What lies beneath?

Click through the larger image to see where the links take you ...

This illustration along with the notes tool in flickr shows how the NPTech Meta Feed 2007 Version 1 - which is an aggregated feed of all sources that people tag resources with the nptech.  I fondly refer to it as the firehose.

Allan Benamer has taken that feed and brought it into Yahoo Pipes.  That takes some of the duplicates out of the tag stream.  (Note, a few other folks have created their own variations of a NpTech pipe).  The RSS feed that comes out Yahoo Pipes has been brought into the npdigg site, which is digg for nptechers.

One issue is that NpTech Meta Feed is NOT identified as the community source.  It's identified as a single user or submitter on the npdigg site, roborssfeed.  So, while it may appear that this user is tagging all this material, it is the sum effort of the community of taggers who contribute to the stream.  What you loose is the original source - who tagged it.

This is very interesting to me - an entire community of nptech taggers has been imported into a digg like entity or what  Allan Benamer is calling the anthill.  There are some new roles.  Submitter - you can add a resource to the site directly by setting up an account.  Voter, you can vote on items.   Consumer - you can just read what's there.  There are some additional ways to sort the information - by popularity and by category.

So, the Nptech tag is jumpstarting this digg community!   It brings up some reflection questions about online community, knowledge sharing within a community of practice, and moving a community from one platform or technology to another.

• What are the differences in community behaviors and roles in a digg community versus tagging community?   Can the two ecosystems successfully exist together or will one kill the other?  In other words, how dependent is the npdigg on the efforts of people continuing to tag items with nptech now and over time?
• What happens when a community is shifted from one platform to another?
  
• What are the connections and tensions between building a information resource collection versus a community of people around sharing tagged resources?
• What are the dynamics of the "anthill" approach (one central location or one big tent) versus a distributed community?  For example, on npdigg you can comment and talk about the resources. This happens with tagging communities, but it is distributed ... people my discuss or talk about a resource via a blog post or the notes field in a social bookmarking tool.
• How does the digg structure/functionality/community design influence the quality of the resources collected?  Does all good cream rise to the top? 
• What does critical mass look like in a digg community and how does critical mass (number of people voting or submitting) influence quality?
• How valuable or useful is a human filtered presentation of resources tagged from the tag stream or digg lists?  What is the role of an online facilitator in a digg like community or for that matter in a tagging community?

That last question is making me think of an article that I read in the Web Worker Daily about five Web2.0 jobs.  (Allan Benamer IMed me about it).  One of the roles was "Communtiy Curator"

Community Curator: The final entrepreneurship example is to build a community. While not directly creating a product, by providing the impetus for people to come together you can create opportunities for monetization. Whether it is incorporating appropriate affiliate advertising or facilitating transactions between members, this is probably one of the most difficult and time-consuming projects to pull off. However, if done successfully, it can be the most rewarding. Sites like Ning.com simplify the software setup for your social network. All that’s left is creating a site that’s sticky; a place where what’s shared is valuable and worth coming back to again and again.

I'm also trying figuring out which feed or combination of feeds to monitor or summarize from ... seems like different things are being picked up from different feeds - pligg feed is diferent from pipes feed which is different from the meta feed.   I decided, perhaps stupidly, to disrupt my work flow by switching to Google Reader for a variety reasons.    Ah, but that's the fun and the opportunity - to reexamine your work flow process.

Comments

[Wanna]

Yahoo! Pipes is most talked currently. However, I still don't get how it work :)
I'll spend more time to play around.