curation – Dave Briggs

My content curation workflow

shutterstock_129038348 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.

Twitter

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.

Pocket

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.

Email

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 Gibbons (@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!

Link roundup

I find this stuff so you don’t have to:

Introducing Kind of Digital Exchange

It’s not the most exciting bit of technology in the world, but it could be very useful.

I read an awful lot of stuff on the web – thanks to Google Reader, it’s made really easy. Lots of people don’t have the time to do so, and are quite grateful to have useful items pointed out to them. I usually do this by putting links up on my Twitter profile, and the occasional link round up post here on the blog.

The trouble is that Twitter is a very ephemeral medium, and if people miss links, or don’t record them anywhere, then finding them again can be very tough. I’m also slightly uncomfortable that someone else has a hold of all this data! What’s needed is a way to record these things for posterity, and perhaps create a conversation around them.

So, in about an hour of fiddling, I made the Kind of Digital Exchange. It simply publishes links to stories I find interesting, with tags to enable easier searching, and the ability for people to leave comments.

As well as the main site, you can grab the RSS feed, get the results by email or follow the firehose on Twitter.

It’s very basic – just a bog standard WordPress instance and the free, open source, P2 theme. The interesting bit takes place away from the site, where I have set up the wonderful IFTTT to pump items I star in Google Reader into Exchange as posts within WordPress. This means that for me to share something via the site, I just click a single button.

It doesn’t have to be just me though. I’d be delighted if others could contribute. Using IFTTT as the spine, it’s easy to pull content in from other sites, whether Google Reader as I do, or maybe through Delicious bookmarks.

So, if you’re keen to start contributing links to the site, let me know and we can get it sorted. Of course, you can start commenting on links right away!

Will this become the digital engagement equivalent of something like the awesome Hacker News? Probably not. But it didn’t take long to put together, and if people find it useful, then that’s alright with me. Of course, if lots of people find it useful, I’ll throw some resources at it to give it a makeover and start to add some functionality. Stuff like:

user liking or upvoting of the best content
user tagging of articles
ability to reshare links on other networks

…and I am sure there’s a lot more too. There’s a page to share ideas.

So do please go and have a look, and maybe get involved. I was asked the other day where people in government can go to find examples of innovation and creative ideas. Other than say ‘look on Twitter’ it was hard to muster a proper response. Hopefully soon I’ll be able to say – ‘look on the Kind of Digital Exchange!’.

Link roundup

I find this stuff so you don’t have to:

The learning organization: an often-described, but seldom-observed phenomenon | Harold Jarche – "What should a true learning organisation look like?"
Connecting and engaging inside your organisation – "Social networks are inherently bottom up and user powered. In IBM, BlueIQ worked because it had buy-in from the very top. You need both otherwise time is wasted overcoming resistance."
Local 2.0: How digital technology empowers local communities | The Young Foundation – Useful report covering how digital innovation can impact on communities.
The order I check things | Stephen Hale – I love reading how people do this stuff!
Cutting down on cookies: practical tips | Puffbox.com – Useful tips from SImon Dickson.

Options for curating online content

Curation is an answer to the problem of information overload. There’s so much stuff online these days – how do you read it all? Or rather, how do you decide what’s worth your attention?

A way for an individual or organisation to build a community or network digitally is to become a trusted curator – in other words, getting popular by sorting the wheat from the chaff on other’s behalf.

There are quite a few tools out there to help you do it. Here’s a few.

1. Social bookmarking

I use Pinboard, but there’s also Delicious and Diigo, amongst others. You see a site or page you like, so you save it to your bookmarks usually using a button on your browser. You describe the link, tag it with keywords, and it joins a public list that others can browse.

I also republish all my bookmarks as occasionally posts here on the blog – I doubt if anyone ever actually looks at my Pinboard page.

2. Storify

Storify is a neat tool for bring content together in a single place around a certain event or topic. So whether it’s photos, videos, tweets, blog posts or whatever, every type of content can be added to a single page, making it potentially the top destination for someone wanting to find out about that topic.

3. Pinterest

A pretty new site this, and still invite-only I think. Pinterest is all about visual stuff, encouraging users to ‘pin’ images and videos they see on the web to their own ‘boards’ or group boards along shared themes.

There’s a big social element to Pinterest too, with users encouraged to ‘repine’ things they’ve seen on others boards to pass them on to their friends, and so on. Bit like retweeting I guess.

4. Paper.li

Paper.li is an automated curating thingy that pulls tweets and stories linked to in tweets together for you, publishing them in a daily ‘newspaper’ of useful content. This is all based on your own followers’ activity, so hopefully all the content ought to be relevant and interesting.

It’s good because it’s automated and you don’t have to do a lot to make it work. It’s bad because it’s automated and you don’t have a huge amount of control over what it publishes.

5. Tumblr

As well as being a blogging tool you can use to publish your own original pearls of wisdom, a lot of people use Tumblr to curate, by ‘reflagging’ stuff they’ve seen elsewhere. Again, Tumblr makes this easy by using a button in your browser. Increasingly popular amongst young people who wouldn’t normally be seen dead doing something as dorky as blogging, Tumblr’s a huge and growing network of people sharing, resharing and reresharing content.

It’s also home to some hilarious themed sites – like Glum Councillors, for example.

That’s it

There’s five from me – any more?

Bookmarks for August 5th through August 11th

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I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

Splashpath – “Splashpath is a free service for Leisure Operators to create, update and communicate swimming pool timetables”
The Value of Transparency Is At The Boundary between Government and Society – “Open government is not a way to outsource problem solutions to others.”
More on Apps for Elephants | Public Strategist – Further exposition from Stefan on the ‘should gov develop mobile apps?’ debate.
Devour – “Devour sifts out the best videos and posts the well-curated collection every weekday. Fewer cute kittens, fewer skateboarding nutshots, fewer tween heart throbs, and lots more awesome.”
Don’t Get Fireballed | brown blog – Nice guide to protecting a WordPress site from traffic overload.
Dig Up Political Influence | Poligraft – Looks interesting and cool, though not sure I fully understand it
Early History of HTML – 1990 to 1992 – “HTML is the language that powers the Web in many respects, as the lingua franca that Web browsers are expected to be able to render. HTML has had unprecedented levels of success, and the uptake is all the more surprising when you realise that it was only invented in 1990, and few people knew about it before 1993.”
10 Reasons NOT to Ban Social Media in Your Organization – Handy list.
UK ICT classes killing kids’ interest in tech – “The Royal Society is to investigate why British schools are failing to interest children in information technology – and why numbers taking classes are falling so fast.”
Crowdsourcing Is Far From Easy for Government – “Once again, this case proves the disconnect between engaging citizens (and voters) and engaging government employees. For open government to work, both aspects need to be addressed and possibly synchronized.”

You can find all my bookmarks on Delicious. There is also even more stuff on my shared Google Reader page.

You can also see all the videos I think are worth watching at my video scrapbook.

Bookmarks for March 21st through March 29th

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

Would Anyone Ever Say that Open Government Isn’t Great? – "Let’s not demonize good old e-government and let’s not overhype open government or government 2.0. Because what they have both in common is the willingness to help government become better."
Bristol City Council – blogging our web presence development work – "Us folks here at Bristol City Council have decided that as we continue to develop our web presence, in support of our wider business objectives, it’d make sense if we listened to the collective wisdom of our local digital community."
3 principles of innovative organisations – 100% Open – "As if we needed reminding, this exponential increase in connectivity and information sharing is fundamentally changing the way organisations operate and innovate."
Posting information online could preempt FOIA requests (3/18/10) — GovExec.com – "Taking advantage of technology and preemptively posting frequently requested information online could help agencies address new Freedom of Information Act queries and tackle backlogs"
The Seven Needs of Real-Time Curators – "I keep hearing people throw around the word “curation” at various conferences, most recently at SXSW. The thing is most of the time when I dig into what they are saying they usually have no clue about what curation really is or how it could be applied to the real-time world."
How Not To Tender For e-Consultation Software | Delib Blog – "This is an issue that’s vexed us for some years here, but having just seen the most ridiculous tender process we’ve ever come across, we really have to say something for the good of all. After all, if we ignore history, we are bound to repeat it."
Coding Horror: The Opposite of Fitts’ Law – "If we should make UI elements we want users to click on large, and ideally place them at corners or edges for maximum clickability — what should we do with UI elements we don't want users to click on? Like, say, the "delete all my work" button?"
Passion at work: blogging practices of knowledge workers – A Phd dissertation on blogging in the workplace. Not read it yet.
my_$publicservice.org – "What really matters in the end is that we listen, and having listened respond and improve."
Gordon Brown and Tim Berners Lee: Back to the Future? – "The result may be for the UK to remain stuck into its ambition to be seen as a leader in e-government (and now government 2.0) without ever really making it."
Public Sector Transformation Summit by Michele Ide-Smith – Great post with an awesome embedded slidedeck.

You can find all my bookmarks on Delicious. There is also even more stuff on my shared Google Reader page.

You can also see all the videos I think are worth watching at my video scrapbook.