Flipboard on Philip Sheldrake

Why I've decided to stop curating a Flipboard magazine

Wed, 18 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

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.

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:

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.