Social Bookmarking not so Delicious anymore

Posted on September 28, 2011 by Judy O'Connell

I remember the scramble to work out what to do when the rumours flew around about the demise of Delicious as a social bookmarking tool. Now the new Delicious has launched and the fallout for me is huge – I have to get re-organised all over again!

I read Delicious Relaunches. So, What Now for Educational Social Bookmarking? (Or, Rather: So What?) and jumped right on over to take a look at what happened.

Even before it was clear what the future of Delicious would be, people were turning elsewhere for alternatives, moving their data to sites Diigo, for example, or to Pinboard.

That was me – I managed to get paranoid about my bookmarks. Actually, I started actively bookmarking in Diigo, which I synchronised with Delicious, which I synchronised with Pinboard. So here we are now – we’re starting all over again as my sync-chain is broken.

I like Diigo for it’s group functions, and maybe this is what the new stacks at Delicious are all about – information curation for groups with visual tweeks. But stacks are not collaborative ventures as represented by groups in Diigo. So I will keep using Diigo for the group collaboration (I like the weekly digest, and the ease of sharing on the fly), as well as for the personal bookmarking across my many devices. .

Richard Byrne takes a look at Stacks and explains that Delicious Stacks could be a good visual way for students to explore a set of links that you have shared with them about a topic or you or your students could create multimedia playlists about a topic to share with each other. If you are new to social bookmarking, this is certainly something you might be interested in.

As I jumped back to Delicious I discovered just how many people forgot to or chose not to accept the changes to the new service. Suddenly I am only following 20 people and I can’t now see who follows me incase I want to reciprocate!!

I follow 101 on Diigo, including some that I consider critical, such as Howard Rheingold and his crap-detection. Now so many of the links I had in papers and presentations that pointed to Delicious users and resources have essentially died.

In the new Delicious:

I detest not being able to change the number of items I view on a page.
the new browser tagging toolbar does not ‘call up’ your existing tags.
there are no longer RSS feeds
no tag cloud and other features are missing

The best social bookmarking site is officially dead!

The new Delicious has a nicer interface, and is clearly going to go in new directions and respond to new needs. However, right now it has things I don’t need and things that are missing, so it’s not my tool of choice as it does not work as efficiently as the old Delicious. But I have my account, so I will continue to ‘watch this space’ – at least I don’t have to start from the beginning. (Perhaps this is just what some people wanted to do to de-clutter?)

Meanwhile, Diigo and Pinboard will continue to draw my attention – and it’s time for me to re-organise how I curate bookmarks. New delicious is a bitter disappointment.

Image: cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by bjornmeansbear

What’s Delicious Doing Now? Making Stacks (freetech4teachers.com)
Delicious team unveils new version of the social bookmarking site (venturebeat.com)
Oh God, what is this mess branded as Delicious? (socklabs.com)

Social content curation – a shift from the traditional

Posted on August 8, 2011 by Judy O'Connell

The notion of content curation is one that has traditionally been associated with libraries, archivies, galleries, or organisations working with objects or data in some way. For example, in the DCC Curation Lifecycle (UK) you will see a complex flow of the “appraise and select” activities which requires data managers to “evaluate data and select for long-term curation and preservation”.

So ‘selection’ or ‘acquisition’ is then closely linked to a repository or institutional policy on collection development.

Now the extraordinary thing is that the term ‘curation’ has become one of the latest buzz-words in the social online sphere, which has been transformed into an activity that is both about marketing and about organisation of the vast information flow that is delivered via social media.

Social networking has definitely provided us with main channels for information flow. But in Curation: Understanding the the social firehose we are introduced to the fact that mainstream news reporting not only contributes to or makes use of this social news firehose, but is now also getting involved in curation – because someone has to make sense of the flow of citizen reporting of events.

millions of tweets spewing out – different languages, mostly personal, some from people actually there, authorities, governments, media outlets, fake media outlets…you name it. And then someone has to make sense of it all – but if they do, the reward is possibly the most accurate, unbiased real-time account of an event you’re ever likely to get.

So in the social media sense, content curation is the organizing, filtering and “making sense of” information on the web and sharing the very best pieces of content with your network that you’ve cherry picked for them .It comes down to organizing your sources, knowing which of them are trust worthy, and seeing patterns.

So for teachers and librarians it comes down to keeping up the pace in adopting these strategies and using tools to publish curated content in the sense of ‘reporting’ what’s happening. So as a teacher and librarian I see myself doing these things:

curating my own content for myself (my own ‘go-to’ repository with tools like Diigo, Delicious, Evernote, Pinboard, Vodpod, Flickr, RSS readers etc.
sharing this first level curation because my online tools are socially connected
curating content for others via targetted tweets or Google+ circles, Facebook pages, Facebook groups, wikis, livebinders, etc. (Does Paper.li fit in here seeing as it is automated?)
sharing this second level curation as a direct extension of the first level of personal curation.

Now I can see a reason for educators to move into third level curation as a form of info-media publishing. Think of this as dynamic content curation that’s about helping keep up with the news. The flow of information through social media is changing:

While we’re dismantling traditional structures of distribution, we’re also building new forms of information dissemination. Content is no longer being hocked, but links are. People throughout the network are using the attention they receive to traffic in pointers to other content, serving as content mediators. Numerous people have become experts as information networkers.

Now I can use all my social networking resources and return information back to my social community at the third level of curation. I saw Howard Rheingold’s use of Scoop.it, for a number of topics, including Infotention – which got popular. I watched with interest as Robin Good’s Real time News Curation grew and grew.

Social content curation is about collecting, organising and sharing information – in a new package. I’m no archivist. But I am a digital curator of information for myself, and perhaps for others. I’m interested to see how (what I call) the third level curation evolves. I like the idea of socially connected ways of publishing ‘what’s new’ and ‘what’s newsworthy’ as an ‘aside’ to my ‘go-to’ information repository such as my social bookmarks.

Check out my test run in this new area with

Digital Citizenship in Schools http://www.scoop.it/t/digital-citizenship-in-schools/
Social Networking for Information Professionals http://www.scoop.it/t/social-networking-for-information-professionals

My target audience are my past and present students in my subjects. I see my target audience being anyone interested in these areas? Or perhaps this is a waste of my time?

I recommend watching this interview of Robin Good by Howard Rheingold , where they discuss Content Curation and the future of search.

How to Be a Good Content Curator – Graywolf’s SEO Blog (seome.me)
11 Reasons Curation Is The New Killer Opportunity (toddstechtalk.wordpress.com)
Content Curation Needs Powerful Discovery Capabilities: Targeted vs. Serendipitous Approaches (eqentia.com)

Will Richardson Talks With Howard Rheingold

Posted on March 1, 2009 by Judy O'Connell

Is social media a new thing? No, not really – just an evolving use of media, an ecosystem of tools and a rich variety of opportunities. Now we are seeing great ways for students to collaborate. Listen to these two important innovators, and enjoy the conversation.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

more about “Will Richardson Talks With Howard Rhe…“, posted with vodpod