Monday, June 15, 2009

Tagnabit Usage

See Tagnabit Usage at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

It's been two weeks since we launched tagnabit. I want to share some information about how people have been using tagnabit. Some of the most popular tags used so far include:

btv
BTV is the airport code for Burlington, Vermont (where we are located). This tag is pretty heavily used on Twitter to represent our city, but it seems to have other meanings on the other social media sites.
btvsmb
A local event, the Burlington Social Media Breakfast took place a few weeks ago.
acmedia09
Next month in Portland, Oregon is the Alliance for Community Media's International Conference and Exhibition. The activity so far has all been on Twitter. If it's anything like acmne09 then I won't be surprised to see lots of photos, blog posts, videos, and bookmarks once the conference gets started.
tek09
php|tek 2009 was a PHP Conference that took place last month in Chicago, Illinois. While tagnabit actually launched after the conference was finished, it was an example tag that I used to explain the idea behind tagnabit to several people in the PHP community. There's lots of great content tagged with tek09. Tagnabit is built using PHP and Zend Framework in case you're wondering what the connection is.
cxage
Leadership in a Connected Age conference - also a local event.
champ400
The tag for the Celebrate Champlain Quadricentennial events taking place here this summer (sensing a local trend?). There will be lots of happenings so hopefully there is a good amount of participation in tagging content around the events. Vermont Public Radio is encourage people to tag content about Champlain 400 as well, so that should help.

On a more serious note, another tag worth mentioning (although I don't think anyone's used tagnabit for this yet) is the iranelection tag. There is a constant stream of tweets, photos, blog posts, videos, and bookmarks using this tag. Our thoughts are with the Iranian people.

Tell us how you've been using tagnabit. Do you plan on using it for an upcoming event? Are you mainly using it to follow tags or are you also posting content? We've got lots of ideas for improving tagnabit but would love to hear your thoughts! You can either comment here or use the tagnabit tag to give us feedback through Twitter, Flickr, Technorati, YouTube or Delicious.

Monday, June 1, 2009

Tagnabit Launched!

See Tagnabit Launched! at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

Last night we announced the launch of tagnabit, a social media aggregator. It's "a service that aggregates tags from popular social media websites. It is useful for conferences or other events. Participants can use a shared tag across Twitter, Flickr, Technorati, YouTube and Delicious. Tagnabit then aggregates this content in one place." The idea originally started with Town Meeting Day Vermont and then was used for the Alliance for Community Media Northeast regional conference. People found it useful, so we decided to make a "generic" version that basically has the same functionality as these sites, but for any arbitrary tag. Bill Simmon has a few ideas on how tagnabit can be used.

The functionality behind tagnabit was built using Zend Framework (MVC components, Zend_Feed, Zend_Service_Flickr, and Zend_Cache). The client side is all semantic XHTML (with a few Microformats), CSS, and a few JavaScript enhancements (using jQuery). We've got plans for some new features - but we're curious to see how people use the site first. If you've got feedback, please send it our way via Twitter, Flickr, Technorati, YouTube or Delicious by tagging your content with tagnabit (#tagnabit on Twitter).