Robin Good: Chronological and time-bound sequences have been the overwhelming approach to organize content on the web, just like newspapers had been doing for a long time. Look at blogs, Facebook and Twitter to see how pervasive this type of chronological organization has become.
But as more content becomes available more rapidly, chronological organization doesn't work anymore.
What we need is the option to navigate, quality content, through topic-based structures, maps and collections, where time is only one among other factors helping me slice and dice what I want to see.
"There's simply too much content to consume nowadays, so the great challenge of online publishing is to organize it better. Topic pages are the solution."
From the original article: "The time for topic pages has come.
Chronological and real-time consumption of content just doesn't work anymore.
It's time for topic pages to add a layer of organization on top."
Robin Good: Here is a good guide providing the basic principles that should be followed when using, reposting, citing or quoting other people's content (both text and images).
The article outlines "proper methods of source attribution on the internet to guarantee the right people get credit for their hard work and ideas."
Specific sections of the article cover:
How To Cite Content in Blog Posts How To Cite Content in Social Media How to Give Credit to Guest Bloggers and Ghost Writers How to Cite Images and Visual Content
Robin Good: Springpad is both a web and a mobile app that you can use to curate visual collections on any topic.
Unlike Pinterest and similar visual boards, Springpad allows you to add just about any type of content to a collection while it auto-enriches it everytime possible with additional contextual information.
For example if you include a book or a movie into a collection Springpad will gather and display relevant information next to it (author, description, reviews, where to buy it, etc.).
Springpad boards are called "notebooks" and they can be personalized in their look, and made private or public. You can also invite additional contributors and offer a customized providing different views of your collection.
Content can be added to a "notebook" via standard bookmarklet or by using an internal search feature which gathers all types of relevant content.
Works right in your browser and in your favorite smartphone or tablet (iOS and Android).
Robin Good: Start this video clip at 1':42" (up to 3':30") and you can get a pretty good idea of what a content curator does and why what he does has so much to do with sense-making, making things understandable for others and ultimately extracting contextualized "meaning" from information "as is".
Must-see. Excellent. 9/10
P.S.: Thanks to Howard Rheingold for spotting this clip and sharing it.
Excellente vidéo sur le concept mapping avec un exemple sur le cheminement de l'information à l'action (début à 1'42). Merci à Robin Good et Howard Rheingold pour le partage.
Robin Good: PKM or Personal Knowledge Management may be indeed a very close relative to Content Curation. But while Content Curation, is done with a specific audience in mind, PKM is done for one's own learning.
Harold Jarche, looks at the relationship between the two and writes:
"The most important part of personal knowledge management (PKM), in my opinion, is the need for active sense-making.
Merely seeking and sharing information does little other than create more noise online.
Sense-making takes time, discipline, and effort.
-> One strength of PKM is the “manual” nature of sense-making activities. The act of writing a blog post, a tweet, or an annotation on a social bookmark all force you to think a bit more than clicking once and filing it to an automated system.
-> Sense-making, or placing information into context, is where the real personal value of PKM lies.
-> The knowledge gained from PKM is an emergent property of all its activities.
Merely tagging an article does not create knowledge. ...
The difference between PKM and Curation is that the former is personal, while the latter is for an intended audience."
I have been using his framework for the past year and a half to teach curation to nonprofits. Linking curation to nonprofit staffer work flow is a great way to get people to use curation!
Robin Good: Many content curation tools promise to make your content publishing job easier, faster and better. But is it really so? Does less work and more automated aggregation/filtering guarantee a higher quality result?
Christa Carone writes on Fast Company: "New content curation tools make automating the job easier--but easy may not always be as effective.
It would be a mistake to let algorithms do the entire job for you. No one knows your audience like you do.
And, keeping the human touch in the process is more real, which is really important to today's info-overloaded consumer."
Yes, the human touch. Not the human click to rapidly share, repost or reblog. The human touch as in the act of adding value in ways that go beyond being someone who passes on interesting items.
And to achieve that, someone needs to manually stop, research, read, check and contribute something of value. it doesn't happen automatically.
"The companies that are truly winning over audiences and driving consumers are the ones that are experimenting with a balance of automated aggregation and human-directed curation.
It's a process of out-sourcing and in-sourcing.
I've been following Intel's approach. It recently launched iQ, an employee-curated digital magazine created to connect with a younger audience and share with them the bigger, living brand story.
Not only does the site provide original stories about tech, it also aggregates top tech stories from other sites that Intel's audience will find interesting... all closely watched by editor-in-chief Bryan Rhoades, who spurs conversations by judiciously placing some stories on the iQ homepage.
NASCAR, too, is experimenting in this space. A partnership with Twitter includes a site that compiles #NASCAR-related tweets from popular drivers, who send 140-character blasts from the track or wherever they may be-- along with those from sports writers and other industry folks.
They pull it off by using a search algorithm and human editors who understand narrative---and appropriate content."
Robin Good: Next Tuesday, July 10th I will be running a live online workshop on "content curation for education and learning" as part of the e/merge 2012 web conference.
My session (90 mins.) will focus on defining curation within an educational/learning context and analyzing the factors that will rapidly make curation a major new interest area. I will look at the key benefits that content curation may bring, as well as at the types of content curation that are possible and the key tools available to do it.
I will finally showcase a few interesting examples of curation at work, before diving into a "live" collaborative session in which I will be joined by participants in the creation of a collection of great examples of curated content for education/learning.
A follow-up Q&A session is sheduled for the following week on Tue 17 at 12:15 GMT+2
e/merge 2012 is the fourth virtual conference on educational technology in Africa and builds on the e/merge conferences in 2004, 2006 and 2008.
e/merge 2012 which takes place online from 9 – 20 July 2012, is primarily designed to share good practice and knowledge about educational technology innovation within the further and higher education sectors in the region, as well as to strengthen communities of researchers and practitioners.
The e/merge 2012 conference is organised by Tony Carr and the Centre for Educational Technology at the University of Cape Town.
Robin Good: Pathbrite is a new web service which allows you to collect, bring together and layout any kind of media content (from video clips, to images and text) to create a visually compelling personal portfolio of skills and experiences.
In fact, Pathbrite can be used for any number of purposes that involve creating a good looking web presence in which one can easily bring together different types of content to create a "collection".
A music band video portfolio, a photographer book and list of achievements, a sport master illustrated hall of fame.
From the official site: "Curate all your stuff to create beautiful portfolios.
Arrange and describe all your digital artifacts in a way that tells your whole story—tailored for any audience."
"Pathbrite ePortfolios are the best way to collect, track and showcase a lifetime of learning and achievements, and to get recommended pathways for continuous success."
Key traits:
-> Aggregate everything about you in one place.
-> Import anything digital from any source, including a resume, documents, audio, video, recommendations.
-> Publish and share your story on Pathbrite or with your selected social networks.
-> Configure and personalize the layout of your portfolio.
Robin Good: I have recently caught futurist Ross Dawson in transit through Rome, and thanks to his generous kindness, I have been able to ask him a few questions on curation and to record them in video.
What is curation? Does it really help or is it adding more noise to the soundwave of information already coming at us?
Where do you draw the line between social sharing, personal expression and true curation?
How do you recognize curation from personal sharing ?
These essentially my questions, and here in video, his spontaneous, unreharsed answers to them.
Full interview: http://www.masternewmedia.org/curation-a-view-from-the-future/ ;
Robin Good: MentorMob is a content curation platform which makes it easy to create "learning paths" by assembling sequences of web content pages on a specific topic.
From PandoDaily: "MentorMob is one company looking to turn content experts into teachers.
The Web app created by college friends Kris Chinosorn and Vince Leung lets you curate collections of information within a playlist that conveys a lesson plan around a single topic.
...
MentorMob divides its playlists into 12 subject categories including technology, health, and art.
They provide playlists for teachers, as well as standard school subjects such as math, science, and social studies.
More specific topics, called “mobs,” covered within the subjects, range from learning Photoshop to home brewing beer, to entrepreneurship.
Content is contributed by volunteer editors, who tend to be hobbyists and enthusiasts."
Robin Good: I have just received an invitation to test the new content curation platform Zeen, and here I am with some early impressions on what I have seen.
Zeen is a content curation tool designed to create good-looking magazines on a specific topic or theme. Setup and configuration is very easy and straightforward and it allows you to connect your Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts.
Once you are in, you can immediately set up a Zeen magazine, by selecting a title, a description and a cover image. From there on you are free to use the integrated search feature to find web articles, news, images, video clips or tweets relevant to your magazine. You just start a search after having selected what kind of content you are looking for and Zeen presents you with a set of relevant results. One-click on any of them and they are inserted instantly in your magazine.
You can also create as many "tags" (Zeen calls them "labels") as you like and assign each content item to a specific label.
The final magazine issue offers an automatic visual table of contents, in which you can organize by dragging and dropping the order of your selected contents.
A Zeen magazine can be made of multiple issues, instead of being like Scoop.it, a continuously growing content holder. You select the content items and you produce an issue (which can be still edited after publication).
N.B.: There is no way to edit or modify the content picked and added to your magazine, including the use of images.
You can't create new content but only pick and organize existing resources.
Robin Good: In the overall effort to improve the quality of its search engine result pages Google is continuining to make significant improvements to its search engine.
Starting from now all users worldwide can see Knowledge Graph results showing up on top of search results as a visuable and browsable list of alternative options to explore.
Not only.
Google is now officially going after the gathering and curation of the best list, collections and guides on just about any topic.
From the official Google Blog. Read it carefully: "Finally, the best answer to your question is not always a single entity, but a list or group of connected things.
It’s quite challenging to pull these lists automatically from the web. But we’re now beginning to do just that.
So when you search for [california lighthouses], [hurricanes in 2008] or [famous female astronomers], we’ll show you a list of these things across the top of the page. And by combining our Knowledge Graph with the collective wisdom of the web, we can even provide more subjective lists like [best action movies of the 2000s] or [things to do in paris]."
This post, by Nancy White, highlights some of the most important reasons why learners should embrace curation to facilitate sense-making and knowledge creation.
Robin Good: Good video with Margot Bloomenstein, brand and content strategist, being interviewed and explaining, in very simple terms what "is" and what "it is not".
This is a good introduction to what content curation is, and how it is done as it would be explained to someone who knows nothing or very little about it.
Good material to show to top management, executives and to those who may be a bit skeptical about the benefits of doing it as well as for those who are just starting to explore this activity.
"It’s not about hoarding content indiscriminately, says Bloomstein. You have to have goals in mind from the outset.
Not every bit of content you come across will be relevant to your audience, either.
The content curation process is intended to determine what is and isn’t important, in addition to what your readers want to see. Then, it’s your job to get that content in front of them."
KF: Many of these principles carry across into the education sector. Staff collecting resources for their students will find this an insightful guide, and it will also provide some useful guidelines when asking students to curate a collection.
Robin Good: Here is the official presentation that Beth Kanter delivered yesterday, accompanied by a curated bundle of user contributions (mostly tweets) and relevant resources (stats, some visuals and other resources) outlining the key benefits that content curation can bring.
To do so, she used Storify.com which allowed her to pull in the most relevant and interesting tweets that had been posted during her webinar, as well as other relevant resources on the topics she covered.
My three picks from this Storify bundle:
- Mindless sharing is not content curation (Dara Goldberg)
- RT @ntenorg: Good content curators don't just share or collect links, they explain & make sense of a particular topic for others. (Steve Heye)
- ...@hjarche Seek-Sense-Share (PKM) model, he offers an online workshop bit.ly/HPV07M
Robin thanks so much for highlighting the storify summary - I did that right after the session because I wanted to do a quick content analysis of the tweets and see what resonated. I also did the same for the chat logs so I could gather up the questions and make sure they were answered. The session was based on an article I wrote recently on why content curation - real content curation as you describe it - can benefit nonprofits. How it can enhance staff expertise and reduce information overload. Here's a blog post that wrote sharing some of the other resources, including many of yours. http://www.bethkanter.org/?p=5690
Robin Good: I agree. Curation is an autonomous process of collective intelligence, where you and me, and all the others who sift and select from the ocean of information passing through them, unconsciouly help our global brain, to make sense of the information we have ourselves created.
Even those who simply like, share or retweet, contribute to this process, by gradually filtering and marking what is most interesting and relevant to them.
Evolver.fm writes on Wired: "There’s too much stuff. We can help each other find it. This is what the age of curation is about.
Yes, it’s amusing to make fun of people who seem to retweet other people’s links all day, but that’s giving all of those retweeters and Likers too little credit by far.
What they’re really doing is strengthening connections in the global brain, in much the same way the axons and dendrites in our brain grow and lose connections to shape our minds."
"Content curation is the natural evolution of our globally networked consciousness.
This sounds like a bunch of hippie drivel, but we really are creating a global brain, of sorts, by encoding human knowledge and tracking human activity.
Using the human nodes of this network to strengthen some of these connections while weakening others (by choosing either to pass along i.e., ‘curate’ information or not to pass it along) helps this global brain function better as a system, which in turn increases its power whenever any of us need to tap into it.
...
When we curate, for whatever reason and in whatever form, we are enhancing a connection in the global neural network we are inadvertently creating."
Robin Good: Everytime I see a new post or article claiming to list the best content curation tools I know I am in for some disappointment.
Most of these lists just pick up names from other lists without even bothering to check, test or verify what these tools actually do, whether they are still available. Unfortunately the rush to put out "curated" list of tools and services has created more misinformation than useful lists.
But if you, like me, are on the lookout for new and effective tools to curate your own content or the one of your customers, I have created a comprehensive map of all the curation tools available online and I keep it fresh and updated almost on a daily basis.
The map presently lists over 250 content curation tools which you can navigate much more easily than it was possible on my earlier versions of this map.
On the right side of the map you will find all of the news and content curation tools available online today. On the left side, you can find bookmarking, link lists builders, clippers and lots of tools to operate with RSS feeds (which are still at the heart of a curator's job).
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Robin Good: Hard to believe but true: you can curate and publish while on the move by using one of the many mobile apps devoted specifically to news discovery and to publishing/distribution.
Francisco Rosales, the author behind SocialMouths, has prepared a valuable illustrated guide to finding 10 among the best mobile apps for news discovery and distribution.
Robin Good: If curation is all about finding and sharing great content, what's the difference with what so many bloggers have been doing until now?
The difference, according to Deanna Dahlsad at Kitsch-Slapped, is in the focus. While bloggers often cover just about anything that intercepts their online wanderings, curators are characterized by a strong focus on a specific topic.
Here is a key passage from her article: "Many bloggers spend their time selecting what they consider the best of what other people have created on the web and post it at their own sites, just like a magazine or newspaper.
Or they provide a mix of this along with writing or otherwise creating their own content. Not to split hairs, but curation involves less creation and more searching and sifting; curation’s more a matter of focused filtering than it is writing.
Because content curation is expected to be based on such focused filtering, it begins far more based on topic selection.
This is much different from blogging, where bloggers are often advised to “just begin” and let their voice and interests accumulate over time to eventually reveal a primary theme.
...
Some collectors just collect what they like as they stumble into it. …Sometimes, collectors just keep piling up stuff, no matter what it is. Even if this isn’t hoarding, it’s not-so-much of a purposeful pursuit.
But professional curators, those who manage collections for museums or other organizations, and serious collectors, they maintain a specific focus.
And rather than stumbling into items, they continually seek for specific items.
The definition dictates the curation — and everything from funding to their continued employment is based on how well their collection meets the collection’s definition.
While blogging success may be thought of in many different ways, the success of content curation lies in how well you define, search/research, and stick to your subject."
From Journalism.co.uk: "The content curation website Bundlr has just announced a new version of its service which allows for embedding of content from a wide range of sources.
By partnering with Embedly the site now supports over 200 sources of content, including Storify, Pinterest and Amazon, for users to add to their bundles.
Embedly is the service that the new version of Twitter uses to embed photographs and articles in your Twitter stream and is used by a host of other sites such as Reddit and Bitly and comes as a WordPress plugin.
While Bundlr was originally seen as an alternative to sites like Storify, which can be used to create stories from curated links and content, Bundlr's focus is now on creating a top-level resource for curated content around a story or topic."
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