A quick administrative note. If you can see this post, it means that my blog has successfully rehosted.
Apologies for any inconvenience – if you spot anything not working, broken links and so on, please do let me know.
My content curation workflow
Curating content online is a fairly hot topic these days – information overload being what it is, folk tend to like it when someone spends a bit of time picking the wheat from the chaff for them.
It doesn’t have to be too time-consuming an exercise either and there are lots of tools to help you put together a workflow that puts the web to work for you, rather than the other way around.
Here’s mine. It may work for you, or just bits of it. Don’t feel the need to copy it all if you don’t want to, or indeed ignore everything if it all seems utterly idiotic to you.
Feedly
The place to start is with my chosen service for RSS subscriptions. I know people keep saying that RSS is dead as a way to consume content, but it continues to work for me. I use Feedly to subscribe to about 800 feeds from various sites. I rarely read them all – there are a few sites I especially look out for, but generally I treat it as a stream to dip into rather than a list that must all be read. To this end, I always mark everything as read on a Sunday evening so I can start the week with a blank slate.
Reeder 2
Here’s the thing though, I don’t actually use the Feedly web interface at all – I just use it as the synchronisation service to manage my subscriptions and to ensure that they are up to date across my various devices. My preferred client to actually read through the content from my feeds is Reeder 2 on my Mac, iPhone, and iPad. The interface is just one that I am comfortable with and it makes reading through stuff a joy.
Pinboard
When I decide something is worth saving and sharing, I bookmark it using Pinboard. I used to be a big fan of Delicious, but since the various changes of ownership of that service, I decided to go somewhere a bit more reliable, hence Pinboard – an indie service that you have to pay for. I bookmark stuff either by using the helpful button within Reeder, or by opening the item in a browser and using a bookmarklet button. I’m a bit lazy and tend to just leave the title as is – with the odd edit for length (see later) and don’t bother adding a description. I do tag things though, and try to limit myself to just one or two tags.
Everything I bookmark appears on Twitter shortly afterwards, thanks to a recipe on IFTTT. IFTTT is a super useful service that helps you build up automated workflows triggered by online activity. So, in this case, IFTTT spots when I add a new bookmark in Pinboard, and then tweets it for me. I make IFTTT put some quote marks around the title of the article which I think helps to distinguish it from something I have written myself.
With this Twitter process in mind, I will often amend the title of the bookmark, knowing that it is the main bit that gets tweeted. I might add a hashtag, for instance, or @ mention the author to add a little context, without breaking the meaning when the link is viewed in other contexts.
I save everything I bookmark for later reading into Pocket, thanks to another IFTTT script. This is especially useful for longer items. Pocket saves a copy of the articles I save locally on my phone, so if I have a spare few minutes at any time, there’s always something interesting to read.
I include several links in my email newsletter. Right now this is a manual process – when writing the email, I scan through my recent bookmarks in Pinboard and pull out the most interesting ones, then write a bit of commentary about them. This could be automated via Mailchimp’s feature to build an email through the RSS feed generated by Pinboard, but I suspect this would end up taking more work to edit and so on than I currently expend doing it manually.
My blog
Articles I curate only currently appear in the footer of my blog as a widget called ‘Link list’. I very much doubt anybody looks at it. In the past I did have automated posts collecting recently bookmarked links together, which I lost when I recently rehosted my site. I ought to look into reinstating this, as I think it can be pretty useful.
What others are doing
I asked on Twitter how others curate, and these are the responses I got by the time of publishing this post:
@davebriggs scanning rss feeds of all my fave blogs/ news sources on Netvibes and using Buffer to url shorten/ bookmark and schedule or post
— Jemima (she/her) 🙈 @JemimaG@mastodon.me.uk (@JemimaG) December 8, 2014
@davebriggs Press/Feedly for rss + tweetdeck -> Instapaper for stuff to read, Pinboard for stuff to share (which autogenerates blog posts)
— Stefan Czerniawski (@pubstrat) December 8, 2014
What is your curation workflow? It would be great to hear about it!
Planning digital engagement
I recorded this a little while ago to go alongside some other training and consulting work I was doing at the time.
I basically explain how to plan out digital engagement work to ensure it is most likely to succeed, by thinking about your own objectives, the needs of the people you want to engage with, and that sort of thing.
It refers to a template throughout – you can download a copy of that here – it’s in PowerPoint format.
Hope it’s useful!
Content so good you’d pay for it
I’m a massive fan of the writing of Ben Thompson – and so should you be. The analysis he provides on his blog is superb – and it’s free!
Interestingly, he also provides extra content for a fee – a daily email with even more in depth analysis of the technology topics of the day. Just $10 a month, or $100 for the whole year. Members also get access to a forum where you can chat to Ben and others who are interested in his work.
I subscribe – the extra content is great, the forum helpful, but more than anything, I want to support this guy to keep doing great work.
Ben posted recently that he has broken through the magic barrier of 1,000 paying subscribers. 1,000 True Fans is the title of a post by Kevin Kelly outlining how the long tail of the internet means that focused, high quality niche communities can be financially sustainable.
So, 1,000 members doesn’t sound like a lot, relative to all the people on the Internet, or the memberships of supersites like Facebook or Twitter. But 1,000 people paying $100 a year is $100,000 a year! To do a thing you love doing! Add in a few consulting days a month and there’s a good living to be made.
I’ve written before about how I would love to find a way to be able to just live off content creation. After all, I have this blog, with thousands of readers, an email newsletter with over 700 people subscribed, a reasonably popular podcast, and my webinars seem to go down well too.
Of course, it’s hard work. I’d imagine the pressure can build up when you have to produce really great content every single day. Figuring out what people might pay for and what they would expect for free isn’t easy either.
But it is super-interesting to know that to make a living as an independent is achievable and that you don’t need to have Buzzfeed levels of traffic to do it.
Building online communities webinar recording
I had a good time presenting a webinar this morning about managing online communities.
As always, I recorded the whole thing for your infotainment: