NpTechTag MetaFeed: 2007 Version 1 - Feed Fixed, Tag Still Broken?

Allan Benamer gave a shout that the NpTech Meta Feed was broken.   

The NpTech Meta Feed has been revised and move to here: 
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Nptech_Tag_MetaFeed_07

I've asked Marshall to put a forward on the old feed.

But is it fixed?

Gavin's Digital Diner gave us a thoughtful post about the pros/cons of taxonomy versus folksonomy, and the quality (or lack of) in user-generated content.  A brilliant reflection, if only presenting one point of view, but still worth reading! It's here.

Gavin raises some good questions:.

1. What the hell is the "NPTech" tag  and how would one use it anyway?
2. What purpose do folksonomies serve? How are they different from taxonomies?
3. What's good or useful about user-generated content and what's just entertaining or cute. 

Some links that might give some context:

Gavin points us to the "Beneath the Metadata – Some philosophical problems with Folksonomy." article published in D-Lib in November by Elaine Peterson.  While Gavin doesn't point to it, I think it is worth reading David Weinberger's response.

Laura Quinn wrote a rant a while back on this topic back in October.

The NpTech tag early discussions can be found here: http://h2obeta.law.harvard.edu/59925

About a year ago, Jilliane Smith wrote a great post about the Tagging and the usefulness of the nptech tag over at netsquared:  http://www.netsquared.org/blog/jillaine/tagging-for-nonprofits

 

More recently, Allan Benamer made some good points about how the use of a Google CSE might be the best approach:

http://www.netsquared.org/blog/kanter/nptech-google-cse-versus-socialbookmarking-rss-feeds-what-do-you-think

Do you have an opinion? How do you use the NpTech Tag?  Is it useful?

 

Comments

[Laura Quinn]

I think the NPTech tag is a great example of what works well about tagging - I love the NPTech tag, and rely on it heavily to find relevant articles. I use it like a beacon, to find things that others feel are relevant, than as a browsing or rigorous searching mechanism. I certainly don't think that folksonomies aren't useful, just that they're often described as a replacement for taxonomies, which to my mind doesn't make any sense. Taxonomies are much more useful -if considerably higher impact to maintain - for rigorous searching and browsing when users need to find something in particular.