One of the single most important things to learn today

In the new world of managing information, creating information, participating in blogs, and other social media you will hear a lot about Tags.

What are tags?

Prior to the internet, classification had to be done by professionals because there was no way for users to classify.

According to Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_(metadata) In online computer systems terminology, a tag is a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information.

Tagging: adding a tag/label/keyword to a digital object (website, image, audio or video) to categorise it.

A user chooses a tag that is meaningful to him or her.

Tags can be public or private. Public, tags collectively create a folksonomy, a user-generated as opposed to a hierarchical taxonomy such as a subject thesaurus.

Examples of tags :

nptech = nonprofit technology
nptechau = nonprofit technology in Australia
gov2au = the new government web 2.0 movement of transparency – open information
in Australia
npgreen = nonprofits concerned about being green (environmentally conscious)
cua09 = Connecting Up Australia conference 2009

Why is tagging so important?

The more we all tag our blog posts, photos, web site content, twitters, videos etc, the more we will be able to find and collate this information from all contributors –yes you! Your information will be picked up in searches on global tags or local tags with the “au” in them.

Connecting Up Australia is launching a Nonprofit Tag Cloud soon so that you can find a collection of nonprofit topics collated in one place. But there is a lot of information from the global nonprofit sector, so we want more Australian content – tell us what is happening locally. All you need to do is start tagging your content.

Advantages
•    Tagging is simple- formal training in classification or indexing not required, users can assign a multiple tags
•    Users can use their own language, likely to reflect current usage
•    Users select concepts that have meaning for them - highlight what is important to them
•    Tags can be shared and create knowledge through aggregation, and formation of social networks around topics.

Disadvantages
•    Tags with personal meaning are frequently used - little use to others
•    Same term can be used for different concepts eg
•    Singular vs plural forms, use of hyphens and spelling conventions
•    Many systems only allow single word tags
•    Social tagging systems are vulnerable to spam and malicious practice

The key to tags is they will grow organically over time – there is no wrong tag.

Some protocols are :

•    try and keep them short – many tags abbreviate
•    try to use tags that others are using for the same topics so that they can be collated on a search – see some popular tag tools below
•    use multiple tags - one piece of content may be relevant to more than one topic

For twitter use hastags : #tags
See some of the popular tags being used for twitter here www.hashtags.org

For other forums use tags and add “au” if you are Australian.

And generally here www.technorati.com

http://technorati.com/search/nptech (search “nptech”)
http://technorati.com/search/nonprofit (search nonprofit)

For photos : http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags

How to Tag

Most blogs will have a category or tag field when you create your blog entry. On the Connecting Up blogs you simply list the relevant tags to your blog post eg : tags, nptechau, nonprofit, npgivau.

Multiple word tags allowed
•    Wordpress
•    Flickr
•    Blogger

Single word tags allowed
•    Delicious

References:

www.librarything.com/thingology/2007/02/when-tags-works-and-when-they-dont.php
infotangle.blogsome.com/category/folksonomies
http://www.educationau.edu.au/jahia/webdav/site/myjahiasite/shared/papers/arkhayman.pdf

Ask your website manager how you can add tags to your content. And experiment – it is probably easier than you think.

If you have any issues – just raise it on the Connecting Up Blog. We welcome discussion on what tags will be best for particular topics for the nonprofit sector in Australia.

http://www.connectingup.org/blog or contact us http://www.connectingup.org/contact

Tell us your tags or suggest a new tag for the nonprofit sector for a topic - click here to suggest a tag.

We will share these with everyone in coming newsletters.

Author - Karen Gryst and Rosalie Day

Technorati Tags: nonprofit npau nptags nptagsau nptech nptechau 3rdsec