Curating content
Recalling a theme I heard throughout the Public Media Conference this year, I have been experimenting with a Google tool designed to tag and curate content. I have used Google Reader before, but never really thought it did anything that useful that my Outlook didn’t do. Then I found the Shared Items feature. What’s neat about this is not that you can share interesting information with other Google Readers users, which you can; but that you can pull in RSS feeds as well as make note of any webpage using the Google Reader bookmarklet, tag individual items, and output the stream of information as a standard RSS feed that could be subscribed to by anyone, or even fed to another CMS or social media system. This seems like a very simple way to ingest just about any kind of interesting content (text, podcast, video, etc.) and aggregate it into a standard format with very little editting or coding. I think it is a great way for staff at a media organization to share items that they think might edify their audience, and since it produces a standard format, it could easily be integrated into the organizations website or fed directly to subscribers.
You can find an RSS feed of items that I have tagged as #publicmedia here.