Learning Objectives:
- Compare and contrast different curating technologies (Feedly, Diigo, Flickr) (Analyze)
- Develop curation map/plan (Create)
- Prepare curated resource using technology of your choice (Feedly, Diigo, Flickr) (Apply)
- Explain why they chose one technology over the other (Analyze)
- Examine how all technologies are connected on the web (Analyze)
- Discuss content curation relationship with the Internet communities and how it affects the World Wide Web as a whole (Understand)
Introduction:
In this part of the Unit you will be exploring additional technologies (Diigo and Feedly) that can be utilized for content curation and resource aggregation.
The first tool that we will be exploring is a social bookmarking tool called Diigo. Social Bookmarking moves the common activity of saving web bookmarks (or shortcuts) from you specific, individual browser to a website. Bookmarking to a social bookmark site benefits the user in two broad ways:
Personal Utility
On a completely personal level, and if for no other reason, social bookmarking makes your bookmarks much more accessible. A basic problem with the traditional bookmark is that each bookmark you save is available only on that particular browser on that particular computer. What happens when you need to get to your bookmark for an important site in a different browser? What if you are traveling or in a lab or working from a hotel or borrowing a computer? Social bookmarks remain available anywhere… the only bookmark you have to remember will be the service you use (in our case: http://diigo.com/).
Another common problem with bookmarks– as we will see in more detail below– is that browsers organize bookmarks using folders, which is great when you are filing pieces of paper which must go in only one place, but not so great when you are dealing with links, which are just a pointer, not a physical thing. The problems with folders include dealing with bookmarks that fit into more than one folder, remembering how your folder organization works and finding bookmarks that might be in many places. Social bookmarks, which use tags (keywords) for organizing avoid the trouble when making the bookmark and make them much easier to use later.
Social Enhancement
Beyond the personal level, social bookmark systems enhance your bookmark collection by turning them into an entry point for finding more resources. The ability to look at what other people have bookmarked using the same tags and to look at collections belonging to other people who have bookmarked the same item(s) as you greatly enhance your reach. It is much more likely that a bookmark someone else has taken the time to save and tag with a particular keyword will be useful than simple keyword searching in Google.
Once you find a tag or collection or person that has interesting information, you can easily monitor it/them to see when new things are added and copy that same resource if it is useful.
There are many more features in social bookmarking systems, but these two dimensions are the most important!
The second tool we will be exploring is Feedly.
Feedly is a web feed of aggregated resources which is another way to curate the content you collect. A web feed is a continually updated list of what is new on a particular website or web page. These lists are designed to be read by computers, which display them in ways that are useful to us mere humans… most often the tools used to read feeds resemble email programs, showing you what is “new” on websites you visit regularly.
Web Feed is a generic term for these lists of updated information… you will often run into the technical terms RSS and Atom (and even sometimes a little orange rectangle saying XML), which refer to the way the list is made. For our purposes they are interchangeable.