The activist guide to delicious
All the Arabist Network blogs, including mine, are still down, however we have finally got ourselves a new host, and the migration has started. Hopefully it should be all sorted out tomorrow, thanks to Issandr’s and Scot’s help… But again, delicious has been a savior..
Yesterday, Issandr set up a temporary frontpage for the Arabist.Net, which included the RSS feeds of our delicious bookmarks..
So even if we can’t disseminate information in the proper format on our blogs, still we are able to provide the readers with the latest resources and updates we are bookmarking, generating some form of updated content..
Meanwhile, the campaign to free Philip Rizk and the pro-Gaza detainees continues, and microblogging is still central to what we do..
The delicious page created for Philip, I was happy to notice, was circulated widely by activists in the different social networks: It was Jaikued, Tweeted, Facebooked, linked to in blog postings and circulated by emails… The delicious link itself was even bookmarked by delicious users!
But if there are others on the delicious network who are also following and bookmarking news about Philip, why don’t we all tag our bookmarks with the same unique tag: “6FebProGazaMarch”
This means when I click on “Recent” to check out the latest bookmarks by ALL delicious users who’ve been using that tag…
… then I’ll be creating a new delicious page, aggregating ALL bookmarks me and others have been tagging with “6FebProGazaMarch”… If that applied successfully with wide particpation, then in effect we’ve set up one hell of a pool of information about our campaign, continuously updated, and the efforts would be shared by more than one person…
So instead of circulating this link:
http://delicious.com/elhamalawy/6FebProGazaMarch
… it might be a better idea to start circulating that one:
http://delicious.com/tag/6FebProGazaMarch
The new aggregated page also has RSS feeds…
… which could be aggregated to your personal feed readers, and, more importantly, posted on other websites and blogs…
As I’m writing, only Moftasa, Gohary and the Center of Socialist Studies are pooling their links, together with me, into that page, coz we are the only ones tagging our bookmarks with those tags. Sarah and Amr for example have a good number of bookmarks, but unfortunately theirs don’t appear on the aggregated page since they haven’t used the “6FebProGazaMarch” tag.
I think in the future we should give this a thought… In the same way we get together to discuss what sort of blog we are launching for any new campaign, we can also come up with a unified delicious tag for that specific campaign. And it has to be a bit unique and unusual like “6FebProGazaMarch” coz this decreases the chances our pool won’t get “polluted” by other bookmarks we don’t want… For example, Philip is a pro-Gaza AUC student who was detained. When we are bookmarking links about him, I’m sure users will be tagging: “Student” “AUC” “Gaza” Activism” “Detainees”, etc… But these are commonly used tags.. If we decided to pool in the bookmarks under “Student”, other bookmarks for example about “students” in New Zealand could appear too. So choosing “6FebProGazaMarch” could be a good way to avoid that in our case, as it’s highly unlikely someone else is randomly using this tag to bookmark resources about unrelated issues…
This common tag technique has been part of our campaigning tools for quite sometime, user for Kareem, Alaa, Monem, 6 April 2008 Strike, and other cases.
This is good if we can agree on it. In many of the above cases, I took it as a day’s job to see what people are tagging about Monem for example, and tagged it “FreeMonem”. By doing so, I was acting as the campaigns tagger.
But we do not need to agree. After all, this is democratic internet and this is folksonomy. For example, you and I have been following news of police brutality in Egypt, so there has been a good chance that both of us have used the tags “Egypt” and “Police” for those news items–which we did. Without agreeing, we have pooled our efforts together in the delicious page/query http://delicious.com/tag/Egypt+Police which lists items that people tagged as both “Egypt” and “Police”. There you go: first thing in our CopWatch effort. Pull the feed of that page in as many blogs/sites as you can.
Good effort, Hamalwy.
I owe you a great deal of thanks, coz it was you ya Amr who introduced me to delicious three years ago. But I do not recall at any point that we discussed in our previous campaigns this common tagging business. But I think we were all doing spontaneously similar things. Obviously everyone is free to choose whatever s/he wanna use, but I was trying to address here a specific point, which is creating this pool of info.
Anyways, thanks for your comment and for your continuous help and support..
Yes. When I say ‘our’, I am refering to an electronic collective, that has done a few things before and away from Arabawy.
What I am saying is that people do not need to agree to create this pool you are talking about. They may agree, but the technology allows for the pool to happen if they do not just as much. All that is needed is extensive tagging by individuals.
Just about the time you were writing this post, I was exploring what is a far superior social bookmarking and research tool. Give it a try. هتدعي لي.