Where I have personally battled with virulent trolls (on OrangePolitics) I don’t think the supporters are organized enough to carry out this type of response. Most don’t have very well-developed troll radar and/or they are eager to debate, and either way the troll ends up disrupting things and then crying “free speech” when I ultimately cut him off. (Why is it always a him?)

Anyhoo, we are a little off-track but this brings up the need for clear guidelines both in online communities and in tagging. It would really be great if there was a *simple* aggregator that would allow an org to republish the contents of a tag, but with some ability to moderate unwanted posts.

I agree that the potential for hijacking a tag is there. But, if the tagging has an invested community, they’d probably stop put a stop to it (by pouncing on the folks). Ultimately, that’s not productive of course.

I listened in on tonight’s Berkman nonprofit blog talk and (I think — the audio wasn’t always clear) that one of the folks talked about how trolls, during the Dean campaign, ended up energizing the community.

For example, if Republicans discover that the ACLU is using ‘safeandfree’ what’s to stop them from posting pro-Patriot Act stuff with the same tag?

One of the things that’s been most interesting to me about the use of the nptech tag is the discovery aspect. At last count, 124 people have tagged at least one item with it in del.icio.us (that doesn’t count folks who use the tag in other social bookmarking systems but not in del.icio.us). A lot of these people simply saw the tag in use and started adopting it as a way to share information.

I think a critical second step for nonprofits is to use RSS to syndicate the tag stream (for lack of a better phrase) onto their own website.

Great post about tagging! I found your article via the nptech community site where nptech tagged content is being aggregated ….