Social Curation

My family and friends think I'm nuts because I don't have a TV and I don't read the paper or magazines (unless they're free!). But I've noticed time and time again that I hear the latest news before they do, and manage to keep hyper-informed about issues that matter to me, be that current news, or things that I'm personally or professionally interested in. I admit I spend a lot of time glued to the screen (either my desktop at work, or my phone or laptop at home) but I'm a very selective consumer of information and I know how to evaluate it. Also I love discovering new sources of information and I'm not overly attached to any one source - if a website that I like starts to fill up with advertising at the expense of content, then they've lost my patronage. To be honest there is another reason why I don't have a TV or pay for content - it's because I can think of a million other things I'd rather spend my (limited!) money on and the internet offers everything I need. I pay for fast and reliable internet and I choose the content. And speaking of choosing content...

Image by Aivar Ruukel on Flickr, creative commons licence

Actually, this post was supposed to be about social curation tools because that's the topic for ANZ23mthings for this week - Thing 14: Curating with Pinterest, Tumblr, and Scoop.it and co-incidentally it also happens to be the week that we are launching our PD reading project at work, using the lovely Scoop.it as a platform. As part of the process of choosing which of the many social curation tools to go with, we analysed and compared a whole bunch of them. We rejected Delicious and Diigo as being old school in the way that they displayed content - visually uninteresting - although they did have better group and privacy settings. We rejected Pinterest on the basis that it was more suited to images and browsing rather than deeper reading, and we weren't that impressed with the web interface although it's great on a tablet or smartphone. Everyone was impressed by Flipboard but felt that it was once again more suited to the touch interface rather than the desktop, and didn't have enough scope for commenting on articles on the desktop version. Although I've decided to use it for my personal use and totally loving it.

We ended up being happy with our choice of Scoop.it although we are still in the early stages of our project. The aim is to get the whole team contributing articles of interest to our work, read the one's that spark our interest, and comment on them. The emphasis is on the reading and commenting part rather than merely collecting. We've got a controlled list of tags to make searching by topic easy. For me, the best part of this project is that we are all working in the same context (i.e. we are aware of the current library landscape outside of our immediate work environment) and we are all engaging in PD which is not daunting and hopefully will become a part of our daily or weekly routine.

The page we've created is pretty much just for our group so I'm not going to provide and links or details. We did notice that there wasn't a visually exciting social curation site that offered exactly what we needed - a space for a private group to collaborate. The trend is social, so you have to share! Let's see if what we have suits our needs...

Goodreads and LibraryThing

I love Goodreads AND LibraryThing! But only certain features...

Renee Stokes's bookshelf: read



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I used to work at a library supplier and catalogue the new books for public libraries and when I saw a book that I wanted to read in the future I would covertly open up the Goodreads app on my phone, go to 'scan' and scan the barcode and then add it to my 'to read' folder. Then I'd put holds on them at the library, naughty me! Sadly I no longer work there...

With both social reading sites I really like that I can keep a record of the books that I've read and the dates I read them and it's nostalgic to look back over the list :) I don't like reading reviews of a book I'm about to read though because I want to read it with an open mind and some of the reviews are overly critical I find. So I read them after I've finished the book and often see the book in a different light, one that I hadn't previously considered. I don't use many of the other social features, but may do in the future. I've only been using the Goodreads app since the beginning of the year, so not many books in my collection yet.

I've got quite different reading habits to most people. I pretty much stick to fiction, written in the past 10 years, and often translated into English. My appetite is for the foreign novel - it's like travel for the mind while sitting on the sofa and I'll never tire of it as long as it's well written. If it's good enough to get translated then it usually has merit. At the moment I'm really into Japanese and Chinese writers, although I'm reading a Nigerian writer now. Why is there never a section for international fiction in the library :(

I've gotten off topic. I read the excellent Library Thing vs Goodreads by Amanda Nelson and she discovered that LibraryThing came out better than Goodreads on almost all criteria, concluding that LibraryThings was the more serious tool and Goodreads was the more social. LibraryThing doesn't have an iPhone app and I need to have access on-the-go without requiring the more serious features, so Goodreads is fine for me, but I still (sometimes) maintain my LibraryThing catalogue too. It's could take over my life, the amount of detail you can catalogue in and the other fun functions.

Oh one more thing. I've been trying to make the Goodreads widget thingy work on my blog. Firstly it was really difficult to locate the widget section on their site, and then it doesn't update. Will look into it. Feel free to add me as a friend on Goodreads, especially if you read international fiction.