More on Being a Digital Curator
Yesterday I shared how Claudia Escribano writes Buzzin' on the Biz, a bi-weekly summary for her company of what's going on in the blogosphere on topics related to training and instructional design. Today I want to do a follow-up post on how she does it and what she's gained from the experience. Here's the rest of her email interview with me.
About how long does it take you to pull together all of the articles for Buzzin' on the Biz?
It takes about 2-3 hours. About 2 hours to scan through all the blogs-- it depends on how
distracted I get. If I go off on a tangent, it can take longer, but
it's fun. Last year, Karl Kapp and someone else had pulled together a
PageFlakes site with a bunch of training blogs, so that helps me to scan through them all quickly. There are a couple
of others that I just check on my own. I could probably automate that a
bit better.
What's your process? How do you pull it all together?
As I scan through the blogs, I jot down the topics and group related
topics, which helps me see what areas are hot. I also grab the URLs
for entries that I think I might want to feature in the Bytes section. Once I'm done scanning through all the blogs, I've got most of the
Buzz written in Word. I just have to paste it into our internal blog
and clean it up a bit. I always use the same format, so that makes it
easier. The first time was definitely the hardest.
How have your colleagues responded to Buzzin' on the Biz?
I haven't really gotten any reaction yet. The idea is for people to add
to the Buzz whenever they see a news item they want to share. We
originally had the Buzz on a wiki, but decided that a blog worked
better because it allowed for a conversation to develop around the
posts. In our internal blog, anyone can start a post, so when people
see something they want to share, they can post it there instead of
sending out a mass e-mail. Right now, there about 3 people who are
contributing to the internal blog.
This week, I plan to award a Bodacious Buzzer prize to one guy who's been contributing a lot--to encourage others to contribute. I think this is one of those things that may take some time to catch on. So, I just plan to consistently offer up the info, and I think over time, they'll see the value.
Do you feel like working on Buzzin' on the Biz has had benefits for you?
ABSOLUTELY!!! I am learning so much by doing this that even if no one
else ever uses it, it's still worth it. I'm pretty good about checking
blogs regularly, except when I get busy. So, this will help anchor me
to keep checking the blogs on a regular basis even when I'm busy.
What advice do you have for other people who might want to start something similar at their organizations?
- Use something like PageFlakes or an RSS aggregator to make it easy to scan through all the blogs.
- Have a standard format so you know what you're looking for, and it's easy to put the post together.
- Just do it! If nothing else, it's such a great learning exercise.
Have been meaning to leave a comment for a while. Inspired by your Bamboo project, I started a team blog for my team. Reading your posts about Digital Curator, I could associate with that role. I use Google Reader as my blog reader. I normally "share" the posts that I would like my team to read. On my team blog, I have provided an RSS feed for my shared posts and another link to read all shared posts. The RSS feed updates on the team blog as I share new items. So in effect, I am playing the role of a digital curator after all.
Best
Manish
Posted by: Manish Mohan | March 27, 2008 at 07:08 AM