Curation on Philip Sheldrake

Likes and dislikes of curating Social Business Design magazine for Flipboard

Tue, 18 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Social Business is such a nascent, deep and wide topic that I couldn’t do my thinking or clients justice without reading a lot. Everyday. So it occurred to me that if I’m taking the time to do this, then it makes sense to take a few seconds more to act as a filter and pass on the best bits to others.

I began curating a Flipboard magazine at the tail end of 2013. Flipboard tells me that the resulting magazine, Social Business Design , currently contains 210 articles and has attracted 128 readers.

Here’s what I like and what I don’t like about the process. Perhaps the upsides might prompt you to curate one yourself, and perhaps the Flipboard team might take note of the downsides. They do listen – Flipboard CEO Mike McCue (@mmccue ) has taken the time to respond to me via Twitter, as have several of his colleagues.

I like

Flipping

I like the simplicity. Drag the “flip it” bookmarklet from the Flipboard website to your browser’s bookmarks bar and you’re all set up. When I’m reading an article I decide to flip, I just click the bookmarklet and a little window appears, just like this:

Content - an illustrated history

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

UPDATE 1: Thank you to Wired , Mashable , @dmscott , @guykawaski and everyone else who has posted and shared our illustration :-)

UPDATE 2: Now available in Slideshare format .

UPDATE 3: Now available in for printing or anything else you fancy.

UPDATE 4: Now available in Spanish . Thanks to @FollowFlock & @rulsCC .

UPDATE 5: Taptu CEO Mitch Lazar loves our style (and the Taptu reference no doubt!) so we agreed earlier this week to apply our illustrative style to Taptu’s brand communications going forward. Cool.

UPDATE 6: The Slideshare format made the number 1 slot on Slideshare’s homepage for part of the day on the 27th Jan, and accrued over 4,000 views in 48 hours.

UPDATE 7: August 2011. Now available as a YouTube video. Don’t know why we didn’t think of it earlier! Embedded below.

No-one with a smattering of social Web literacy can fail to marvel at what’s taken place in recent history. The rate of change has been unprecedented.

Who would have thought thirty years ago that the Internet would go mainstream and the World Wide Web would transform content business models (and many other business models come to that) so radically?

Who would have thought twenty years ago that the average Joe would carry handheld devices as powerful as the Apple and Android devices?

Who would have thought ten years ago that consumers of media content could also, just as easily, be producers of media content?

Who would have thought five years ago that each and everyone of us could, with a stroke of a touch screen, design their own content channel and publish it.

It's all about curation

Fri, 10 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

If one word has dominated social media in the second half of 2010, for me it’s “curation”. We have reached a certain maturity in our interaction with media to question our traditional abdication of curation to others.

Until recently, people we don’t know decided what we might like to read, listen to and watch. Our only choice, should we disagree with theirs, was to switch channel; change newspaper; retune the radio. And employ technology like personal video recorders to collect what we might want to watch later.

Now a new breed of services is emerging, sometimes referred to as social news aggregators.