Over at Idea Lab I just published my latest about everyone’s new favorite job title: curator.
All my peeps these days are opening accounts on Tumblr and Posterous. It’s where they curate the web. Then there are links on Twitter, Delicious, and presumably Facebook (I wouldn’t know). The internet, a big beautiful mess. And messier by the day.
I started thinking about all of this because of my own dilemma as a recent curator of news and information related to technology, transparency, and accountability in developing countries. The Sunlight Foundation has nearly 4,000 followers on Twitter that subscribe for links to the latest news related to technology and transparency in the United States. Up until a couple months ago there was no similar curation of news related to technology and transparency in developing countries, but we are trying to provide that with the @techtransparent Twitter account. It’s been fun, and I can see that we’re starting to have an influence in spreading news around. Just about every hour someone re-tweets what we post. And every morning I wake up to a dozen or so emails announcing new and interesting followers.
Renata, an amazing curator of everything related to human rights and accountability in Latin America, has opened up a sister TechTransparent Twitter account in Spanish – appropriately enough, TransparenTech.
Also, in my research of transparency, accountability, and civic engagement that will feed into our final report in May a few Twitter accounts – like Tiago Peixoto’s @participatory – have become invaluable sources of information. But trying to sort through all 1,000 of his links is impossible – there is no way to search his archives by category or date. Delicious turns out to be a much better tool to organize, share, and archive links, but despite its tagline “social bookmarking”, it doesn’t have the same social element as Twitter.
For my own personal curation of the web I tend to use a mix of Twitter, Delicious, Google Reader’s shared items, and Instapaper’s starred items. I’ve thought about opening up an account on Tumblr or Posterous, but it seems like just one more corner of the net that will likely go bankrupt in five years. What’s your solution to curating the web in a way that will last 30 years from now?
