Week 4: Curating the Web

The bookmarking tool in your browser is handy for "saving" sites you want to revisit. However, bookmarking can get complicated when you are trying to track many websites at once. Although RSS readers, such as Feedly, are a handy online tool for acquiring and reading information that is updated frequently (blogs, news) some of the sites on your browser's bookmarking tool are static and remain as bookmarks on my computer. But because bookmarks collected through browsers remain on the computer where they are collected, you can't access those bookmarks on a different computer!  Fortunately, there are some cloud resources that allow us to collect bookmarks that can be accessed through any device that has Internet capability. 

 jPodcaster. (2011, July 3). Diigo Icon [Online Image]. Retrieved from http://elifelonglearning.wordpress.com/

Honestly, my MIND was BLOWN when I discovered Diigo - a social bookmarking website which allows users to, not only bookmark and tag webpages, but also highlight and attach sticky notes. I cannot believe I cruised through four years of undergraduate studies not knowing about this tool! Diigo takes research to a whole new level. As a science student preparing for a research paper, I would always save the PDF of a journal directly onto my computer so that I could use Adobe Reader to highlight and add sticky notes onto the file - kind of how Diigo does it, except that doing it this way takes up a lot of memory on my laptop and it's hard to remember which journals were on what topic looking solely at the title. Diigo keeps ALL of my journal articles categorized based on tags that I add, saving memory space on my laptop. It also allows me to read sites I've bookmarked even if I'm offline and revisit pages that no longer exist!  
I further explored Google Alerts, which sends me email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on my queries, unlike Feedly, which updates you on ALL content on a specific site you subscribe to. The one problem with Google, however, is that it chooses which sites are near the top of the search results based on their Panda ranking algorithm. Bharati Ahuja describes this on her blog as a Darwinian fitness of quality content for websites. With so much content out on the Internet and so little time to digest, one can get 'content fried' as Beth Canter explains content curation on her blog. Whatis.com defines content curation as 'the gathering, organizing and online presentation of content related to a particular theme or topic' - which is handy if you want to learn about a topic in a quick and concise manner. 
Diigo and Google Alerts are GREAT tools to add onto the 'collecting information' section of my PLE. 

Krahn, A. (CC) 2014

 This week I came across a news article from my Feedly titled 'The Plan To Kill The Internet Uncovered: 10 Ways Web Freedom Is Being Butchered Worldwide'. I found it relevant to my learning as I further explore the World Wide Web and all that it has to offer, since there are numerous threats to the freedom of the Internet. Now that I've become a more engaged digital citizen, I sure hope the Internet does not cease to exist as we know it because I'm not done exploring just yet!

“content fried” or so much good content and so little time to digest it. - See more at: http://www.bethkanter.org/content-curation-101/#sthash.YJbxqK3A.dpufWhatis.com defines content curation as 'the gathering, organizing and online presentation of content related to a particular theme or topic'.