Advocate's Studio

The news du jour is all about curation. Digital curation, that is. I have noted a higher than average concentration of writing on this topic over the past few days. Clearly, people are interested in it. And that makes good sense to me.

What is digital curation? In its broadest sense, curation is the act of organizing and maintaining a collection of artworks or artifacts. Libraries and museums are excellent real world examples of curation. Digital curation refers more narrowly to the process of establshing and developing long-term repositories of digital assets, per Wikipedia’s entry on the topic. Good luck finding a more concrete explanation than that.

I will try to provide one. For me, digital curation is the gentle swirling of the prospectors’ pan while looking for lumps of gold among the gravel. Through this blog, Reader shares and various social media posts, I attempt to act as a digital curator – I spend my on-line time scanning readers, blogs, tweets, and other content for interesting information that may be useful to me and to people who subscribe to my content. I am a human curator and, hopefully, I provide a shortcut to better information through my blog posts and other social networking channels.

There are other ways to secure curated content. You can employ web tools that automate the process of material selection. The best of these automated offerings will attempt to “read” your interests and respond accordingly.  Google Reader has recently incorporated a setting called “magic” that purports to sort the mountains of content and push the news most likely to be of interest to you to the top of the pile. Feedly, the fantastic add-on for Firefox and now Chrome, does the same and takes it a step further by presenting the content in an easy-read format with precise controls over preferred sources. Lazyfeed, another Web tool, reads your tags and content from various media channels and funnels back to you the most relevant blog entries from across the ‘net. my6sense,an iPhone application, utilizes an algorithm called “digital intuition” to interpret your reading and sharing habits and feed back the content you are most likely to find compelling.

Other services, like MeeHive, Regator and Collected, organize and present the information in logical streams so that you can “cut right to the chase” of the particular news topics you are interested in.

For me, services such as these are a necessary antidote to the out-of-control flood of barely curated content flowing through Twitter and other social media sites. Apart from my few trusted resources, I find it difficult to use Twitter as a news source, particularly since I have no control over the arbitrary content choices  within the stream. The search function helps, but does not assure me that the “curator” is up to my standards. Time spent clicking on links and verifying the validity of the sources is better spent diving right into trustworthy content. As more and more content is generated, all of us are going to need proper curation to save us from web horders.

The list of helpful tools cited above is not exhaustive. It does offer a starting point for anyone interested in separating the wheat from the chaff. Rest assured the number of digital curation tools will be expanding – web experts such as Steve Rubel have taken the position that the future of the Web is digital curation and services that direct the flow of relevant information that is absorbed quickly, easily and smoothly. Rubel’s reasoning is that web denizens are “attention strapped.” I would describe it more as overstimulated. Effective digital curation is the cure for the overwhelm.

Do you have tips, tricks or tools to help you sift through to the diamonds? Please share with the class in the comments!

Taking an already great service and making it better: that is what today’s top information providers should be all about. JD Supra, the online, legal document sharing site where lawyers and law firms can “give content and get noticed,” is taking their show on the road with a brand new, shiny iPhone application. Called Legal Edge, the application allows you to access JD Supra’s topical categories and the sublists of documents organized within those categories. Drill down a bit further and you can view PDF or web-based versions of the documents. Documents submitted by premium accounts will also bear a “Contact Contributor” button, allowing a user to immediately reach out to the document’s author or law firm.

There is a growing number of law-related applications in the App store, but what makes JD Supra special is its status as a collective work of the legal community – the product of its contributors. This is great for those searching legal authority: Legal Edge directly connects users to some of the best minds in the profession – complete with a showcase of their talents  – right on their iPhones, where more and more people are spending more and more of their time. It is also great for contributing practitioners: with a single upload, a lawyer’s content will be featured on the JD Supra Web site and related Twitter and Facebook feeds, RSS feeds, email and now the iPhone via Leading Edge. Now THAT’s what I call publication!

Oh, and guess what? It’s free.

It gets even better. JD Supra is working with firms to develop custom, firm-branded applications to exclusively stream that firm’s content. Firms can leverage JDSupra’s expertise and create their own iPhone app, a strategy representing  one of the hottest trends in tech-based marketing.

My experience with the app is that it is simple, easy to navigate and efficient: with two clicks, I can view an expert’s thoughts on bankruptcy, insurance, real estate, intellectual property and even legal marketing. One more click and I am in contact with the author. There are twenty categories at present, but I anticipate that JD Supra will keep developing the content and finessing the application and maybe even adding features at some point down the road.

You can get Legal Edge for free from the App Store right now. If you take it out for a test drive, please come on back and provide feedback in the comments! Would love to hear your thoughts.

There is writing and then there is Web writing. There really is a difference! JD Supra offers a collection of five Web writing resources to help you understand that difference. Whether you are writing to create or beef up a Web page, fill a blog or promote your brand or business, you will go farther if you understand how people and search engines surf and crawl the Web.

Happy Reading!

Not content to merely offer a repository of free on-line legal documents benefiting both legal practitioners offering quality content and searchers seeking that content, JD Supra has just announced its new Law Centers. Law Centers are pages on the JD Supra site that organize and aggregate the uploaded documents by subject matter: business law; personal law; government law; and, law practice. Within these broad categories are narrower topics such as real estate and construction, immigration, bankruptcy and many other common legal subjects. The Centers will feature top news, recent articles and top contributors to the particular subject area. Searchers will find both the relevant documents and articles and blurbs highlighting the practitioners offering the documents and articles. Coming soon, you will be able to subscribe to a Law Center feed by RSS to keep track of what practitioners in a particular subject are are contributing.

Once again, JD Supra gives up the goods to lawyers and Web-izens interested in all things legal!