Planning for Northern Voice '08

Now that my book is done (more on that in a few days), I'm looking at lining up a few speaking opportunities for the new year. I've heard great things about Northern Voice so I just submitted a talk proposal called "Tagging for Community."

I wrote this one up in about 30 minutes, and it was partly inspired by Alex Wright's Glut:

Tagging for Community

In the past few years tagging has exploded as tool for organizing photos, links, blog posts and other media. One important use of tags is to build and reinforce social bonds in networked media. Tags enable a kind of low-threshold community where people can participate without necessarily being actively engaged.

This talk will explore four ideas:

• How tags can help online communities germinate by lowering barriers to participation.
• How tags can act like "loose ties" across different applications and sites, enabling community members to recognize their "kin" wherever they go online
• How these loose ties give online communities more mobility and diversity than they've had before, and why this is a good thing.
• The specific tagging techniques that make these things possible.

There will be a handful of real examples (from Delicious, Amazon and the BBC) to illustrate these points. (Total length: ~40 minutes.)

I think there are a couple of interesting ideas in this one I've haven't explored before. So I'm hoping I get a chance to work through them--at NV and potentially elsewhere. (Of course, Vancouver in February is about 30 degrees warmer than Edmonton, which means I also have 30 very practical reasons for going.)