Tags and the use of tags is still emerging in Australia for the nonprofit sector. The greatest traction seems to be ( not surpirsing) from the tech nonprofit community and so #nptech is the most common. Is this too US centric? Well there is a large US contingent of bloggers and twitterers using it, but I like to think of it as international. So what about locally relevant content for Australia such as local competitions, funding opportunities etc?

We at Connecting Up Australia have tried to initiate some discussion around this with little response, however some of the "early adopters" and advocates in the social media community have picked it up and are using some Australianised tags such as nptechau and gov2au.

This generally means putting "au" on the end of a tag.

Two Nonprofit tags to start using :

• npau ( np= nonprofit, au = australian) - use to identify content / comments relevant for the australian nonprofit community.
• nptechau ( np= nonprofit, tech = technology related, au = australian) - use to identify content / comments relevant for the australian nonprofit community related to technology.

Tags need to be meaningful to the user group, so they do evolve.

Sometimes I tag a blog post or tweet with both "nptech" and "nptechau" if the content is relevant to the international community but I also wish to identify it as being created or sourced in Australia.

Lots of countries and user groups around the world are grappling with similar issues of initiating locally relevant tags to help identify local content from the large pool of US content or international content.

We have started a page at What the hash tag - to monitor use of tags : http://wthashtag.com/Nptechau 

As a sector we are building content sharing capacity using new tools and new practices.

Tagging is one of the ways we can categorise our content, help others find our content and share it in a pool of content to enrich the power of dicussions. It's those "clouds" again.  Think like a cloud and make a storm

There are many well used tags globally with a predominant voice from the US nonprofit sector, such as nptech, however what we want to do is channel some loacl content and local conversations. So as well as using these global tags we ask you to also use local tags for content generated in Oz.

Some tag suggestions below  :

np = nonprofit

au = Australia

npau = nonprofit sector in Australia

Subject extensions:

• Green ( environmental)
• Gov ( governance)
• Give (Fundraising)
• Gov2 (Government transparency movement)
• Mkt (marketing)
• Devt (capacity development)
• 3rdsec (third sector)

For example:

• 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)
• npmktau = nonprofit marketing australia
• npgiveau = nonprofit fundraising australia

Please suggest more or alert us to any you are currently using so we can share them with the nonprofit sector across Australia and build their presence in our tag cloud as well as the popular tools such as hastags.org and technorati.com

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.