More thoughts on nonprofit tagging
Quite an interesting thread on the riders tech list on using tagging for nonprofits.
Michael Gilbert's comments are right on:
The reason tagging worked for us (and the reason it works for social bookmarking sites) is exactly as Dan Cooney describes it. It made things findable to the person who did the tagging. It does that for several reasons: (1) People use words that they themselves like to use to categorize things. (2) It is more straightforward than choosing a folder. (autocomplete makes it even more so). (3) It exposes the document to the intelligence of the group, which may add other tags, making it even more findable.
Our users developed several other ways to work with tags (in addition to per-tag RSS - and yes, we were using Dave Winer's early drafts of the RSS format): (1) They hand compiled one-off collections of links for particular purposes (such as references for a report) and then applied tags after the fact to the whole batch. (2) They used saved searches, for which they also had RSS feeds. (3) As with Del.icio.us, they had access to "what's new" feeds for the system as a whole and for specific users.
Michael Gilbert's comments are right on:
The reason tagging worked for us (and the reason it works for social bookmarking sites) is exactly as Dan Cooney describes it. It made things findable to the person who did the tagging. It does that for several reasons: (1) People use words that they themselves like to use to categorize things. (2) It is more straightforward than choosing a folder. (autocomplete makes it even more so). (3) It exposes the document to the intelligence of the group, which may add other tags, making it even more findable.
Our users developed several other ways to work with tags (in addition to per-tag RSS - and yes, we were using Dave Winer's early drafts of the RSS format): (1) They hand compiled one-off collections of links for particular purposes (such as references for a report) and then applied tags after the fact to the whole batch. (2) They used saved searches, for which they also had RSS feeds. (3) As with Del.icio.us, they had access to "what's new" feeds for the system as a whole and for specific users.
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