Why I Post My Favorite Tweets: Simple Content Curation and Archiving

Sometimes I am asked by colleagues, readers of this blog, or tweeters why I post my favorite tweets (see for example: My Favorite Tweets for September 16 - 30 2011). Others suggest that I should use this or that tool to make the task of archiving tweets easier. While I am sure that there may be other tools for this job, that would require me to use yet another tool. I try to keep my tool set concise. I remember that my former colleague Tom Davenport said that his research showed that the most productive knowledge workers were those who used fewer tools to more things. I find that is my personal preference.

It takes a lot for me to use a new tool. Recently, I found a great new social collaboration tool, Convofy, that I will be writing about soon. I was slow to begin using Twitter. TweetDeck and my FastFoward colleagues showed me the possibilities.  Now I use it for several things. It is one of the tools I use to monitor what is going on in my areas of interests. Other tools include several news feeds and the Darwin Social Media on the Web Edition. When I find something through TweetDeck I retweet it. When I find something through another source I tweet it. So Twitter is now my main social bookmarking tool.  When I am looking for new content to blog about, the first place I look is my own tweet stream (@billives) or the @darwineco tweet stream.

Now Twitter and TeeetDeck do not seem to be good archiving tools so I use my blog for this as it is a good archiving tool. While there might be a better tool for this archiving, I am happy so far with simply extending my existing tool set. I also find the process of going back through my tweets of the last two weeks and selecting favorites to be a useful exercise as it reminds me of the headlines of the last two weeks. While there is a bit of manual work here, it is something I can easily do instead of watching the TV commercials during sports events. Now I have a record of many of the things I felt were important during the past few years. 

 

Comments

[Miza]

Well there are some funny and interesting tweets out there, why not posting them, the "trending" is a really nice edition, can see whats going on in the world, what is most discussed.