IBM’s new Many Eyes rocks. I experimented with the nptech data last weekend and built this in about 10 minutes. It’s a very rough bubble map of the users of the nptech tag. Interesting how it shows the distribution of the tagging activity. Related: Swivel and Data360.
Number of times “nptech” was tagged, by del.icio.us username
My Many Eyes account is here. (You can get an RSS feed of my visualizations.)
EDIT: Just to be clear, the usernames in the plot above do not reflect the actual number of contributions (the top posters are not getting credit for more than 100 posts each), because of a bug in del.icio.us, which I have discussed previously.
I am still working on developing a tool for analyzing community tags in del.icio.us, but I have run into a problem that messes up the data pretty significantly. I would be interested to know if anyone has any ideas what is going on.
The problem is this: del.icio.us says that there are about 5160 items tagged with nptech in its database. I think this number is correct. But you can see for yourself that, if you put the pagination on 100, you will get to the last page (the first time the tag was used) when you hit the 41st page.
That’s only 4100-ish. Are there 1000 of our entries missing?
Recently there has been a lot of discussion among the nonprofit technology geeks about the use (and usefulness) of the tag “nptech”.
When the nptech tag started one of the ideas was to gather enough data to look and see what words people were using to describe, say, open source (open source, floss, foss, open source software) and then use those words to inform a taxonomy. It’s a taken a long time but I bet there’s enough data in the nptech tag on a combination of bookmarking systems to do a little crunching and get at some of those commonly used terms. Sort of an emergent taxonomy… Marnie Webb,
nptech proto-tagger
The nptech tag (on del.icio.us) dates back to December of 2004 and was created by a group of nonprofit technologists that were exploring the potential for social tagging in the community. While I have a “curmudgeonly” eye for Web2.0 gizmos, in addition to a deep distrust of technophilic “progress” … I think that the development of this tag is arguably the single largest reason for the current (thriving I think) state of what is commonly called the “nptech community.” Which means a lot to me.
(A great summary of the current conversation is at Beth Kanter’s blog.)
Opinions abound. Most of us seem to be worked up about the efficiency of the tag. On this note there has been a lot of interesting reaction to a post by Gavin Clabaugh, which was critical of folksonomies. Laura Quinn of Idealware largely agrees with Gavin.
In this context, it seems that generally the consensus has been that 1.) Taxonomies are harder to create than Folksonomies, but they are better in many contexts. And 2.) we need more data about how to make the nptech tag more useful as an “emergent taxonomy”.
So, in the spirit of improving the tag and promoting the nptech community, here’s some data:
- A plain text listing of every word that has been used on del.icio.us in association with nptech. fulltext.xml
- A sorted and ranked list of these tags. nptech-tagged.txt
- All of the tags presented as a scrollable tag-timeline.
- The script that I wrote to gather the data from delicious (in perl): community-tag-robot.txt. (The code is also displayed below with syntax highlighting.)
The script that I wrote crawls the pages of del.icio.us and pulls out all of the tags that were used to describe the same stuff tagged “nptech”. This gives us an idea of how the tag has been used — effectively describing the tagged links, if we assume taggers are using “synonym clouds”. Del.icio.us has a “related tags” feature but it is lame (only 10 are listed), and judging from my initial review of the data it is pretty random. (Not really sure if I broke some terms of use or not with my script, but it’s *our* data, right? And besides, the script is very polite.)
There are a lot of delicious mashupy-type things that show you tagging patterns, but these approaches seem somehow very passive, and not community-oriented. I mean, in general delicious is used very passively — people want to be able *consume* more efficiently, not create some community in which greater action can be taken. Or it is just used for explicitly personal purposes, as a web-based bookmark service.
What I like so much about the nptech tag is that it was intentionally created to support and reflect a community (unlike, say, the tag “nintendo,” which may very well support a community, but it is not active in a self-critical, dialogic way.) And certainly there is a beauty, I think, in using these hyper-technological tools (which have the ability to be very atomizing and consumerist) for the sake of doing things that are explicitly not-for-profit and mission-driven.
And personally I tend to agree with Michelle Murrain that we need to be wary of an “expert” approach to developing our tags and community taxonomies. That line of thinking is what made me want to do this in the first place. (Likewise I need to point out how much I have really been thinking lately about stuff that I have been reading at Ulises Ali Majias’ blog like this.)
Anyway, further experimentation (graphs/charts from excel would be easy using the text files, for instance) would be nice; please let me know if you are doing something interesting with the data. I’m hoping that this will help us, as a community, determine what we want to do with this tag now that we have been using it for more than two years. What patterns do you see in the data? What does the nptech tag mean for our community? I am not going to try to start doing any analysis here, now — but I would really like to hear what people’s reactions to the tag timeline are.
There are still a lot of holes in this data that I could answer with a bit more programming. (i.e., who has been using the tag?) Suggestions for extending the script are welcome. What do we want to know?
Last night I was trying to do something that I thought would be pretty simple: display a bunch of recent weblog posts on one page.
There is a great online community of folks in the biofuels blogosphere, and this page would give a quick summary of their myriad, nerdy, wonderful events and research.
So the goal is to have the title of a weblog, followed by the most recent posts, each with the date posted and a bit of the post body. The entire web page might be called “biofuels digest,” with a total of perhaps 30 weblogs. Often on the web you will see “blogrolls” that list lots of blogs, but these are usually just links to the blogs (there isn’t a post excerpt) and they are almost always either hardcoded html or javascript-included from a third party like Bloglines (see my own blogroll on the front page).
I’d had experience with building this type of page last year, when I just wanted to have an “aggregator” page of all my most loved online reading. I ended up just slapping things around with Magpie RSS (an excellent open source PHP class), and it worked fine. Not slick, but fine.
I could have easily used a number of services that are available online for displaying other people’s rss on your own page, without all the mussing with PHP. (Feedburner or Feed Digest are services that I’d recommend for doing this type of thing, if you want to go that route.) But who wants to mess with a bunch of javascript calls to someone else’s server? And you get stuck with limits on the number of feeds you can run. And the there’s the annoying “powered by …” sticker at the bottom. And you’d have to use a third-party RSS splicer to combine all of your feeds.
So forget all that, because this isn’t just a wonky personal project — it will hopefully end up being part of the excellent Piedmont Biofuels website — so it needs to be quick and hosted on the server.
So last night I opened up the latest installation of MagpieRSS and installed it on my server, created all of the necessary php for each of the blogs, and I ended up with a decent document. The major problems with this first version (using just the Magpie class) is the inconsistent treatment of the posts — some appear and some don’t — and the improper encoding of the blogs. (I went ’round and ’round with the encoding. It’s a common problem, but I couldn’t get those damn posts clean.) Probably a few days in the Magpie listserv archives at Sourceforge would clear all of this up … but the archives are exceptionally annoying, the Magpie blog is down, and the first version was still surprisingly slow anyway, even with the cache working.
So I found another solution, Alan Levine’s Feed to JS, which is built on Magpie. This is an excellent free (and libre) service that has both hosted version and downloadable script. (It relies on the magpie class, but uses javascript to display the results., giving the added benefit of having an administrator’s page that simplifies some of the options for display (such as the number of posts), and it yields much more compliant utf8 encoding (no more bloody diamond question marks in place of fancy quotes).
The downside: there is currently no way to “splice” all of the feeds together before running them through the javascript, so you end up calling the js file for each feed you parse. I felt sure this would make it to slow to be usable, but I think (hope) I was wrong, even with 25 blogs on the same page. I trimmed each of the blogs to display only 3 posts anyway, so at least the compiled filesize is real slim.
(Actually, while I’m writing all this out, I should bother to mention that there are a hell of a lot of 3rd-party RSS splicers/combiners … but, again, they’re all third party, and they seem to go extinct quickly: e.g. the defunct rollup.org. Most of these also have ads, are not free, or have limitations on the number of feeds, like feed digest. I was surprised and disappointed that I couldn’t find something to install on the server that would take care of this — somebody please let me know if there’s something reliable out there. This would allow me to combine all the posts and just run the JS once.)
So, from a programmer’s view, this is a little inelegant, but the result is really consistent, and it still comes in at 8.5 seconds on 56K. The (minimally styled) latest version is here.
I’ve been using this tutorial from Alexandra Samuel to set up a workflow that allows you to 1.) post to your blog 2.) post to del.ico.us and 3.) save all your links using spurl.com, all at the same time. This, I think will work well for a new biofuels community website that I’m working on with people in (and around) Piedmount Biofuels here in NC. Pardon any mess I make while I’m tinkering.
A beta project from CompuMentor, Consultant Commons provides a platform to share and collaborate on resources around nonprofit technology consulting. I wish I could recommend this site, but it has a long way to go before it really works well.For now, at least, there are a few useful documents, but most of the stuff is geared toward nonprofit consultants.
From Emily’s World comes an updated rundown of the “digital divide” among nonprofits.
Where does your nonprofit fit?
1. This group has added a blog, rss feeds, and/or podcasts to their website.
2. This group has a well designed website. They are familiar with emerging technologies and are looking into ways to add them to their website.
3. This group has had a website for years. They are up to date with web design. They have heard about emerging technologies but do not understand them.
4. This group has a website, but there is still room for improvement. They have an updated website, but they are ready to redesign their site and add more content to it. They do not know anything about emerging technologies.
5. This group has a website but it lacks usability and has not been updated in years.
6. This group does not have a website. They do not know how a website can help their organization.
Now, what are you going to do about?
The concept of eRiders is deceptively simple: people with lots of tech skills don’t need to be on the staff of every NGO or nonprofit, they can “ride” a circut of folks that they help. This idea is being presented at WSIS this week, and I think it is an incredibly powerful idea that will be used increasingly around the world.
TUNIS, Tunisia — One of the focuses of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) process has been on the cross-cutting nature of technology, and how it can act as an enabler of other development objectives.
Civil society has always had a significant part to play in development objectives and achieving the . Except for a few notable examples though, civil society has not fully embraced technology in its development work.
In a workshop session on eRiders at WSIS, Toni Eliasz from Ungana-Afrika today presented a “replicable and low cost ICT capacity building and support model” uniquely suited to enabling technology within this under-resourced sector.
He presented eRiders as an ICT consultancy solution for small, mission-focused NGOs which can’t afford a full-time technology support person.
eRiders are consultants that work with a group of development organisations concurrently. They are motivated by the development objectives of the organisations they work with, but their focus is on helping these organisations employ technology to achieve their missions.
Although eRiders perform a number of technical functions, one of their key functions is demystifying technology and making the concepts accessible.
Initially, an eRider\’s focus will be on smoothening normal operational activities within an organisation. As the relationship develops, the eRider will encourage a more strategic approach to technology, and new program delivery innovations may become available through technology.
Internet & ICTs for Social Justice and Development News - APC
If you like the idea of tagging you web pages and your books, how about tagging your people? Sounds a bit like info-tainment to me, but I felt obligated to post it because of the compelling freakiness of it all.
“
Tagalag is a service that lets you tag people, via their email address. It’s not a ‘tribute’ site like 43 people, because only people who know a person’s email address can add tags for that person.
If you create a profile you can add personal and geographical information about yourself.
I don’t know if Tagalag is onto a viable business model, but I like the idea of tagging people. This could become interesting as it evolves.
Read it: People Tagging with Tagalag
See also the recent surge of interest in Facebook, which about 80 percent of college kids are using. (No, really, 80 percent — I’ve seen other numbers that confirm this phenomenon.): Facebook Users sure are Passionate
(Found on:TechCrunch.)
Reporters Without Borders has today released a wonderful handbook of international blogging. The 84-page guide includes sections that discuss the basics of blogs and blogging terminology, and it moves quickly into a serious how-to guide for blogging anonymously and blogging successfully. This is a first for the international blogging community, and I am certain that it will receive an extremely warm welcome.
The guide begins with general discussion of the role of blogs and basic blogging terminology. This is hardly revolutionary coverage, but the writing is solid, with sections from very reputable sources in the international online media scene.
There is also a good section on choosing the right blogging platform, getting things setup to make the search engines happy, and a lot of serious advice on “making your blog shine.”
There are a few problems in the text, notably the failure to mention several key blogging platforms available for international use. (They mention MSN but not Typepad??) Also, I think there is not adequate description of the differences between a hosted blog service (Like Blogger) and a blogging platform that you have to install on your server (Like Movable Type.)
But by far the most inspiring part of the handbook (an it is as a whole quite inspiring) is it’s selection of personal accounts from “famous” international bloggers, including selections from a female blogger in China, a writer in Iran, a wonderfully disaffected journalist in the U.S., and a Bahranian blogger who prides himself on “breaking the government’s news monopoly.”
Keeping with the audience-first nature of blogs, everything is eminently readable, with spunky illustration by Nuit de Chine.
This is not a handbook for making money with your blog; it’s a serious look at the tools that are available for people who are otherwise not encouraged to communicate. It is for newsmakers without news outlets and people making news who don’t make headlines.
That’s a refreshing break from the wealth of blogging how-tos in the developed world. Those documents may be useful, but they don’t have the kind of detail that you find here for really getting a blog started in China, Nepal, Iran, etc. In this way, the “How to Blog Anonymously” chapter by Ethan Zuckerman must be considered the most important single part of the document. As an online community, there is nothing stopping us from perfecting and distributing tools for subverting government chokeholds on IP addresses.
I am very excited by the guerrilla-free-speech innovation documented here.
As Rebbecca MacKinnon has written, “Bloggers are often the only real journalists in countries where the mainstream media is censored or under pressure. Only they provide independent news, at the risk of displeasing the government and sometimes courting arrest.”
This handbook is groundbreaking both symbolically and technically, and I think it safe to say that it will evolve to address it’s very few shortcomings. Hopefully it will be re-released regularly, with updates of all the wonderful things that are going on in the blogosphere, new home of the free international press.
Your dear author recently posted about the ambivalence and misunderstanding that abounds with regard to the concept of RSS. Based on this weeks hilarious (in a laughing-at-you, not-with-you way) usability survey of blogging from Catalyst Group Design, blogging (yes, the entire concept) is about a mainstream as the Kabbalah.
The people they interviewed (about 25 of them) were smart folks in a wealthy, highly industrialized country. They used the internet all the time. But when they came to a normal blog, they were stumped. They asked: What kind of a website is this? What are these categories? Are they organized chronologically?
These are not stupid questions — they just sound stupid to folks who work with blog publishing software.
The point is this, geeks: people don’t understand what blogs are. They don’t know how to use them effectively and, often, they don’t know how to read them. They certainly don’t know how to subscribe to them via RSS.
If you are a blogger, this may be a difficult concept for you to accept. It was for me.
But ask around. Ask your friends who aren’t geeks. Ask the people at work. I’ll bet you a dollar they don’t know what a blog is. I’ll bet five they don’t read them, and I’ll bet you ten they would be intimidated as hell by the idea of creating their own. (And if I lose that, I’ll bet $50 that, once they start it, they won’t keep up with it.)
For now, we (bloggers) need to recognize that our readership is other bloggers. Don’t get depressed: that’s a pretty decent concept, mate. We can have our little blogger community and create positive change among ourselves. But clearly, we’ll have to move on to reach other users … like real people.
So this technical-sounding “usability study” of blogs means a great deal for people trying to create change with online publishing. Here are a few tips that I have tried to follow here:
For one: If you are a blogger, design down your site. I think that simplicity has an inherent currency in all forms of learning — and all publications are deigned to teach. Consider that your blog, as a text-based medium, would do better to take influences from the world of books (remember those?) than cable TV.
For two: Write for real people, not just geeks. Surely, there is a place for geeky forums, but if your online work is meant to be relevant for people with real lives (present readership excluded), try to avoid terms like trackback and ping, which have a clinically-proven tendency to cause impotence and sleep apnea.
This post from Tech Soup is a good, brief introduction to the use of databases in your organization.
The author of this article (a nice techie from ONE/Northwest) finds that you should really call in the professional to get things set up — I would agree, but don’t let that keep you from learning how to use it.
A database is an investment of time that can really pay off, especially if you have been managing your donor lists, inventory, etc. by hand. But that means you need to know how to use it.
Make sure to check the entire selection of articles about nonprofit databases at Tech Soup.
Here’s a bit from the overview:
While it’s no simple task, developing a basic Web site made up of pages of text and images is usually a job that can be taken on by the staff of a nonprofit organization, hopefully with a little help from a professional designer who can aid in the development of the site’s look and feel. Implementing advanced features on your site, however, will most likely require a level of expertise that doesn’t make sense for your organization to internalize. The goal of this article is to explain the benefits of database-driven Web pages as well as the possibilities and vocabulary involved to help you make informed decisions.
The best book I have found on Access 2003 (The current most popular database software) is “Access 2003 Personal Trainer” from O’Reilly (a reliable publisher of training manuals.) This book represents their newest approach to teaching computer materials at a normal-people level.
I appreciate it’s informal (superhero) style, it’s clarity of writing (though there are still a few proofreading errors in the text, the thoughtfulness of the writing — the book is much more than a simple, huge, frustrating dictionary of specs that you so often end up with.
In short, it’s a real text that can get you into using Access for the first time. The best part: it comes with a tutorial cd that is actually useful. Not merely a appendix of sample databases, it provides a quick shot-in-the arm approach to doing specific tasks.
If it gets too easy, just quick through. The only thing I with it had was a detailed walk-through of creating and using a simple database.
Techsoup just announced that they have Symantec Antivirus with multiple user licenses for under $100. (Single user licenses start at $100.) If you haven’t priced antivirus software, well, that’s a bad sign. Unless your’e on a Mac, but that’s a different post.
Bottom line is that you shouldn’t be paying anything near full price for software if you have 501(c)3 status to flash. Check out the other stuff they have, most notably Alpha 5 (PC Magazines “best database” of the year), Macromedia Contribute 3 (excellent cheap way to run your website) and Dreamweaver (great web development environment). They also have Microsoft and Cisco software for a pittance.
Check it out under the Techsoup Stock tab at the top of their page:
TechSoup - The Technology Place for Nonprofits: ”
After getting back from a lecture at the most recent N-TEN Tech club meeting, I found myself enlightend as to the way of the podcast.
Brian Russell is a stand-up guy doing a lot of grunt work with the development of podcasting as a tool of activist. His website does a great job of explaining the current state of the field, and of course his podcast is great:
www.audioactivism.com
If you are completely new to podcasting, a quick shot in the arm:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcasting
There’s a good discussion going on now at TechSoup about how you can use technology to increase capacity of your nonprofit.
Their latest focus is on RSS, which is one of the more amazing technical innovations of modern communications. If you don’t know what RSS is, you’re not in the loop.
Most notably, you are missing two things. 1.) The ability to prrocess inhuman amounts of information on a regular basis. RSS is used by many sites to create “digests” of (a.k.a. “syndicate”) their content. News sites, for example, offer these RSS “feeds” to sections of their newspaper.
It’s a lot like having a TiVO for your favorite sites.
Once you subscribe to one, it appears in your RSS reader of choice. In the end, it’s a lot like having a TiVO for your favorite sites — every time you sit down and you want to read, you have a list of updated articles in front of you. No wasting your life poking around the less glamorous parts of a newspaper page.
2.) If you have a website that is updated regularly, you can create a RSS feed so that others can subscribe to your page. This may seem a little superfluous if you don’t even know what a RSS feed is. “Who would use it?” Plenty of folks will, especially over the next year or two. So start writing some engaging articles for your site.
Here’s a bit from the Tech Soup conversation:
“If you’re like most people who use the Internet, chances are you often come across new and interesting sites, but then completely forget to visit them again. Or likely you spend too much time visiting the same sites looking for new information, only to be disappointed.
In addition, your e-mail inbox is probably flooded with messages you barely have time to read, including subscriptions to newsletters that tell you about new content available on still more Web sites. … Wouldn’t it be nice if there were an easy way to have all this information come to you and go to them in a way that was easy to manage, timely, and put the reader in control? “
Read the article (and check out TechSoup forums, which are among the best of their kind on the web.) TechSoup - Articles: Using the Internet - RSS for Nonprofits:
Here’s a great resource for getting your email campaigns in a row: white papers from a consulting group that does email campaigns for a living. They’re free; how nice.
Download them here: Return Path Solutions for Increased Email Delivery, Performance
If you are investing money in a website with a social justice purpose (do, please), you of course need to be thinking about getting people to your site.
Have you read The Gilbert Center’s “Email Manifesto”? It is absolutely the best crystallization of the shape your online strategy should take: make your web presence personal + active. Specifically, spend some time and money on an email strategy. If you really have something that you want to get done with the web, you’ve got to digest this short essay.
“Stop obsessing about how many hits your web site gets and start counting how much email interaction you have with your stakeholders. Stop waiting for people to discover your web site, and start discovering their mailboxes.”
Read it: Nonprofit Online News: The Gilbert Email Manifesto (GEM)
It’s rare that you see much criticism of nonprofit organizations. People are getting *something* done, after all, no matter what particulars you may take affront to their modus operandi.
But we should all be wary of the thought-stifling, fuzzy-feeling environment that lets fundamental missions go unexamined. And it’s in that spirit I that I so much appreciate David Geilhufe’s recent frustrations with the increasingly for-profit nature of N-TEN’s national conference.
You can find his post here: Social Source Software: Where Have The Values Gone?
Mission-Driven nonprofits have, I think, the most to gain from blogging than any other organization or type of individual. If your organization has a site, I think you really should have a blog. There are a number of clear reasons. Seriously.
The reasons to maintain a blog are all about education — which is at the center of most nonprofits’ agendas. How many ways can you raise awareness and make changes in people’s lives? Blogs offer a number of advantages over newspapers, magazines and flyers as mediums: They are free to print, they are easy to update and they are easily targeted to your base of stakeholders.
Here’s an extract from an article published for a 2004 seminar on blogging and Public Relations:
“In the past, you’ve most likely depended on good relations with traditional media, and some combination of website, e-mail, and printed or electronic publications. Printed magazines and newsletters are expensive to produce, and e-mailed items run the risk of being neither received nor read. A website by itself can’t always be updated as quickly as you’d like, and none of these provide the immediacy or the conversational attributes of a blog.” Read the article.
Yes, they are certainly cheaper than print — you already have the web space and need only pay for the time it takes to post. If you already have regular emails that you are sending out to a list of subscribers, then you already have the content. By posting them to the web, you can memorialize your communication, keeping your activities transparent and engaging others.
By posting something to the web you are making it public and, even if it is only your staff reading it at first, this can really have a strong mobilizing effect on your organization.
Blogs can also help you build your fundraising mission, but, more importantly, they can also become part of your mission — you can contribute directly to your goals by keeping a record of your creative, collaborative thoughts on the current state of things.
A single-subject blog will help push your organization’s site to the top of the Google results, becuase search engines love pages that are frequently updated. People will begin to find your page more if you put more information on it — and they will be people who are already interested in your subject.
Blogs are truly flexible tools: you can set up multiple blogs to serve multiple purposes. Most notable, you can have a private, group blog for internal communication and a public blog (perhaps maintained by one person) on your website.
Blogs help organize the web: Do you have a ever-expanding folder full of favorites that would be great to share with others concerned about your mission? Post them as you find them (with little reviews to clue people in).
Examples of other nonprofit blogs:
http://www.citizensleague.net/ “The Citizens League promotes the public interest in Minnesota by involving citizens in identifying and framing critical public policy choices, forging recommendations and advocating their adoption.”http://community.oceana.org/ “Organizes campaigns dedicated to restoring and protecting the world’s oceans through policy advocacy, science, law and public education.