Tagging on Twitter? #nptech

A few days ago, Amy Gahran and I exchanged some musings on social media tradeoffs.  We agreed that it was much easier to share information on Twitter, that the immediate gratification was addicting, but that retrieval on Twitter is a not easy.  Amy and I have noticed how our usage of RSS and social bookmarking seems to be less.   

In the comments of a Read/Write post, Vanderwal.net also observes this problem.

I like the microblogging tagging as I have been wanting to add a small set of tags to my 4,500+ favorites I have starred in Twitter over the last 18 months or more I have used the service. Some of the best info I come across is flowing through Twitter and I stamp it for later, but I am missing an easy means to get back to it. Tags are one easy option, if I can get nice mobile access as the food and travel/city relevant info does me more use from a mobile.

Alan Levine also wrote a reflection about wanting to see a resurgence of blogging but also admitting how much fun it is share information via twitter.

From Marshall, over at Read/Write Web has wrote a piece called Five and Half Reasons To Fall in Love With Tagging Again.  His point 5 is something that sounds like a dream come true to me to monitor Twitter for NpTech related items

I know I'm not alone in finding it much easier to share information over Twitter than by blogging or tagging in a social bookmarking app. Enter Hashtags. Like tagging for Twitter, hashtags are terms you put after a # in a post. Hashtags.org then aggregates all the tweets using a given tag and publishes an RSS feed. Reading a feed of short messages sent from the #sandiegofires was very interesting, for example.

Though you can certainly just subscribe to a search feed through a service like Terraminds - Hashtags let you do all the things in microblogging that you can do using the methods described in numbers 1 through 4 above. See also Dave Sifry's new project Hoosgot - a service he calls the Lazyweb for the age of Twitter.

Chris Heuer (who was on a tagging panel at Netsquared with Marshall and me two years ago) has some additional thoughts on tagging.

Some reflections:

• So, if we add tags to Twitter we have a merge between object sharing and people sharing.   What's nice it is that with social booking sites like del.icio.us, it is difficult to know who has shared the item unless their account is appropriate marked.  This combination of tagging and tweets gives you both.

• I am hoping that those nptechers on twitter might adopt using hashtags and share information this way.
• I can't figure out how to subscribe to the RSS feed for #nptech at hashtags.  Help!

Update: Here's the feed

Comments

[Ben Greenberg]

Happy New Year, Beth. I'm definitely glad to have hashtags for the reasons you and Marshall note. My only resistance to using them is that they take up valuable real estate when you only have 140 characters. I think this makes it hard to use hashtags systematically, since there will be tweets where one decides to sacrifice metadata for communication.

[Michelle / chelpixie]

Beth I'm sure you're aware of the favorite option on Twitter. Two things that I do with stuff that I want to tag for later or for interest is tag it by adding it to my favorite tweets.

If there's something I recall that I want to go back to, I can usually remember the tweet enough to google it and come up with what I'm looking for. Of course, you'd have to remember enough of the tweet and the user and the context to get it to come up but it works wonders for me since I don't often forget something.

[Cody Marx Bailey]

Right now, the site doesn't allow you to subscribe to an RSS feed until the tag has been used once before. We'll be rolling out some new code soon that will allow that, but for the time being... just tweet #nptech (once you've added the hashtags bot) and the rss feed will be available.

Cheers, and happy new years.

(oh god, that rhymed)

[Corey]

I tend to agree with Ben: the #nptech sounds like a good idea but I fear losing 7 precious characters from many tweets that I'm already crunching my language into.

I've been pleased with the discoveries that I've made monitoring the rss feed for "nonprofit" search with Terraminds. I love that it finds both "nonprofit" and "non-profit" Adding "tech" to the search narrows down the results and when people use both words, the post is still recognizable by people who aren't familiar with the nptech tag.

I don't mind at all when someone cross-posts links between twitter and their blogs. It seems to me that we have a lot more room to work with the nptech tag there.

[Alan Levine]

This is a mildly interesting end around an obvious twitter shortcoming; the lack of its own built in tagging that might allow clustering of information within and across accounts. Its hard to imagine given the number of other social services that layer folksonomy that this is a technical barrier.

I see awkwardness in having to remember tags, the character count a serious kink for adding multiple tags, and the cluttering up of the content (my 140 char space) with tag clutter-- tags out to be meta-data, not mixed in with data.

As a test I did try searching TweetScan for "#nptech" but it seemed not to find the hash and pulled any tweet with the "nptech" in the phrase.

Hopefully, ideas like #hastags (and believe me, to the folks that put it up, I love the concept) may help increase the voices calling to the twitter-masters to consider including a true tagging feature.

[Simon Berry]

Hi Beth

I thought you and your readers might be interested in this little combination of Twitter, Hashtags and Wordpress MU:
http://simonberry.ruralnet.org.uk/2008/04/24/a-mini-blog-using-twitter-and-hashtags/

With best wishes

Simon
24/04/2008