I’ll look into that, it seems a great tool for both a community of practice and a social network

Thanks Beth,

I gather you mean a bunch of people deciding to use a unique tag at a social bookmark service, like the tag “nptech”.
Whoever hears about it is welcome to use the tag as a service like del.icio.us is open.
And from here you can connect with others who use this tag and share other interests.

If you click on this tag, you will be able to see all the people who use this tag, so you are seeing the community around the tag, clicking on it in 6 months you will be able to see how the community has grown.

It would be good to see how active people are in using this tag…you can re-syndicate the tag feed into a blog or webpage or sidebar, but how would you go about automatically grabbing the user del.icio.us page so we have a list of sources who contribute to this tag community.

I already included blog carnival…

Not sure what you mean by cross blog conversations, I think I covered this in “Cloud of Blogs”

Probably something else I could of mentioned was a memetracker like techmeme or megite, with these tools you can discover multiple conversations about the same meme.