I have curated a Flipboard magazine for 16 months with the super title: Social Business Design magazine – Purpose & policy, openness & agility, structure & culture, communication & trust. Organizing to create more value for all faster than otherwise.
Trips off the tongue.
The service dutifully informs me that of all the stuff I read I have considered 913 articles worthy of inclusion in my niche 'publication', attracting 73 followers and 670 viewers.
I first posted about this sort of stuff ten years ago, and posted my likes and dislikes of Flipboard a year ago, so I've given this some thought. And Flipboard ...
It's over.
It's not me. It's you.
I enjoy sharing, but sharing is insufficient. You need to understand that curation is about community and shared knowledge. Yet there is no community.
Who are these followers and viewers? I've no idea... it seems I must carry on my altruistic curation absent social feedback. Can we comment on what we find? No. We can share and discuss the curated content with our other communities on other social platforms, but not with this specific group of people coalesced around Social Business Design Magazine. Quite weird. Makes Flipboard start to look like a step worth skipping.
But what about Flipboard as knowledge repository? Perhaps each of us can enjoy the utility of my Flipboard magazine in isolation.
But alas, no. For those unfamiliar with Flipboard you may find this quite odd, but there is no way to search back through the corpus I've assembled here. Zero. It really is incredibly frustrating. And whether intentional or otherwise, I can find no way to export the collection to a service or format that makes it searchable.
How odd to be told there are no results for "socioveillance" when I know for definite that this content is flipped to my Flipboard magazine.
So that's it, we're done. This is the last item of content I will curate to my Flipboard magazine. Just to let followers know. Because I'm sociable like that.
Anon says:
I agree
18 February 2015 — 8:56 pm
Stuart Bruce says:
Being a social sort I'll comment. I disagree. Like you I 'curate' a Flipboard magazine 'Future of PR' http://sbpr.co/sbprnews. And in typical cobbler's children style I've been rubbish at promoting it. In fact beyond I think a single blog post and tweet when I started, and a mention an my email signature, I've done nothing to promote it widely. And like you I'm frustrated by how little I know about how well it works, which stories are being read, by who, where etc. Despite this I'm going to keep it up for two very good reasons. Firstly, it takes almost no time to do. Flipping a story from a third party website or my own blog adds just seconds to whatever else I'm doing with that story (e.g. reading, commenting, sharing on Twitter or saving in my OneNote knowledge library). So why wouldn't I do it? What's the downside, even if I only had five loyal and eager readers? The second is I already know it works. I've had a business lead out of it. A paying gig to speak at a conference in the Middle East I actually had to turn it down as I couldn't make the date so my ROI is still zero, but that's my fault. They told me they'd been reading it for a while and liked both my blog posts and crucially the articles that I shared and wanted me to do the keynote based on the issues in both. That's why I'm going to keep doing it. And finally, I'm one of your readers who will miss it. My main source for news are my RSS subscriptions in Feedly, but the Flipboard magazines I subscribe to provide me with news or article that sometimes I've missed. They are far more effective for doing that than say Twitter which has so much I'm still likely to miss them. For example I probably miss most of your tweets, but see most of what you share in Flipboard.
19 February 2015 — 7:45 am
Philip says:
Hi Stuart, I subscribe to your Flipboard magazine :-)
I too share my experiences and thoughts and interesting things I find in the hope that I can contribute and derive more value with others. In other words, it should be good for business. I've no problem with that. I've just concluded that Flipboard doesn't look like the most useful medium (ie, in relative terms) to do that.
I like Feedly, but found myself migrating to Inoreader last year for reasons I can't quite recall now.
20 February 2015 — 9:35 am
Philip says:
On another note, while having made the point here of course that no-one can converse about this article on Social Business Design magazine, it attracted five comments upon syndication to LinkedIn / pulse.
20 February 2015 — 9:37 am
Ken Pulverman says:
Philip, Any thoughts on what you'll be changing to? You are right, but there doesn't seem to be anything easier or better....yet for magazine-like curation, collections, and comments. Hopefully someone at Flipboard is listening to requirements here.
9 June 2015 — 10:45 pm
Philip says:
I use Zotero now, but more for personal use of course.
10 June 2015 — 8:04 am