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In organisations we have a fetish for control and neatness in regards to information and communication; which is flys in the face of how we naturally behave.

You know how it goes, "this type of information must live here", "if you talk about this topic it must happen here", etc…

Now people naturally form groups and personal networks, they talk about various things and feel comfortable and confident in participating in circles of people they trust, have rapport with, have shared experiences with…

If you look at our lives offline and even on the web there is no person that mandates where you file topic-based content and where you are allowed to talk about a topic. Yes control has a purpose sometimes, but I’m talking about an equilibium, I’m talking about realising that management approaches have a fetish that sometimes do more bad than good…we need to stop and think, does the command approach suit a particular initiative or event.

Online groups 

I’ve talked about this before in a post called social computing is messy, and so it should be. What initiated that post was a new Community of Practice (CoP) that was formed to be a support group for designers. This CoP noticed a few other CoPs had forums about design tool applications and suggested that since they were now the official design tools CoP that these forums be moved. I’m glad this didn’t happen, I’m glad not even management could persuade these other CoPs. If it did happen, there would be a good chance these forums would have died. Why? Because people like to talk where they hang out, with people they feel comfortable with. In the end a CoP is about the people not the topic. I mean, in the offline world I talk about any topic with anyone I like where ever I happen to be (coffee room, desk, elevator, etc.)

Online networks

At least with online groups tools like CoPs organisations have a "form" to control, but online social networks take it a step further as there is no standard space to speak about a topic, it’s simply a messy network just like email (People connecting to each other talking about what they need to talk about to get their work done) ie. it’s not a group space where someone can choose to control it, it’s simply connected profiles where only the person who owns the profile can control, and hence no-one controls the network. At least with email this happens underground so there is no chance to control, but when we bring this way of communicating online, management get a fever that they can’t control it. 

Aggregate and curate 

Like on the web, organisations must realise to allow things to be messy, let them flourish, that’s natures way…and then it’s the job of aggregators and curators to pull topic based content where ever it surfaces and to present it.

Rather than control unfront which will somewhat curtail what you want to achieve, look around and gather what you find. Let people free-play and then collect what you find.

Let’s look at some examples of this on the web…

Travel  

When some people travel they blog about their travels…they do this all over the web, whether on blogs, or blog networks etc…

As a user we use Google or Google Blog search to find personal posts about a city, region, event, etc…

Google social search will show results from people in our Google Reader and Twtiter list, and more…this is a good start as it helps reduce the load of results

Without Google social search finding stuff like travel reviews is time consuming, and sometimes nowadays we use help engines or social search like Twitter, Facebook or Quora to explicitly ask a question ie. it’s quick to ask friends, you trust their feedback, they know your history so they can offer contextual recommendations, and you can chat to clarify, and of course the wonder of conversations begets idea, insights and gifts.

Quite often on the web destination sites make a business out of this need eg. TripAdvisor. But the focus of this post is less about social networks and more about aggregation and curation.

Yesterday I was looking into what to do for a couple of days in Kuala Lumpur, and TripAdvisor is great for this, but I wanted to check this out from all corners of the web…so I started on Google blog search and Google search.

I came across the Kuala Lumpur city overview page on Lonely Planet’s website, and I noticed a beta program they have on their sidebar that says "OUR FAVOURITE KUALA LUMPUR BLOGS (BETA)" I clicked to see more and I landed on their Kuala Lumpur "Blogs we like" page. This lists blog posts from handpicked sources that blog about Kuala Lumpur and travel. This saved me lots of time, I got to read 10 quality posts.

NOTE: I’m not sure if Lonely Planet go a step further and curate posts ie. they choose particular posts from their source list, rather than just aggregate every post.

There you go, that’s an example of the messiness of the blogosphere, and a third party picking sources to valuable content…in essence they do the hard work for you.

This is what I saying organisations have to get their head around, the world is messy and we have to make sense of it as it happens rather than try controlling it…and as I said by controlling it you actually stifle the world from happening, or push it into the "black communications market" (ie email).

Music 

Another example is music. I’m personally into bedroom or starting out artists…without sites like Soundcloud, Myspace, Vimeo, Bandcamp where would we be in finding this cool stuff. But even with these destination sites there is still a lot to look through. A good site is last.fm as similar to TripAdvisor you can connect with people to see what they listen to and get recommendations.

But since this post is about aggregation and curation I’ll mention something more inline with that…I discovered a music site called "Altered Zones". They have noticed there are lots of underground music blogs and know it’s hard to keep up, so what they have done is chosen 15 of the best undergound music blogs and aggregated the stream into one feed. Again I’m not sure if it’s pure aggregation, or if they are curating one ot two posts a week from each blog.

OK here’s one step further. A social network/mp3 blog aggregator/streaming site called The Hype Machine have aggregated lots and lots of music blogs and put them into topic directories. You get your own profile and choose the blogs you want to follow, and you can also follow search results

I have several music blogs I subscribe to in Google Reader, and Facebook Pages; which is great so I can keep up with the latest.

The Hype Machine like me and countless others, have discovered brilliant blogs on the web that share the lastest mp3’s.

What The Hype Machine have done is select hundreds (or perhaps thousands) of these blogs and built a massive directory and aggregator.

Search for a blog by tag
- When you find a blog you like, you add it to your subscriptions
-You can display posts by one blog or all the blogs you have subscribed to

So rather than Google Reader I can use The Hype Machine to keep up with the latest

Now the interesting thing is that it will only display blog posts that have an audio link
- So when I say the latest, I don’t mean the latest news, but I mean the latest audio links

Further to this you can stream the song right there from the blog post within The Hype Machine

You can also favourite blog posts which in essense is a favourites playlist
- it even has a shuffle mode
- I can’t seem to see the ability to make multiple playlists

Now I can find, keep up, play and keep music in the one spot without having to leave.

In addition to subscribing to blogs, you can also search and subscribe to an artist
- this is not based on metadata, but is simply a search (so it can be a bit noisy)

Your subscriptions page can be limited to show posts via blogs or artists, or both

And you knew it was coming, you can also subscribe (follow) others users, and do the social network thing.

Another cool thing is that it lists all blog posts that link to the same audio file. In this respect you can read multiples reviews about a song. See an example.

And of course Twitter integration.

Anyway, yet another example of people out there freely doing their thing, and the job of a facilitator (or startup in this case) is picking a bunch of sources, and letting you do the aggregation and curation.

If you want to know about aggregation and curation look no further than Robin Good

A mindmap of content curation tools to aggregate, filter, edit, curate and distribute any type of content

Real-Time News Curation - The Complete Guide Part 6: The Tools Universe

Real-Time News Curation - The Complete Guide Part 7: Business Applications And Trends

Real-Time News And Content Curation: The Best 2010 Articles And Reports From MasterNewMedia

Here’s an example of Robin drinking his new champagne, he’s uses Scoop.it as a real-time news curation tool to present news funnily enough, on real-time news curation

Related

Communities and Networks Connection blog aggregator

I just read over on mashable about the various ways to filter tweets; by keywords, by groups, by links, etc…

Under the keyword section they list filttr, but I got to tell you filttr does it all, not as sophisticated as peoplebrowsr, but it has the essential features. It’s oAuth enabled, post select updates to Facebook, Twitpic, file attachments, shortcuts, threaded replies, and has a mobile version. Below I have focused on the filtering features.

Features

• Filters tweets based on your past reading behaviour
• Manually black list and white list keywords
• Slider to curb noisy tweeps

eg. if a tweep is conference tweeting too much you can slide to receive less noise

• Link only tweets from your stream
• Create many keyword streams
• Create many group streams

But can’t share these as Sameer Patel would like, and which some others can do

• Create a combination of a keyword stream within a group, and also, that shows only tweets with links in them

eg. show me tweets with just links in them with the hashtag #e2conf within my group of people I follow called “enterprise”

• Automatically creates a group of tweeps that aren’t in a group

I’ve been using Filttr for most of this year, and I tell ya it helps me deal with my Twitter stream firehose, plus these guys are really responsive with implementing suggested features, either via Twitter, email or Uservoice.

If you have time you can read the regular stream, or perhaps just read link only tweets in the regular stream, but let’s face it I never, ever, ever have time to do this…

I don’t really create keyword search streams unless I’m researching or there is an event, and I haven’t used the sliders or black/white listing features yet.

But what I do use is the grouping feature (alias), and link-only tweets feature.

Just like an RSS Reader I have folder type streams.

These folders are groups that I organise my tweeps in…you can do a keyword search across a group if you like.

eg. I have a group called “enterprise2.0″
- this displays tweets from about 100 people I follow
- if I wanted I could overlay this with a keyword search eg “wiki”
- then later on I can take off the keyword search if I like

For every group, I have a link only group as well.

For example, if I don’t have time to read all tweets in my “enterprise2.0″ group, I’ll read the “enterprise2.0-linkonly” stream instead…this way I can just read tweets that have links in them.

The main groups I have are:

Regular stream-linkonly
Enterprise2.0
Enterprise2.0-linkonly
Enterprise2.0Essentials
Enterprise2.0Essentials-linkonly
Networks
Networks-linkonly
Communities
Communities-linkonly
Learning
Learning-linkonly
KM
KM-linkonly
Local
Local-linkonly
LocalEsssentials
LocalEssentials-linkonly
Vendor
Vendor-linkonly

Today I may only have 20 minutes to catch up on Twitter on my mobile on the train, so I may read:

Communities-linkonly
KM-linkonly
Networks-linkonly
Enterprise2.0Essentials-linkonly

I really like that I’m empowered to be able to do this. With the regular Twitter interface, my 20 minutes would not get me far, or satisfy me…

FeedVis - Still in private beta, with also an offer of the source code to run it on your server, FeedVis is a a tag cloud generator based on a bunch of feeds that you import via an OPML. The cloud is based on frequency and popularity. This should just be a feature of Google Reader, and probably is in Feedly (also see mini). I remember good old Feeds2.0 had a tag cluster. [via RWW]

embedit.in - embed doc and image files or URLs into your blog posts as flash boxes - doc, docx, xls, xlsx, ppt, pptx, pdf, wpd, odt, ods, odp, png, jpg, gif, tiff, bmp, eps, ai, txt, rtf, csv, html. Limit is 20 meg. If you already have a web page with links to lots of documents, use embedit.in sitewide to convert them in one go. See their tips. I’d rather not embed it in this post, but here’s a URL to an example of embedding a URL. [via nw]

Webinmail - if all you have is an email connection, yet you want to surf the web, then email this service with the URL you want in the subject field, and they will email you back the page…you can even email a search query. [via DI]

Innercircle.cc - create an email distribution list. Also see posterous group blog/email lists

Smub.it - ever read a webpage on your phone and want to bookmark it in delicious, share it on Twitter, Facebook or Friendfeed, email it, etc… I do all the time, but my phone doesn’t have bookmarklets (do phones have these). Anyway, what you can do now is prepend the URL you want to bookmark/share with “smub.it/”. It’s kind of like ShareThis, but done manually by altering the URL.

eg.
- if you came across this URL on your phone
http://www.labnol.org/internet/email/surf-the-web-via-email/5624/

- you go to the address bar, and prepend it with “smub.it/”
smub.it/http://www.labnol.org/internet/email/surf-the-web-via-email/5624/

- then it takes you to a page of icons for delicious, facebook, twitter, friendfeed, email, etc…click on one of these and your away.

Problem with my phone is I can’t choose an icon to click, darn….

Anyway, you can also manage your bookmarks at smub.it, and use a smub bookmarklet or toolbar

It’s also a URL shortener, where you can customise your URL’s
ie enter your ID and a keyword. For example the link in the example above could be
smub.it/johntropea/surfemail

[via BrightHub]

It’s sometimes such a drag being an early adopter because you are ready for features years ahead of when regular users will ask for them…you just have to be patient.

But the day has come, Google Reader has turned into a simple newsmastering service.

Over two years ago I was whining (point 5 in this post) that Google Reader lacked an OPML file for each tag/folder, which it still does, but it has gone one better anyway, well kind of…

I was also whining and still will that the OPML of my subscriptions is a file and not a dynamic URL. Use case is if I import my OPML into a Google CSE, and then add/delete a feed from Google Reader, my Google CSE will not know about it, which is a pity because it means I can’t use Google Reader as a master control for people to use a public search engine across my current Google Reader subscriptions.

OK, the new feature…a while back during the American elections you may remember that Google Reader was showcasing shared item lists based on a curated selection of feeds.

Well now we can do the same with the new bundles feature. That is, grab a selection of feeds and stream the latest posts on a page.

It’s just like our Shared Items page, but now we can select the feeds, and you can make as many of these newsmastering pages as you like, basically an auto-blog based on some source feeds.

Yeah! and each has an OPML file.

Here’s my auto-blog page on mobile culture, access the OPML file of the source feeds, or subscribe to the feed.

If you click the “subscribe” button you will batch subscribe to multiple feeds right into Google Reader, and they will be auto filed in the folder/tag with the name of the bundle page.

If you decide you don’t want the bundle anymore, unfortunately Google Reader doesn’t allow you to unsubscribe all feeds in a folder, so you have to manually unsubscribe from each feed…yikes!

What about subscribing to an OPML?

Now what would truly make this awesome and catch up with what Blogbridge did, in my own words is:

“When you import an OPML file into BlogBridge can you choose it to be a static list or a dynamic list…”

“Basically a reading list means you can subscribe to the URL of an OPML file, but instead of importing all the feeds in one batch, they kind of virtually exist in your RSS reader…if a feed is added or deleted to the OPML file, then this will reflect in your RSS reader…dynamic!”

What I’m saying here, is that in addition to batch subscribing to multiple feeds one go, I would also like the option to not subscribe to the feeds at all, but instead subscribe to the OPML URL.

Just say you subscribe to the actual OPML URL of my bundle above (you virtually/remote subscribe), and then I remove a few feeds and add some new ones. Then this will reflect in your remote subscription of my OPML bundle. I hold the master, and whatever I do in it, will reflect in whoever has subscribed to it.

As I said this would be good as an option, to import a static or dynamic OPML…here’s a post I made on this over 3 years ago, Dynamic newsmastering with OPML.

I guess if this was the case, then in your “manage subscriptions” page you could have a section for OPML’s you are remotely subscribed to.

So what’s next?

It needs:

• an OPML exchange - a place to swap bundles
• a newsmaster exchange - same as above, a place to find Shared Item blogs
• a search box
• tag cloud
• curating, like mysyndicaat

This last one is especially interesting, as it’s not only a topic auto-blog, but you could have the option to remove posts before they appear in your bundle (kind of like moderating), and also adding in posts that come from other sources (kind of like what we do with our public tag/folder shared pages).

And even do this by setting up keywords to filter in and out, the latest tool is MoreOver, and the most common is Dapper and Feed Informer…and of course MySyndicaat.

You know what’s coming next, and that’s to add a group feature where members could:

• comment on items
• write their own posts

Is this sounding like a Friendfeed Room!

Related features from Google Reader:

Google Reader is your new watercooler
Meeting friends of friends

[ADDED 24/05/09: Of course now I can put a bundle OPML into Google CSE, and when I update that OPML (add/remove feeds), my Google CSE will magically be updated]

Buzzable - a neat interactive newsmastering tool, perhaps similar to a Friendfeed Room.
Create a topic page and invite people to your group (public or private). These people have 140 characters when posting content. If group members use the “@” symbol they can reference posts to one another (ie. conversational chatting). Again this is what I like about microblogging, in the very same stream I am posting a blog-like post, but then a minute later I’m chatting with someone in the same stream…then a second later I’m reading some links someone has posted (read, chat, post, share links within the same stream and network)

Also posts you make in Buzzable can be auto-tweeted to a communal Twitter account. If you need some help populating your stream, you don’t have to rely on your group, you can import feeds to re-syndicate content, and filter those feeds by keyword.

An idea would be to associate a hashtag with a buzzable group. When I use that hashtag in Twitter, it will re-post it to the buzzable group, and it will only do this if I’m a member of that group. If someone replies to that tweet from Buzzable it currently re-posts to a communal Twitter account, which is OK because I will still see that tweet in my reply stream.
I guess this would be like member-based hashtag pages.

Use Google Reader from within Outlook - replace the Outlook RSS feeds folder with Google Reader. This comment suggests you can do the same thing in Outlook 2003.

Google Reader offline - RSS Bandit and Scoop. If you are after an alternative web version, check out Feedly.

Storytlr - We all know Friendfeed has won the lifestream battle, but I thought I’d mention this one as it’s a your very own lifestream page without having to be part of a network, ala the old skool Suprglu. Storytlr has a bonus feature of grabbing items by date range and creating a story. They offer a widget to integrate into your blog, but if you want to go even further try a service called iBegin which is a plugin to create a lifestream page on your blog, check out Elsua’s. [via lifestream blog]

Tablefy - Lots of people may use Google Docs to display comparsion tables, well now there is a service that is made specifically for this use. Robin Good has an example, you can track this table, or even embed it in your blog post. Now we can make our own comparison sites like wiki-matrix, well not quite, this goes one further by allowing you to choose only the products you want to compare.