Curation experiment : grey matters on Scoop.It

Playing around with the curation tool Scoop.It has been on my "To-test-out-list-one-day-but-not-today-because-I-m-sooooo-busy" list for ages (actually since last year's Business Educa), so I saw a good opportunity to get my toes wet when we did the workshops on Neuroscience and leadership.

Here is the curation site I've set up some months ago. I've been posting relevant sites and videos from time to time. Link: http://www.scoop.it/t/grey-matters-ccl .

I must say I'm a big fan of the concept of curation. For curators (people who dive deep in the internet searching for goodies and have long RSS feed lists they crawl through anyway)  it is a low cost and fast way to bring relevant information to people you know. For everyone with an interest in the field, it is a trusted way to get info filtered their way without drowning in information overload (aka filter failure).

Here is a good introduciton on the benefits of curation:

The Unanticipated Benefits of Content Curation from Beth Kanter

Another great introduction is this animated mindmap by Robin Good:



I've found scoop.it a fast and easy way to get started with curation, but since I haven't shared my scoop widely, I have no information so far on the usefulness for other people. The automatically suggested scoops are mostly not relevant for my topic (am I not using the proper key words), so I've been adding most sites manually. I'm using the free version, so all is public. The site uses a freemium model with paying pro and business accounts. I'm wondering if the business edition allows for a 'private' scoop on your intranet, because that would be interesting as a learning assignment while keeping your companies secret behind your firewall... Anyway, good site even though they by default spam you every day with a daily summary mail.