Digital media flows and that’s part of what makes so many interesting things possible.1
The Sea
You are literally adrift in a sea of content. There are so many people out there who do an amazing amount of work to find and write interesting things. Gather them. Use them. Add and prune these sites until you get what you really want. This should be your own beautiful ocean of content- sparking ideas and giving you great enjoyment. If it isn’t then you have only yourself to blame.
These are some sites that perform well for me. Your needs and interests will likely vary but there are worse places to start.
The Harvest
Now that you have many good things flowing by, you’ll need a way to save all this good stuff. Some you’ll use in the moment, many other things you’ll tuck away for later, or for someone else, or just in case.
This is painless and comes with so many benefits.2 Back in the day I used Delicious. I now use Diigo (which backs up to Delicious and Pinboard).3
Diigo allows you to create groups as well. A number of our content specialists are using it to multiply their power. They’ve chosen some teachers to add to their groups. The specialists can then skim the cream of the links they’re adding to the group to add to the specialist “approved” curriculum/content repositories. They don’t have to do anything other than look at this source and they’re harnessing the energy of people in the field doing real things.
Flows and Flavoring
Links in Diigo is one thing but people often want to provide more context, have more control, increase capabilities etc. That means making the links flow from Diigo elsewhere. If you’re doing this right, it’s not a Herculean task. That’s where we go wrong so often. Those efforts die because they’re so disconnected from daily work and the updates are so delayed because they’re so painful.
FeedWordPress gets me those Diigo bookmarks into a blog- each bookmark as its own post with tags, notes etc. You can see that happening at the KG Language Arts site here. Now I have all the magic of WP and the associated plugins and themes that I can apply to this content yet the specialist never needs to actually come to the blog to make any of these posts. The flexibility of posting options- email, Press It bookmarklet, RSS feed, form etc. should meet how most people do their daily work.
1 This is a fairly simple rehash of something I’ve been trying to convince people of since 2005 but I seem to have gotten a little traction lately so I’m putting it back out there.
2 Here’s an old post arguing for Delicious.
3 Keep in mind even these sites can become sources of good information. Find the right people.