New Events sign/calendar at NPC landing point

I just discovered that the new events committee of the Nonprofits in SL group, also known as the Nonprofit Commons community has created a calendar/sign post. This was very exciting to me since this is something that I have wanted to have in-world for a while now. While I was having lunch in RL with SLebrity, Jani Myriam, of Transgender Resource Center fame, on Friday, she and I were discussing how if you want something to happen in a community in SL, you mostly have to do it yourself, or it takes long to never to happen. It was a commons frustration we shared. Until recently…I am lucky to have Coughran Mayo, Kosmik Guru and PCOSGurl Infinity on the new events team.

While I was there, I was talking to Movies1963 Beck who has a MySpace page dedicated to SL Live events. He was looking at the new NPC events calendar, and I told him that I was interested in having the events tagged NPSL in eventful. “Tagging?, What’s that?”, he asked. “Uh oh”, my reply. I then barraged him with TechSoup articles on tagging and forum threads on feeds and tagging 101. Then, fortunately, Faust (Nick Hernandez) came to my rescue. While I flew away, I over heard him uttering, “There are sites like del.icio.us that you can…”

So, thankfully, I had achieved a few positive things in world tonight. I got friendly with an avatar who has a myspace page for SL live events, I learned about a new events calendar that our group has put together and I helped introduce a couple members of our community and one learned about Web 2.0.

You see! SL is more than just a game! On the note of the calendar/sign. Do any of you know how to make the events on that thing get tagged with NPSL for eventful, so it can be fed into this site?

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Plush%20Nonprofit%20Commons/130/179/26

Written by: Glitteractica_Cookie

Cool new free SL module allows you to post a SLurl to del.icio.us

What will those crazy hackers think of next? Bill Hax (his avatar name) has created a very cool gadget called Yummy.

Yummy will allow you tp post a SLurl to del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us/). It is available at the SLexchange

This gadget allows you to post a slurl of your current sl location to del.icio.us. You may optionally add a description and tags, and may mark the post either ‘not shared’ (default) or ‘shared.’ It must be attached to your avatar to function, and is invisible unless attached as a HUD. Like any script, Yummy will not work in “scripts disabled” sims.

Help summary:

To post a slurl to del.icio.us:
/111 description, tag1, tag2, …

description (optional) can be any text EXCEPT a comma and tag1, tag2, etc. (optional) are single words to use as tags.
For example: ‘/111 Great store for clothing and hair!, clothing, hair, shopping’
The tag ‘slurl’ is automatically added to all posts.

To get help:
/111 help

To popup Yummy’s menu:
/111 menu

To launch your del.icio.us web page in your browser:
/111 www

To change new posts to ‘not shared’:
/111 private

To change new posts to ‘shared’:
/111 public

To change Yummy’s chat channel:
/111 chat channelNumber

Limitations:

Since LSL has limited support for non-text MIME types, errors that occur when posting a slurl to del.icio.us may not be reported. This is not something I can “fix” until Linden Labs chooses to provide this support. For this and other reasons, I’ve decided to provide Yummy for free.

That said, Yummy works just fine for me!

Notes:

Updates will be available for free. There is no auto-update function built into Yummy to keep the script nice and simple. If you would like an update, send me feedback (/111 feedback) with a short message like “Any updates?” and I’ll let you know if/when an update is available.

If you’re interested in the source code, drop me a line. Future versions will probably be “Modify” – the current version is my first script and I don’t like to release code before I’m completely happy with it 🙂

Release notes:

Rev. 1.0:
initial release

——————————

I hope you enjoy using Yummy!
– Biil Hax

Written by: Glitteractica_Cookie

Tagging Tutorials, Part III YouTube

If you don’t know about YouTube you must be living a sheltered life… YouTube is a video sharing site that has successfully captured a huge portion of the Internet video market. It has come under some criticism for allowing large quantities of copyright material to be pirated and uploaded onto the site. None the less, YouTube is a powerful tool that can be used by the nonprofit community to raise awareness and market.

What do I need to post and tag on YouTube?

  1. An account. Signing up is easy. Go to YouTube.com and click on sign up in the top right corner of the screen. Enter in the required fields and submit. You will get a verification email which with a link that you need to click on to activate your account.
  2. Upload a video. This presupposes that you have videos ready to go. YouTube accepts a wide variety of different video formats including: .WMV, .AVI, .MOV, and .MPG. Uploading a video is simple. First click on upload videos in the top right corner of the site. Second, enter in a name, description, and TAGS. For the Nonprofits in Second Life site, we are asking folks to use NPSL as a tag to identify it as related content. Choose a category and a language. Click "Continue Uploading". Browse for your file on your computer. Just like on Flickr, you can then decide who can see your video–will it be public or private to friends and/or family. Click Upload.
  3. This will bring you to a page with a snippet of code you can use to embed your video into your Web site. In my case this looked like this…

<object width="425" height="350"> <param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/04dCZ3Rzsho"> </param> <embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/04dCZ3Rzsho" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425" height="350"> </embed> </object>

which produces this:

You must own the video to tag it. So, unlike Flickr where friends can add tags, you need to ensure that all the tags you think are relevant are added. You can always add to your own tags later.

Written by: Creech

Tagging Tutorials–Part II Blogs

Tagging on blogs can have multiple benefits.  The first is, if your blog is searchable, the tags prove to be a way for readers to find like content.  For example, on this blog (built on Drupal), if you click on a single tag it will return all results that match that tag.
Try clicking on "npsl" and see the result.  In Drupal, a function called Taxonomy makes this magic happen.  We could, in fact add navigation to the site that would match a given tag essentially creating navigation to content that will for ever expand.
The second benefit is allowing your posts to be easily pulled into tag based feeds.  Technorati allows easy setup.
Many blogs will have a field for tagging.  So, as an example we’ll use Drupal as an example.
How do you tag a Drupal Blog post?

  1. You need to have rights to post to a blog.  In the case of the Nonprofits in Second Life site, contact Creech Antwerp (Matthew Saunders) at matthew.saunders [at] westaf.org or at matthew [at] dogstar.org if you are a member of the project and want to become a blogger.
  2. Underneath the "Title" you will see a section called "Tags".  The Drupal database collects and saves all tags and will attempt to auto fill it for you.  If you see a similar tag match it so your post will be referenced with other like posts.
  3. Separate tags with commas.

Who can tag a Drupal Blog post?  In general…

  1. The author.
  2. Someone with administrative rights

If your post is related to the Nonprofits in Second Life project, please tag your post with npsl particularly if it is on your own site.

Written by: Creech

Tagging Tutorials — Part I Flickr

My next few posts will deal with tagging on different social networking sites. This first tutorial will focus on Flickr.

In all the social networking sites that you might post to, there is something in common–tagging. Simply put, tags are little pieces of data that let people know what your information–whether it be an image, a video, or text–is about. For example, you could tag a picture of the castle in Warwick, UK on Flickr with "Warwick castle UK England" and when someone searched on these criteria would have the following results returned:

Click on me: [warwick castle UK England]

Who can tag on Flickr?

  1. First you need an account. If you already have a Yahoo! account, then you can sign up quickly using that account.
  2. After logging in you can tag a) your own photos b) photos of those who have set you up as a contact c) photos of those who are in the same group as you

How do you tag on Flickr?

  1. Log in
  2. Go to photos you are allowed to tag
  3. Look on the right side, you should see the current tags of photos
  4. Click on "Add a tag". If your tag is more than one word, use quotes around the tag.

How does tagging benefit you?

Tagging allows others, like on the Nonprofits in Second Life site, to pull in images–see the Flickr badge on the left–from all sorts of people who have chosen to use the same tag. It also allows Real Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds of that content that can pull in like images to a web page or to a RSS aggregator like Netvibes. Tagging allows your pictures to be found.

The tag being used for Nonprofits in Second Life is "NPSL."

Written by: Creech