Taming the Flood of Knowledge

I tend to browse many news sites, articles and streams from other people, many times I mark things for later reading. My toread and toblog bookmarks on del.icio.us are reaching 168 and 105 respectively, this is one of the reasons I implemented my del.icio.us blog posting and now populate the notes field with text which describes the value I believe the article can bring and what led me to read or start reading the article.



The problem with this is that when it is posted to my FaceBook page, or other RSS posting streams, that it easily floods all the other relevant information. I'd already instigated a limit on the number of items posted to my FaceBook and Twitter by creating a links stream which contains almost all the information I like and most of the information I bookmark and share.



This means my main accounts are less busy, still there is much information which is not relevant to my customers, who I doubt care about the kudos I am sending in the way of the Social Media and Internet Evangelists who influence me and who certainly don't care that I liked individual Questionable Content comics.



So for my company Twitter and now also for my company FaceBook Page (Special Brands FaceBook) I've come to reduce the links I share with my followers there by following not the entire del.icio.us stream, but only the items I tag with "specialbrands". (I've explained globally how to do this in the article: Digg with del.ico.us and Reddit.)



(posted with Amplify)

See this Amp at http://bit.ly/bwdLin

Amplify amplifies my del.icio.us content curation

I've not been using amplify for longer than a few days, and I'm seeing an advantage and the execution of an idea I had in 2000, when I still used cociter by cogitum. I created a small citation bookmarklet which posted the source to a webserver which processed the information and added it to my database which I could include in, what I at that time called news posts, blog posts.



At that time I did some content curation, although I wanted to have my comment included in any curation list that I made - I tended to speak when I should have been listening - the reasons for selecting the item; what it could be used for; why they are wrong and I am right. :) Naturally with the advent of del.icio.us I was enthralled and with the addition of FriendFeed I was able to "microblog" which was closer to blogging than to tweets.



Using any new platform I like to see how others are using it, what are they posting, what features are they using and how they are posting. And I'm noticing that many of the things I've been taking about in my blog regarding the use of del.icio.us as content curation application, used for more than just Social Bookmarking, and rebroadcast is being performed with Amplify. I'm not saying that I don't miss things in amplify, I most certainly do, but these are focussed on my desire to not just curate the content of others, but also my own content.



The disadvantage that FriendFeed has is that there is no way to restrict what is published from what source. This means that for somebody like me, who syndicates to many sources, many duplicate entries appear in FriendFeed. The disadvantage of Amplify is that I can't passively integrate these sources based on input, I need to go out and find my content and curate it. Many of the content curation platforms allow me to do this, but are ugly or made by programmers like me who dislike designing elaborate GUI interfaces.



Now I shall go back to listening and let others speak.



(posted with Amplify)

See this Amp at http://bit.ly/d46YVm

The power of RSS in Social Media Syndication in Content Curation #amplify

Inspired by @svartling I started playing with amplify, and added it to my Social Media Syndication Network Flowchart which I'm updating.



The way I'm setting it up focuses on the way your message can be spread in your information stream, by making your information stream more visible. This naturally includes the regular blogging (RSS) and microblogging applications, and events which are interesting for 3rd parties. For somebody like me who produces many Likes, Social Bookmarks and other items I discovered that the value of being able to extract and automatically curate items from the feed such asTwitterFeed and del.icio.us.



TwitterFeed can be used to extracted items and post these to a number of platforms based on keywords, although the keyword filter has always been poor and their OpenID implementation half-hearted.



Another RSS feature comes from del.icio.us, which in my opinion is one of the only Yahoo! product which hasn't been exceded by a far superior Google product, del.icio.us produces multiple RSS feeds, specify feeds can be extracted based on the tags which are assigned.



Naturally FaceBook, Twitter and other services produce their own RSS feeds, the another great Yahoo! product Yahoo! Pipes gives us the ability to curate content multiple sources, which can all be used for external sources and for people like me who discuss multiple subjects which can be curated in different ways.



RSS has never been the exclusive domain of blogs, but they are more powerful than most think.



(Posted with Amplify)

See this Amp at http://bit.ly/aJqcAU