journalism

Curation duration

All the rage in fashion this winter? Curation*. Tool after tool after tool. Splices of networks, filters by geography, interest, type of media or time of day. I turned on a self-publicizing service called Paper.li not too long ago. There are readers, there is sharing, but there are few ‘subscribers’ so in my eyes they must be missing a few things.

Here’s a sample publication I put together for Themeefy (bummer they probably have to pronounce that correctly for people). It was quite a bit of work figuring out how to ‘simply’ put it together.

http://www.themeefy.com/miniature?tid=47205

For some people, curation is what they hear in the hallway at school or work. For some, it’s Twitter from 7:00 to 7:10 am. For some, we rely on Facebook or other destination sites to use their own algorithms to determine what’s ‘important’ for us. They use things like ‘most shared’, ‘most discussed’ and ‘most liked’. Often what’s most discussed is not what is most important or interesting to me, however, or even you, so that fails in a lot of ways too.

How much time are we spending curating each day? Doesn’t this defeat the purpose?

* Why do I have to add the word “curation” to every dictionary in every program I have? Certainly curation has been a word used in other industries for many years.

Lisacast.com Daily on Paper.li – Try paper.li

Lisacast.com Daily http://ht.ly/5yjNn thank you @CNN @pitchforkmedia @exponentialedge @zeldman

Social Circulation

How To Create a Webzine by Compiling Your Twitter and Facebook Worlds

This is an excellent way. This site is really intuitive, very easy. You can pick a few keywords or tags and publish the content each day (or twice a day, or weekly). Readers can view the information is a relatively well formatted zine style. Click on mine to check it out. If you subscribe, you’ll follow updates from me plus, all of the people I follow. Paper.li creates it for you automatically.

Focused Content

I put this together in less than 10 minutes and I’m sure you can do it too. I hadn’t seen the site before. My focus for this site was an experiment for  “new energy”, and related aspects: like “#windpower”. If you view it, you’ll notice, #windpower is now a menu item. Click through to read content tagged wind power. Easy to read, huh? This is a nice way to further open your social imprint.

This is an easy add on for any newspaper site, but it also serves the interests of a citizen journalist who simply want to tie Twitter and Facebook together in a nice tidy webzine. Webzines were popular in the 80′s  90′s. Well, the 80′s 90′s are back.

[*I am corrected by a loyal Twitter friend, webzines were really more in the 1990's.... and I agree. In 1994, I took a Basic programming class in high school, but the course was limited to programming principles. In retrospect this was probably a big reason I ended up in a profession marketing technology. A couple of years later I was learning Pascal from a local community college (making up for high school science credits). As proof of the web's embryonic state, the course was available via television but I thought that was pretty cool, and much preferred to sitting next to the distractions of being in class.

Last night on the news, I saw a piece on computer-based distance learning programs. They were highlighting a family home schooling their 3 children. I have also seen these programs, especially for math, being used in public and private schools. Teachers have to be excited about this, because it places some of the responsibility back on the student and parent where it should be. Parents must be excited because they have a window into what and how the student is really learning.]