Content curation in less than 6 minutes a day

Steady, smart content curation can help grow the number of return visitors you have to your online group and encourage higher participation.

You can do this by filtering out all the rubbish and showing your group members all the good stuff.

In exchange, they start paying more attention to your group and are more likely to participate and contribute good stuff themselves.

This is a step-by-step look at how I do my daily content curation. Nothing fancy:

You can even read a recent blog showing the slides used in a recent webinar for the Online Facilitators Community by Steve Dale on Content Curation.

Less time than it takes to make a cup of tea?

Can you content curate in less time that it takes to make a cup of tea.  I believe you can.

As the Telegraph has mentioned “Scientists have discovered that the key to the best tasting brew is to let it sit for six minutes before drinking.”

 

Seeking

I did all of these things once, to get my toolset in order:

• Set up Google Alerts using key words
• Set up Feedly (Google Reader Alternative)
• Set up Tweetdeck (Add Columns to include relevant hash tags e.g. #kmers = Knowledge Management)
• Set up Scoop It with a theme (Install the Scoop it bookmarklet to my browser)

Add my favourite blogs, news feeds and anything interesting from Google Alerts into Feedly

This should take about 30 minutes and is a one of thing.

 

Making Sense (Morning)

Review my Feedly / Google Reader list.

• If a headline looks interesting, I read the story.
• If I think my group will find it useful, I open the story in a separate browser window. The reason: You probably first read the post in Feedly / Google Reader. You need to view the article on the publishing web site for the next step.
• Click the Scoop It bookmarklet

 

This will appear

 

Add an insight.  You can also post this to other social networks as well.

 

Making Sense (Afternoon)

Go to Tweetdeck and review the topics of discussion and links on the hashtags you follow.  If one really stands out or is getting a lot of retweets.  Open the tweet and if it is of interest use your scoop it bookmarket.

 

 

Sharing

There’s a whole range of ways you can share all the great content you have curated.

Scoop it offers the option to embed a live stream which could be used in your Announcements, Wiki etc.

It also provides a RSS Feed which can be used in conjunction with Blastacasta to import the feed into the group

It also has a new addition of newsletters.  If you select Downlad as zip file and open this in a webpage.  You can copy this and add it to a Blog post.

But I prefer the old fashioned way.  Because this stimulates more conversation and return visits.  And that is to pick the best content and use it to stimulate a discussion.

6 minutes a day – that’s all it takes

Based on the work of Ian Laurie http://www.portent.com

Are you a content curator?

Yesterday we were luckily enough to have Steve Dale, voted number 25 in the most influential knowledge management bloggers.  Run a webinar on Content Curation for the Online Facilitators Community.

Content curation is an up and coming skill and is seen as part of the new digital literacy.

It probably has more relevance to people who are knowledge workers, working in social media and collaboration.  But can be useful to anyone.  I suppose most of us are really knowledge workers now.

It also has very strong links to Personal Knowledge Management which Harold Jarche talks about.

So here is Steve’s presentation from slideshare.

Are you ready for the new literacy?

Last week I attended a great conference by International Society for Knowledge Organisation set up and hosted by Steve Dale.

The topics covered included Social media tools, social networks, intranet, social complexity and knowledge sharing

Copies of the presentation from the day are available here

The bit I was especially interested in was the new roles, new skills for the 21st century knowledge professional

Steve covered two areas that I have a particular interest in Community Management and Digital Curation.

Steve mentions that Harold Jarche suggests that Labour is replaceable Talent is not as well as pointing to Dr Daniel Churchill work looking at the future worker and two new skills that are appearing.

Tool Literacy and Digital literacy.

Steve suggests we are moving away from institutions and moving towards a networked and community based way of working.  So having skills in Community Management and Digital Content Curation are handy to have up your sleeve.

What is Community Management?  I still like Dion Hinchcliffe’s explanation of a jack of all trades.  Covering all aspects of Platform management, Project Management, Product Management, Customer Management, Professional Development, Brand Management, Advertising and Marketing, Staff Development, Business Planning, community Management and Content Management

What is Content Curation?  Beth Kanter describes it as the process of sorting through the vast amounts of content on the web and presenting it in a meaningful and organized way around a specific theme.

I will be organising a webinar with Steve Dale in the future to talk about content curation in more detail and to show some handy tips and tricks in how you can use a range of tools to help keep you in the know.  But if you would like to see more of Steve’s work, check out his Slideshare and Blog

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.