If I could do the NpTech Tag Over Again ...

I just noticed a session at the Nonprofit Software Developers Summit that is probably happening right now.

Marnie Webb is facilitating.  Here's the description (notes here?)

The NPTech tag is used on del.icio.us and Tehcnorati to designate technical resources that may be useful to nonprofits. It started right when these sites had just started, and it arose from the need to develop a nonprofit technology taxonomy. The idea was to tell people to tag with nptech everything that is relevant and then look to see what was being tagged to see how the tags were being used. It was a big surprise that this started being used by a large group of people, and also that tags started being used for just about everything (photos, blog posts, etc.).

nptech was chosen so that it made sense, and because it was short -- short and intuitive. Therefore, the goal was to encourage people to use it. Over time, as people started using it more often, it was being used to market and advertise. At first, tagging (bookmarking) was used for individual use, and then it started being more social and more as a means to broadcast information.

The problem with seeing how it was used is that there wasn't necessarily enough data about how people were tagging -- as in there was not enough sites that multiple people tagged Also,del.icio.us is not easy to get a large amount of data out of.

In evaluating the use of the nptech tag, it was discovered that a lot of people were using the tag, but not necessarily reading the tag. It was also discovered that people want a directory of resources.

Comments

[Catherine Carey]

Hi Beth,

Interesting thoughts here:

"The problem with seeing how it was used is that there wasn't necessarily enough data about how people were tagging -- as in there was not enough sites that multiple people tagged"

Now I'm wondering about who does tagging and who uss it. I have to admit I don't use it much because I get results with few tags and think, "This isn't much better than a search. "

Who uses tags? What for? When?

I found the last sentence of that paragraph more interesting:

"Also,del.icio.us is not easy to get a large amount of data out of."

I'm guessing you mean besides taging results. Can you elaborate a bit? I'm still pushing people to create their own "newspapers" - RSS. But I see some value in tagging, IF it gets me some vetted websites.

Hope you're having fun with kids and family on school break.

Catherine

[Marnie Webb]

Catherine,

RE: the last sentence -- you can't get info out of del.icio.us by tag -- it needs to be by user or by URL -- so that it's hard to do data analysis on what's in there. We did have volunteers that did some screenscaping so that we could get at the data.

Re: the not enough users tagged something. We just often saw that a significant number of people (more than 10 say) did not put enough tags on a single URL to really say anything all that meaningful about it.

Haven't looked at the data that way in a while so that might not be true anymore.

Beth,

Those are the notes. The conversation ended up going a much more interesting (I thought) direction when we started sharing strategies for group tagging. More on that soon.