On Blogging and Social Media

For those who aren't familiar with Scoop.it, it's a web based platform for collecting and curating content based around themes, with it collects together in an interactive magazine like format. It also allows 'curators' to comment on the materials they collect and share the additions to their collections through a wide range of other social media platforms (including Twitter). This gives it a form of micro-blogging capability, especially as visitors to the site can also interact around the curated content and build conversations about it.
Here are two of my Scoop.it sites

• Learning technology
• Tools for learners

If you have ever tried to build a conversation with multiple people asynchronously on Twitter, you will know how confusing that can become, but on Scoop.it the interaction appears below the content being discussed, so you can quite easily have multiple conversations on-going at the same time.


The other big advantage of Scoop.it is that discussion is based around content, which can help to give the interaction more depth. It also helps user to escape much of the banality that appears on Twitter as it tends not to attract the celebrity or 'what I had for lunch' postings as it isn't principally about conversation, but as more of a focus on content sharing.

Scoop.it use in the education sector also seems to be gaining momentum. My own principle Scoop.it sites have grown in terms of the number of followers (Yes, you can follow people on Scoop.it too) by about 500 - 600% over the last 2 months, so that they have now outstripped the Twitter following which has taken me years to nurture and develop.


Scoop.it now has it's own mobile reader  for iPad too which works in a similar way to Flipboard so you don't have to be a curator to use it, you can just download the app and follow the streams of information which suit you.
Scoop.it also works with MailChimp, so you can turn your Scoop.it updates into e-newsletters to your subscribers. You can also find a number of other interesting plug ins and apps at: http://www.scoop.it/extras

For me though, the big advantage over Twitter is the lack of 'noise'. I follow around 2.5k people on Twitter and as I watch my stream constantly flowing by it can be hard to separate the real gems from the rocks. With Scoop.it, users tend to broadcast a lot less and with much more of a focus on quality.

So will I be dropping Twitter? Actually, no. When I add something to my Scoop.it collections it allows me to simultaneously pass the links through to other networks including Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+, so I can make Scoop.it my main app for handling all of those networks.
Of course, Twitter does have some other advantages like the direct messaging feature that I also continue to use, and it's nice sometimes to take a break from other chores and just watch the various topic related streams I monitor through TweetDeck and pick out the odd link to follow up, but on the whole my main focus now is with Scoop.it and collecting together good quality content to share with my network.

If you want to give Scoop.it a try and aren't sure where to start, have a look at Russell Stannard's tutorial videos which should show you all you need to know to get started.

• http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/scoopIt/ 

• So which do you prefer?
• Are you still committed to Twitter?
• Are you using other curation tools?

By all means leave a comment.

Related links:

• The Anatomy of a Tweet
• An introduction to Stumble Upon 
• How I use social media for my professional development 
• 10 Tools for Increasing Engagement in Online Courses  

Best
Nik Peachey