Content curation for your online group using Google alerts, Google reader, Scoop it and Blastacasta
Have you been thinking about content curating for your online group or community?
So why should you currate content? Well one of the roles that are mentioned in Dion Hinchcliffes jack of all trades is content management.
And content curation fits nicely into this area.
Having the facilitators flagging interesting content to the group is always a good thing, and there are a few simple things that you can use to make it easy for you.
After a while it could just be one or two clicks and a new piece of content could be available in your online group.
I’ll explain how you can do it.
Let’ start with the Google Alerts. Go to Google Alerts and enter the keywords that are relevant to your group
Everyday you will now receive an email with a summary from across the web on your chosen topic. You will start to see the same people talking about your subject or specific websites dedicated to the topic.
Next to Google Reader. If you have started to see the same people and websites appearing in your Google Alerts why not subscribe to their RSS Feed. Also Google will start to recommend blogs and websites to follow based on your feeds.
Really Google Alerts and Google Reader are the content collection stages. Now you get onto the content curation.
I have been using a website called ScoopIt. Which is a content curation site which creates an online magazine of content that you believe is interesting. But allows you to embed it into websites in a similar way as a YouTube video or to create a RSS feed which can be used with other sites to be embedded into a website.
But allows you to embed it into websites in a similar way as a YouTube video
Or to create a RSS feed which can be used with other sites to be embedded into a website.
And this is where Blastacasta comes in
You can add the RSS Feed into Blastacasta
And customise it in Blastacasta before taking the embed code to use in your group.
Please note to use the I frame version of the widget.
This is how it could look in your group
It sounds a lot more complicated to set up than it actually is.
Curating your content.
I also have a widget for Scoopit set up on my web browser toolbar, which is really helpful. So I can see a piece of interesting content. And within about 15 secs I can have it on my group.
This is how you I it.
Stage 1 – You find an interesting article, document or blog via Google alerts or Google reader.
Stage 2 – Select the Scoopit widget on your browser.
And this will open
90% of the time the title and content will be automatically filled in.
Stage 3 – Select Publish.
This will now appear in the group where you have added the widget from Scoopit or Blastacasta.
