I feel moderately good about our experiment of “tagging” the NMC Summer Conference this year. We put it in the printed program that we were asking participants to tag blog posts, flickr photos, and del.icio.us bookmarks with an “official” tag of nmc2006.
I used a local copy of Feed2JS and flickr’s Javascript badge to bring them together into one page at http://www.nmc.org/events/2006summerconf/tag.php. I was going to SuprGlu ’em too, but had trouble getting to their site the night before the conference.
So how did it go? Well, of course, I had a fair bit in there since it was my idea and I wanted it seeded with “stuff.” And I appreciate the numbers of people who did jump in. The aggregation is quite nice. In summary:
- Tagging with Technorati is the most complex of them all. Unless you have added a plugin to your blog software, getting the content o appear involves embedding a hypertext link with a “rel=tag” attribute, so it is a manual process for many blogs, problematic for public hosted ones where there are not options to install Technorati plugins. But even that is not enough. Without a blog set up that pings the big T, you have to go there and manually ping them. So it can be more of a hurdle to get blog posts tagged. Maybe I should have tried a feed from a Google blog search or a feedster search. See the blog posts tagged with nmc2006.
- Flickr certainly wins the ease of tagging award (or at least ties for first place.) Lots of people were taking photos, and I am hoping they are waiting until they get home to post photos and tag (although, when I left Cleveland this morning, there were more than 250 photos tagged with nmc2006).
- I was happily surprised that people were tagging conference related web sites with del.icio.us. There were lots of URLs mentioned in sessions, posters, print materials, and I am guessing we may have tagged 10% of what might possibly have been tagged. The downside is not being sure of some of the sites being tagged as the relevance to our conference is not clear (or it just may be I was in a session that mentioned the “Plants Have Feelings Too” site). I do have some concerns about tag pollution, and am getting ready to look at using Scuttle to create an in house NMC collection of tagged sites. Are there Scuttle users out there? I am aware that Todd at Zane State and Tim Lauer have implementations, but I”d like to learn more about the ins and outs of running an islanded version of del.icio.us.
All in all, I am pleased, but I am eager to see how we can get participation from more than a few type A taggers like those mentioned below (and anyone else I have overlooked, sorry, I am tired).
A big tagged thanks to the folks that did pitching in- blogs from Using Wiki in Education, Scholarly Life of a Committed Technofile, Pandaemonium, InfoCult; flickr photos from NickN, DCrutchley, BrettBixler, NickJS, JHildreth, Carl Berger (lots from Carl), MidiMan; bookmarks from toddjensen, landisb, bmcmurray, nnoakes, and in0urbrain.
So we had some fair tagging activity, but it is still a small group currently playing the game.
Update: Now I have it all SuprGlu’d together at http://nmc.suprglu.com/ which also includes the podcast feed from the conference. Bonus learning! The podcast feeds in SuprGlu point to the audio file URL; you can use the del.icio.us PlayTagger code if you add it to the SuprGlu Static Content area– this way, your MP3 links will be embedded with a nice little Flash player:
