Today I want to tell people a little bit about a new tool I am totally addicted to psyched about. It's a social curation tool. What is "social curation" you ask? Essentially it is a social media term used to describe how we organize, discover and share things found on the web. Social curation allows us to group interesting things we discover on the web (eg. food preservations I like; canning recipes I want to try; cool kitchen gadgets I want my husband to buy me for Christmas). We can then arrange the content in a way that makes sense both for our own use and in order to share with others (refer back to my holiday wish list for my husband!).
Brian Solis wrote a great post earlier this month entitled The Three C's of Information Commerce: Consumption, Curation, Creation. It's a great read if you're into social media at large, and want to understand where Brian feels "curation" fits into Forrester's Social Technographics Ladder (right before creator, thank you very much).
Anywho, why am I telling you all of this? Recently I had the opportunity to get a demo of Pearltrees, a fabulous social curation tool. Pearltrees allows individuals to collaboratively contribute, edit, refine, and compile valuable information resources curated by themselves and others. Pearltrees uses a unique drag and drop interface combined with an add-on to your browser, to allow you to organize the things you are passionate about and share them with other people.
So, for example, take my passion for food canning and other food canners/preservationists. I have started a pearltree for that! I clicked on the pearltree I created and clicked "share". I am given the options to tweet, facebook, etc. I'm also given the option to embed, whcih I've done here.
Go ahead and click on any of my pearls to investigate these canners. You will be brought into the browsing interface (it's fast and it doesn't remove your current window). You can flip through them, add to them, curate them yourself, etc.
This process has so simplified my life when it comes to bookmarks. When I have a page open that I don't want to lose, I no longer have to add it to my horrificly long list of bookmarks. I simply click on the pearl in my broswer, I tell it to sort the content by a particular type (for example, I can add a great new food canning blogger I met to my pearl for canning bloggers) and then I can shut the window down, knowing I can access that content when I have time.
It also allows me to easily share all of my research with other people who are interested. Think of the possibilities when working on team projects.
For fun, here's a holiday wish list I put together. I love aprons so I have saved what feels like hundreds to my list. No, I don't expect my family to run out and buy me 10 each! Basically, when I have an extra few bucks to spend, and I want a new apron, I can come back and look at this list and choose the one that speaks to me at that moment. My aprons do speak to me, you know…
So there you have it! Social Curation and my new favorite tool, Pearltrees. Check out my Pearltree and let me know your thoughts. The more you play with the tool, the more fun you'll have!
For more information about how to use Pearltrees, Beth Blecherman of Techmamas has done some great summary posts:
Understanding Pearltrees: A New Way to Organize Web Content
