Curation Nation

I ‘ve been using twitter lists for a while as a way of making sense / curating the mixed bag of interesting people I follow. I won’t detail the why’s and wherefores of that here, see an earlier post on that.

Suffice to say I have found Lists really useful.

And I’ve also used Delicious for a long while , but that usage kind of tailed off as I started to use twitter as a bookmarking service in some ways.

Now along comes Pearltrees. Not brand new as I believe it was launched end of last year – but new to me.  Thanks to twitter.com/jeffmclfc for the tweet that led me to it.

I’ve just started playing with it and my first reaction is that it should be easier, more interesting and hopefully more habit-forming than using the somewhat dry Delicious service.

caveats: IF I can sustain the impetus to keep curating all the interesting stuff I come across on the web. And IF twitter lists don’t fulfill that functionality.. which in some ways they do (certainly in recording blogs I like, as one use).
But I’m aware that using Twitter lists is a subset of all the possible sites out there e.g someone has to be a twitter user and a blogger before I could curate them as ‘an interesting digital blogger’.
Pearltrees would just let me read their site then pearl them straight off (hmm, that sounds wrong) as a blog to retain a note of.
And pearltrees additional features , the social part, where I can see who else likes that blog or has different info resources to me, is an area I haven’t made any use of yet.

It’s the social part that is the cool thing – curate or interrogate web content based on shared interests not just share friends or broad industry / profession categories.

This curation malarkey takes time. But I think if I was researching a particular subject then pearltress would become a richer area to mine that perhaps a straight wiki approach also? As long as there is a big enough crowd-curation take-up of pearltrees of course.

There is a nice roundup from February on pearltrees at the ‘down the avenue‘ blog. (Which I’ve just discovered and have added it to my twitter lists, great blog) And now I should also add it very easily to my pearltree account with the firefox plug-in.

The drag and re-arrange interface is really nice too. A lego brick approach to constructing your own take on a subject area in a way that makes sense to you.. and you can use specific bricks (pearls) from other people you stray across when you do a search for a specific topic..

For example, I did a random search on ‘genealogy’ (not so random as I have an interest in this area) and found some great sites curated by someone with the handle of gdappel.
To date I’ve either bookmarked interesting (to me) genealogy sites I’ve found or tagged in Delicious. Pearltrees allows me to see some context (in the relative visual spacing) of new genealogy resources gdappel has found AND those they have links or connections to elsewhere.

My one (BIG) concern is that I could lose HOURS following some of these new sites up.. uh oh!

Stop Press : seems you can import Delicious public tags also.. cool.
My Genealogy pearltree will be grown in the near future then.