The great collective

When there is live TV coverage of an event do you watch the entire broadcast or just the highlights? The answer of course will depend on a number of factors, including how interested you are in the event, and how much time you have available to you. It's exactly the same with content on the web. Earlier this month I wrote about the 'tsunami of content' online that threatens to swamp us all. Just about everyone using the web today is creating content on a daily basis. How do we find the gold dust content amidst all the dross and trivia that exists on the internet?

Search engines have their place, and of course, we tend to use them a lot. Some of the more intelligent search engines are morphing into answer engines, computing your question against highly structured data (see for example Wolfram Alpha), and providing focused information. Often, for busy professionals, even this is not enough. Then there is problem of how to organise your content when you actually find it. Many are using tools such as Delicious.com or Diigo.com to tag, store and share their favourite content. These tools are also excellent and well used, but are they enough to cope with the vast quantity of content we want to keep? Wouldn't it be nice to have up to date, regular content, all presented in one place?

Enter the digital curation tools. There is a very special breed of web users out there that we call 'the curators.' In a sense, curators are a little like their counterparts in museums, because they tend to trade in very specialised, focused content. Anyone can be a digital curator. As a part of the great collective, curators choose a topic they are interested in, and then search and display dynamic content related to this topic, using one or more digital curation tools. They are collectors of the virtual and ephemeral and they have some great tools. Scoop.it is a very useful and attractive curation tool, enabling summaries and snapshots of related content from blogs, media sharing sites and other social media to be displayed, usually in two columns. Check out my own Scoop.it site Future School. Storify is another style of curation tool, enabling the curator to search for specific content from social media sites that can be sequenced into a blog style story. The curator can add their own text, and embed the final product into their blog. This short video explains how it's done. A third curation tool is Pearltrees, which works as a kind of connective network of content, which can be shared, repurposed and linked in a number of ways across social media platforms. The Pearltrees Teams group function also enables users to collaborate to create shared curated collections of content. Here's the video demonstrating how Pearltrees works. All three tools allow conversations and further sharing, and all three are very attractive as a means of making sense of the vast amount of content there is on the web. There are of course many other tools being developed that can also perform similar tasks of consolidating and accumulating content, and offering it in a digest form to busy professionals. The great collective it seems, are becoming the great collectors.

Image by Dieter Drescher


The great collective by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.