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Thisi is a review by Rob Alderson of Maria Popova's Curator's Code from Brainpickings that I curated last week. The internet, Maria says, is a “whimsical rabbit hole of discovery” which works thanks to “an intricate ecosystem of ‘link love’" and the code is an “an effort to keep this whimsical rabbit hole open by honoring discovery through an actionable code of ethics.” A “codified common standard,” can, she believes, do “for attribution of discovery what Creative Commons has done for image attribution.”
Content curation is all the rage. The rank and file folks online tend to get overwhelmed by the amount of information spewing from the firehose. For the most part, they don't want to know every l...
Why curate? What is the value of curating for teachers? Really –what is the benefit of curating in terms of the learning goals – enduring understandings and 21st century skills for our students?
Via Nik Peachey
Do you suffer from info overload? Here is an article that provides different ways to organize it all into at least some reasonable matter. Jeff Dunn shared a few of his favorites: Pocket Pinterest Diigo BagTheWeb PearlTrees Bundlr Storify StumbleUpon Twitter and others
Robin Good: Maria Popova has just launched a classy and laudable initiative, focused on increasing awareness and in highlighting the importance of honoring always where or via who you have got to a certain article, report, video or image. Credit and attribution are not just a "formal" way to comply with rules, laws and authors but an incredibly powerful emebddable mechanism to augment findability, discovery, sinergy and collaboration among human being interested in the same topic. She writes: "In an age of information overload, information discovery — the service of bringing to the public’s attention that which is interesting, meaningful, important, and otherwise worthy of our time and thought — is a form of creative and intellectual labor, and one of increasing importance and urgency. A form of authorship, if you will. Yet we don’t have a standardized system for honoring discovery the way we honor other forms of authorship and other modalities of creative and intellectual investment, from literary citations to Creative Commons image rights." For this purpose Curator's Code was created. Curator's Code is first of all "a movement to honor and standardize attribution of discovery across the web" as well as a web site where you can learn about the two key types of attribution that we should be using:
a) Via - which indicates a link of direct discovery
b) Hat tip - Indicates a link of indirect discovery, story lead, or inspiration. Each one has now a peculiar characterizing icon that Curator's Code suggests to integrate in your news and content publication policies. Additionally and to make it easy for anyone to integrate these new attribution icons in their work, Curator's Code has created a free bokkmarklet which makes using proper attribution a matter of one clic. Hat tip to Maria Popova and Curator's Code for launching this initiative. Whether or not you will sign Curator's Code pledge, become an official web site supporting it, or adopt its bookmarklet instantly is not as important as the key idea behind it: by providing credit and attribution to pieces of content you find elsewhere, you not only honestly reward who has spent time to create that content, but you significantly boost the opportunity for thousands of others to connect, link up to, discover and make greater sense of their search for meaning. Read Maria Popova introductory article to Curator's Code: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/03/09/curators-code/ How to use the Curator's bookmarklet: http://vimeo.com/38243275 Healthy. Inspiring. 9/10 Curator's Code official web site: http://curatorscode.org/ This is very helpful and will share - thanks Robin!
Via Robin Good
Robin Good: I think Sam Gliksman has a vital point here. The point is this: there is no better way to learn something than to research, organize and build a personal framework of information, facts, resources, tools and stories around it. And yes, if I do think about it, I can only confirm that my in my experience this has certainly been the case. Rather than learn by memorizing and going through a predetermined path that someone else has arbitrarily set for me (and thousands of others), by curating my own learning path and curriculum, I am forced to dive into discovery and sense-making for the very start, two essential ingredients for effective learning. The change is evident: from passive memorization of predetermined info, to personal exploration, discovery and sense-making of what I am interested in pursuing. With such an approach, the replacement of classic teachers with curators who can act as guides, coaches and wise advisors to my exploratory wanderings may be vital to the success of many learners. Curation can therefore be a revolutionary concept applicable both to learners and their approach as well as to the new "teachers" who need to become trusted guides in specific areas of interest. Insightful. Informative. 8/10 Full original article: http://ipadeducators.ning.com/profiles/blogs/supplementing-textbooks - thank you Robin for curating this topic
Via Robin Good
This piece was written by Eric Brown for social media explorer. I selected this article because it reaffirms what many of us already know but it's still good to see this in writing: Content curation and Media Curation (a mix of machine aggregation and Human Curation) are starting to pick up steam. Curated by Jan Gordon covering "Content Curation, Social Business and Beyond" Read full article: [http://bit.ly/kmZvJg]
Via janlgordon
MarketingProfs guest bloggers Robert Wu of CauseVox and Annie Escobar of ListenIn Pictures share tips for telling stories through videos that draw others into your cause. Curating is one way of telling other people's stories your way. This article gives you tips and questions to ask yourself before you create a video or tell any story where you want a call to action. We are all branders, and we are all storytellers. I teach storytelling so like the way the author put how plot structures can be used. In “Made to Stick,” Chip and Dan Heath suggest that there are three dominant plots that inspire people to take action. (http://www.amazon.com/Made-Stick-Ideas-Survive-Others/dp/1400064287) Instead of telling your audience what you do daily, focus on inspiring your viewers to feel part of something that matters. Tell them a story that appeals not only to who they are but also to who they strive to be.
Robin Good: Amber Naslund, at Brass Tack Thinking blog, has a great article touching on the importance of curation and on the danger of easily selling personal self-expression and serendipitous re-sharing of other people's content with true content curation. And she is so damn right about this. Here a few key highlights from her article: " 1) To me – and by definition – curation requires conscious thought with the purpose of adding value, context, or perspective to a collection of things. It’s deliberate work, gathering things together for a reason and lending a keen editing eye to those assets, whether it be pieces of art or pieces of writing. ... 2) Turning your Twitter feed into a clockwork-scheduled stream of all the stuff you find in your RSS feed is not curation, it’s distribution. And since collecting and redistributing content is arguably easier than creating it, everyone does it. Which serves to create a great deal of noise, and as we’ve lamented for some time now, it becomes increasingly difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff and home in on information resources that are consistently valuable, and favor mindful selection and sharing over optimizing a feed to populate a bunch of links and drive traffic or gain fans and followers. 3) Can curation be accomplished online? I think so. But it’s rarely what we actually see happening when we immerse ourselves in social networks, and it’s not what we’re doing when we click the “share” button over and over again. ... 4) The business case for curating content has long been that you can become an expert resource for others, a trusted source of information or expertise that sets you apart. But becoming a trusted source of information implies a willingness and ability to apply filters, to have exacting standards, to discern the good from the simply popular, the valuable from the gimmicked and hyped. Which requires work. A lot of it. Not just an app and the ability to put your collection and distribution on autopilot." Thank you Amber, you are so damn right. Insightful. 9/10 Full article: http://www.brasstackthinking.com/2012/02/curation-saturation-and-why-we-might-need-information-friction-after-all/ (Image credit: http://Streetfilms.org)
Via Robin Good
Jani Gordon selected this piece by Dino Joannides for Lingospot because it tackles a much asked and frequently tackled answered of "What is Curation?" in the most appropriate manner possible. That is to say, he answers the question with an excellent example of curation, complete with multiple links to articles that prove his points. Some points that caught my attention: **Content curation means different things to a variety of stakeholders, be they journalists, editors, bloggers, business executives or marketers. **Fred Wilson the Venture Capitalist and blogger sees curation as an essential element in today's media landscape as indicated by one of his posts here . **Some argue that curation could actually save media. **Others have argued that there is a new type of curation that is in effect the New Search. He closes by suggesting traditional editors make decisions based only upon content that was produced internally, whereas the newer Curation mixes this with external content. The determination of what is given prominence remains the same. The difference is that now, this role is undertaken by professional journalists, content marketers, bloggers" or in reality, anyone that publishes online". What do you think? Curated by Jan Gordon covering "Content Curation, Social Business and Beyond" Read full article: [http://bit.ly/w81bwP]
Via janlgordon
Rob Diana writes: "The core of my concern is that curators need tools to find those stories that may not be as popular as others.
Otherwise, all news comes from a few select sites that are read by the masses. Obviously, this is not what we want to have happen." He couldn't be more right.
The rest of his article, dating back to November, offers good insight into what the 1% of former Google Reader was really doing and what they are looking for now that it is gone. Insightful. 8/10 Read the full article: http://regulargeek.com/2011/11/12/google-reader-is-not-about-reading-news-it-is-about-curation/
Via Robin Good
This piece was posted by Tim Ryan a contributor for PSFKI thought this would be of interest to anyone who is curating content. Digg is doing something very clever and it's a whole new forum where you can contribute and curate and possibly find new audiences for your brand. "Digg Newsrooms is a new channel introduced by the online content curator that uses bot's are all the channels by topic: http://digg.com/newsrooms Selected by Jan Gordon covering "Content Curation, Social Media and Beyond"
Via janlgordon
The media world is changing, due to new devices from which viewers can access content and the ease of finding content on-demand. This article is written for whose main product is video, like Netflix and Hollywood studios. Video comes in different forms: DVDs, online, and streamed. Each medium is different. "Viewers still look for the best content, but in many cases, it’s limited to the best content available on whatever devices they’re using." Consumers can access their content whenever they want and on a wide range of devices. The media companies that take this into account that they have to be everywhere anytime, will win. Content is only as good as its distribution. If content is not available when a user wants it, they'll go somewhere else. So the media companies have to distribute their content on pursuing a multiplatform strategy, whichever device the viewer uses to watch content, they risk alienating and eventually losing that audience.
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BGR $57 worth of awesome paid iPhone apps you can now get for free (6 apps total) BGR Now that well over 10 million people own Apple's new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus smartphones, it's time to start filling them with great new apps.
"School librarians can use curation as a tool to position themselves as information and communication authorities and information professionals." (Content Curation Not an Option in Schools: Librarians To Lead the Change | @scoopit via @RobinGood
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." Rightful. 8/10 Full article: http://www.kitsch-slapped.com/2012/06/facts-questions-on-blogging-curating-collecting/
Via Robin Good
There’s so much information online just begging to be curated: news, social media, images, video, websites… the list goes on. This is a great list, but now I'm more confused than ever. Which one do I use to curate? I like Scoopit and then pin what I find the most useful to my boards on Pinterest. Whatever I scoop or pin can go to my Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn accounts. They are all connected. I can add to Google+ if I want. Now I can gather content on my iPad. I love Flipboard and News360. Just learned about persona/ Scoopit and Pinterest and persona/ Oh My!!! Too much! I think that if you really want to build a name for yourself as a curator, pick the right ones and don't spread yourself too thin. When you curate, then make sure what you write is being shared by others. I'm going to review these because there might be something better than what I'm doing now. I have a WordPress site (barbarabray.net) so will be checking out the plugin Dashter so I can curate right to my site.
This is a post from August 2010 but found it to be really interesting with some good points for curators. Yes, you can use Twitter for curation. The author talks about mixing content that your audience will find interesting similar to a DJ. "As a Content Curator, you should be entertaining." 1. First realized that you ARE a subject matter expert. 2. Know your market. 3. Search via hashtags and alerts. 4. Know the "Power of Three" to effectively engage. 5. Know that how you write your tweets is just as important as what you are tweeting. 6. Elevate your peers. 7. Develop good taste! 8. Become a valued resource to your community. 9. Be the good news channel. 10. Know "when" to tweet. 11. Become part of a bigger conversation. 12. Follow industry conferences. 13. Understand there are differences if you curate for a global audience. 14. Content Curators need to follow a lot of people. 15. Curate Twitter lists that others will want to follow. 16. Become a trusted resource. 17. Track your results. This works for Scoopit and Pinterest and other curating tools also. Good read!
It's a good question! The fact is that blogs are filled with articles about Pinterest. For my part, I am absolutely convinced that this kind of social media will wreak havoc among users... and you? [note mg] It's addictive, fun, visually appealing, and easy, so it's no wonder Pinterest, the popular visual bookmarking site, has hooked millions of users. That said, the site’s growth (below) was fairly flat from its launch in early 2010 until September 2011. But since then, it’s simply been going gangbusters, begging the question--why now? Here are three reasons why we think it’s become so attractive. 1. Pinterest rides (and defines) a new trend: social relevance. Pinterest is successfully riding a new trend wave in the social space, moving mechanisms for content sharing beyond connections (friends) and towards relevance, effectively broadening the social horizon for us content addicts. Read more: http://www.fastcompany.com/1818729/why-are-we-all-suddenly-pinterested
Via Martin Gysler, Jim Lerman, catspyjamasnz
Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest – What Happens Every 60 Seconds In Social Media? Some very interesting information: >Did you know that every 60 seconds Twitter sees (on average) 175,000 new tweets? >Over that same time period, Pinterest receives 1,090 visitors >LinkedIn absorbs 7,610 searches >Flickr users upload 3,125 photos? >If you think those numbers are impressive, how about this: each and every minute of the day, 700,000 messages are sent on Facebook >two million videos are watched on YouTube. This data is courtesy of a new infographic from marketing consultancy firm Social Jumpstart, which takes a closer look and tries to be as accurate as possible at what happens in social media every 60 seconds. Selected by Jan Gordon covering "Content Curation, Social Business and Beyond"
Via Jonha Richman, Dennis T OConnor, janlgordon
In his book Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson writes: “...most great ideas first take shape in a partial, incomplete form.” … “Liquid networks create an environment where those partial ideas can connect... they help complete ideas." Twitter is a liquied network. How do we curate and capture these ideas around an interactive experience? This is where Twitter chats come in using hashtags. 1. Choose a chat. I follow #edchat and #edtech, but use other hashtags depending on the content. 2. Follow a chat. If you are not sure what chats to follow, follow the people who are chatting about the things you are interested in. 3. Participate in the chat. If you like something someone tweeted, retweet it or reply to them but remember to use a hashtag to keep the chat going.
Megan Garber at The Atlantic has a great story on how an online community of long-form articles readers has moved its natural skill one step up by, making of its most valuable curated list, a commercial ebook. "At the end of last year, Longreads, one of the curators of lengthy, magazine-y stories that has sprung up to help fans of long-form journalism find great stuff online, released a list highlighting the top ten longreads of 2011. The list included such savor-worthy pieces as Maria Bustillos' examination of David Foster Wallace's private self-help library, for The Awl; Jeff Wise's investigation into the crash of Air France 447, for Popular Mechanics; and Amy Harmon's exploration of adult autism, for The New York Times. The list was, in other words, fantastic. Today, the list is taking a new form -- as an ebook, which is available for $6.99 on Amazon. The folks at Longreads have licensed seven of the original collection's stories, working out a revenue sharing arrangement between the pieces' authors and the stories' original publishers to ensure that -- in vague IP-ese -- both content creators and rights-holders benefit from the book's sale." Read the full story: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/01/when-a-web-community-becomes-a-book-publisher/251560/ (Curated by Robin Good) I'm wondering if this could be a way for students to collaborate as curators and then publish an eBook as a community of learners. Just an idea!!
Via Robin Good
The Institute for the Future and the University of Phoenix have teamed up to produce, this past spring, an interesting report entitled Future Work Skills 2020. Thank you Robin Good for sharing and curating this research! By looking at the set of emerging skills that this research identifies as vital for future workers, I can't avoid but recognize the very skillset needed by any professional curator or newsmaster. It should only come as a limited surprise to realize that in an information economy, the most valuable skills are those that can harness that primary resource, "information", in new, and immediately useful ways. And being the nature of information like water, which can adapt and flow depending on context, the task of the curator is one of seeing beyond the water, to the unique rare fish swimming through it. The curator's key talent being the one of recognizing that depending on who you are fishing for, the kind of fish you and other curators could see within the same water pool, may be very different. Here the skills that information-fishermen of the future will need the most: 1) Sense-making: ability to determine the deeper meaning or significance of what is being expressed 2) Social intelligence: ability to connect to others in a deep and direct way, to sense and stimulate reactions and desired interactions 3) Novel and adaptive thinking: proficiency at thinking and coming up with solutions and responses beyond that which is rote or rule-based 4) Cross-cultural competency: ability to operate in different cultural settings 5) Computational thinking: ability to translate vast amounts of data into abstract concepts and to understand data-based reasoning 6) New media literacy: ability to critically assess and develop content that uses new media forms, and to leverage these media for persuasive communication 7) Transdisciplinarity: literacy in and ability to understand concepts across multiple disciplines 8) Design mindset: ability to represent and develop tasks and work processes for desired outcomes 9) Cognitive load management: ability to discriminate and filter information for importance, and to understand how to maximize cognitive functioning using a variety of tools and techniques 10) Virtual collaboration: ability to work productively, drive engagement, and demonstrate presence as a member of a virtual team Critical to understand the future ahead. 9/10 Curated by Robin Good Executive Summary of the Report: https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapolloresearchinstitute.com%2Fsites%2Fdefault%2Ffiles%2Ffuture-work-skills-executive-summary.pdf  Download a PDF copy of Future Work Skills 2020: https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapolloresearchinstitute.com%2Fsites%2Fdefault%2Ffiles%2Ffuture-skills-2020-research-report.pdf  
Via Robin Good, janlgordon, catspyjamasnz
Online 'communities of interest' are becoming increasingly influential when it comes to developing reach and products on the web. But how can brands engage with these persuasive groups and share their expertise? I am connecting with people I never knew so much faster using curation tools. I am learning something new everyday and connecting to experts on specific topics who I never knew before. This is going to take me to places I am not aware of now. Watch out 2012!
Via witszen
Scoop.it, the startup that approaches Web content curation by letting you create a topic-specific blog-style feed that others can follow. "For each of the topics you manage, Scoop.it will suggest recent articles from around the Web which you may wish to share. Each suggestion can be shared to your page or removed with a couple of taps. If you want to share something manually, meanwhile, you have two options; you can either enter the URL, title, and a note to go with it, or there’s a bookmarklet you can install to share easily from the iPhone’s own browser." My concern is real curation. Just a couple of taps to share an article that you may or may not read on your iPhone. I find the comments from real curators very helpful. Need to try this to see how it works before I comment anymore.
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