Annotation, Curation, Social Bookmarking

When I spent a lot time writing books, I found social bookmarking services such as Diigo to be helpful in organizing resources; later, I began to look at who was bookmarking links I found to be useful and explored what other links they had found, and then I began to look at who the most useful bookmarkers were following. That became a resource when I started cultivating personal learning networks. Done right, social bookmarking is a form of collective intelligence.

When I started thinking about how humans can add value to the online commons, I realized that bookmarking and link-blogging were forms of curation -- of informed selection of high-quality information. There's crap detection and blocking -- ways to cut down the noise in the infostream by filtering out the bad stuff. But curation by knowledgeable people improves the commons by bringing the good stuff to the attention of more people. I started teaching students curation as a participation skill in my social media literacies class. In the process, I interviewed Robert Scoble and Robin Good, two well-known and successful curators, about their curation process.

More recently, people have started using tools such as hypothes.is to annotate web pages -- not changing the pages, but providing a sidebar with annotations. This also turned out to be a valuable learning tool.

What these practices have in common is that they use web tools and human judgement for both personal information management and, in as a side effect, as a way of improving the information commons.

A few links I have found valuable:

Social Bookmarking and Annotating. "The driving force behind the Web 2.0 revolution is a spirit of  intellectual philanthropy and collective intelligence that is made  possible by new technologies for communication, collaboration and  information management.  One of the best examples of collective  intelligence in action are the wide range of social bookmarking  applications that have been embraced in recent years."

Robin Good's curated list of curation tools. A master curator's list of tools.

The Seven Needs of Realtime Curators. Scoble's list offers a workflow and checklist.

Robin Good's Complete Guide to Real Time News Curation. If you really want to get into details, this six-parter is deep.

Annotation Tools. An essay on the use of annotation in college instruction.