really huge for what I see as a very small (active) community.

I wonder with Pligg, what the signal-to-noise ratio would be–the worry being if only 100 people are participating, and those 100 people are all pretty closely aligned (as I see the nptech community is overall) is it going to just turn into a giant echo chamber, with everything “digged” (pligged?) about equally?

Most importantly (and I admit that I do primary grassroots tech), could any of this be done using existing tools and word of mouth? I’m a geek and tend to think of things as technological solutions, but I feel like if a major goal is to come up with the Uber Nonprofit Technology Library and Water Cooler, that’s going to happen through word of mouth, not SEO.

Lastly, and importantly, how is this going to affect/supplant bloggers like you? Because the community is small, I trust individual voices and for the most part y’all have been doing an excellent job of pointing me to what I want or need or didn’t know about (and giving commentary, which Digg/Pligg doesn’t do well). With Pligg, I feel like at best it’s going to be tracking back to the bloggers sites themselves, and considering right now I think I am subscribed to only about 5 nptech blogs (because that’s all I’ve found/found worth reading), that’s not much of an impetus to use it.

By: abenamer

abenamer — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 10:14:23 +0000

As a sidenote, all those other sources besides del.icio.us can be merged into a new NPTECH metafeed via Yahoo Pipes…

I don’t mind Yahoo! Pipes too much — it’s fairly innocuous as RSS merging technology goes. I think the community will have to create a Yahoo account and just merge all those other feeds together.

The Google CSE can only really search URLs — theoretically, it wouldn’t be impossible to search through bookmarks but the bookmarks would have to be in OPML. It IS possible to search images but they’d have to be considered a URL resource that was set as a permalink or we’d never ever find it again.

I like the facetious demo and in fact, Google CSE actually deals with the issue of multiple audiences. If you go to http://www.nonprofittechblog.org/manseo you can see a demo of that. A true taxonomy? No, not really. This is the price we have to pay for having a distributed audience with very loose tagging authority (or none at all). I don’t mind that price as long as people feel free to contribute. It’s our job though to untangle the tags by exposing them to another process via the Pligg site.

By: Marnie Webb

Marnie Webb — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 04:52:13 +0000

Right on, Allan. I\’m with you that del.icio.us isn\’t robust enough to meet the needs you are talking about. But people aren\’t just using del.icio.us. They are using Furl, magnolia, upcoming, microformat tags in their own blog posts, flickr, YouTube and, I\’m sure, other things.

So, I think we have to think about the different ways that people seem to be using/want to be using the information and then set up complementary ways to access it:

* search engine. Maybe instead of based on suggested topic areas a search engine could be based on searching through bookmarks, blog posts, photos, videos, events?
* a taxonomy. This is where del.icio.us really fails but putting the nptech tag into a database of some kind so that you can end up w/ something like this: http://demo.siderean.com/facetious/facetious.jsp?tn=0subject&tv=nptech&ss=1
* a tag cloud. This could really help the \

By: Beth

Beth — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 01:03:03 +0000

David, if someone can teach me, I can help. I’ll also document so others can help. But can’t do much until after NTC.

By: David Geilhufe

David Geilhufe — Sun, 18 Feb 2007 18:42:40 +0000

The big issue here is time commitment. I want to work on it an hr a week or so, but its easy for me to get overwhelmed. nptech.info has a couple issues:
(1) Do we have enough administrators? 3-4 reliable people are required.
(2) Do we want to do custom stuff? If so we need to use a dedicated install… CSOD is useful for all the standard Drupal capability, but custom code means we now need a dedicated site and system admin.

By: Beth

Beth — Sun, 18 Feb 2007 05:08:40 +0000

Peter: I want to attend that session. Make sure it isn’t scheduled at the same time as other sessions I’m doing. With that said, what about a NPTECH affinity group meeting?

Peter, did I send you the info about the CPsquared conversation?

Allan, can you blog a bit more about the user role thing?

By: Peter Campbell

Peter Campbell — Sun, 18 Feb 2007 04:51:57 +0000

Interesting. And a good vision. We need to bring David in on this conversation – he has both volunteered to help build the site and to host it, and I\’m reasonably sure that we\’d have a lot of access on his servers. But I\’ll caution that we can not commit to this type of development without committed administrators, including a few with skill sets with ours (while I haven\’t played with Pligg, I\’ve played with all sorts of other stuff, and I\’ve been using *nux/regex and other tools for about 20 years, working my way through perl and PHP and on to Ruby — I\’m betting we have a lot in common, Allan).

So here\’s a question: should we be meeting on this at NTen? I\’m slated to do a Salesforce thing that I\’m completely unprepared for, and I bet that Holly would let me last-minute replace it with an NPTech session, if there isn\’t one already in place. But I\’m thinking of one that does revolve around the ideas and feasibility of growing the web site. Is that worth pursuing?