Do You Miss the Resource Roundups?
Okay, I'm wracked with guilt. On this blog, and then summarized in our eNews, I used to round up articles from around the internet that I felt would be useful for nonprofits choosing software.
I really liked doing it - I thought it added great diversity to what was covered in our own articles, and I feel strongly that winnowing through the huge amount of stuff out there to find truly useful things is an important editorial service in of itself. And I don't know if anyone else noticed, but it meant that you could search the Idealware site and find many more articles than we have actually written.
But it's really, really time consuming - I was spending a solid 10 -15 hours or so a month on it, unpaid. In particular, you really need to go out of your way these days to find good coverage of anything other than Web 2.o tools. I stopped trying to systematically cover what's out there in August, as it just didn't seem to make sense - with an extra 10-15 hours, we could do another original article, for instance. We started the Ask Idealware series instead, which is considerably less time consuming for me, and also (hopefully!) adds good new content into the world.
But I really miss the article roundup, especially as part of our eNewsletter. I feel especially guilty as it means our eNews has closed down from being a roundup of the world of content to now focus almost exclusively on our own. Does anyone out there miss it too? If so, any thoughts on how we can carefully filter the world of content down to a useful summary in less time, or actually make money to cover that time?
I really liked doing it - I thought it added great diversity to what was covered in our own articles, and I feel strongly that winnowing through the huge amount of stuff out there to find truly useful things is an important editorial service in of itself. And I don't know if anyone else noticed, but it meant that you could search the Idealware site and find many more articles than we have actually written.
But it's really, really time consuming - I was spending a solid 10 -15 hours or so a month on it, unpaid. In particular, you really need to go out of your way these days to find good coverage of anything other than Web 2.o tools. I stopped trying to systematically cover what's out there in August, as it just didn't seem to make sense - with an extra 10-15 hours, we could do another original article, for instance. We started the Ask Idealware series instead, which is considerably less time consuming for me, and also (hopefully!) adds good new content into the world.
But I really miss the article roundup, especially as part of our eNewsletter. I feel especially guilty as it means our eNews has closed down from being a roundup of the world of content to now focus almost exclusively on our own. Does anyone out there miss it too? If so, any thoughts on how we can carefully filter the world of content down to a useful summary in less time, or actually make money to cover that time?
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7 Comments:
I don't remember the resource roundups but I find the other stuff very useful so I thought I would chip in.
My suggestion is to work out deals for republishing/reprinting with Michael Gilbert and other such individuals/orgs that do the same thing very effectively. Why reinvent the wheel?
Venkat
Thanks! I certainly agree there's no point in reinventing the wheel. I was trying to specifically cover the world of resources useful in choosing software, which I felt wasn't well covered (Michael Gilbert tends to focus on larger, organizational issues) - but certainly if you guys don't feel it added a lot of value over what's already there, then my time is better spent on something else...
My suggestion would be to set up an account with a bookmarking service like Del.icio.us for these stories, and then post them to that account as you come across them.
It won't be as comprehensive, but it will be much easier since the work becomes just clicking a "Post This" button in your browser when you stumble across a story of interest, rather than having to manually track them all down and write them up in one sitting. Then if you want to put them in your newsletter you just refer back to the del.icio.us site to get the list of links.
You could "crowd-source" the resource roundups.
To piggyback on Jason's suggestion, everyone could post links on Del.icio.us with a standard tag like "idealware-resources". That could act as a mechanism for people to suggest resources. You could apply your own tag for resources that you particularly like.
People can then browse/search/subscribe by the editorial tag in an idealware account, or by the general tag regardless of account. There are probably feed aggregators in PHP that you could use to include the latest links in both categories on your website.
Leave a follow-up comment or shoot me an email if more details would help clarify the suggestion.
Great suggestions - thanks, Jason, David. Yeah, the time consuming part is not actually the capturing or even so much the writing up of resources, as much as following the huge pool of things I was following to filter out the best stuff about choosing software. There's more than a hundred resources a day posted just to the NPTech, for instance.
So it seems very crowd-sourceable, if you guys were up to help. Does a new del.icio.us tag seem the way to go? I'm nervous about defining a new tag, but it seems the obvious solution.
To my mind, an editorial filter is an important component of what I was doing - to filter "everything" down to a quite finite number of really useful resources. This would be a lot easier, though, if I didn't have to wade through as much stuff to find the good stuff. In fact, if we had a del.iciou.us tag, it would be easy for anyone to see the full list (in del.icio.us), and then I could use that full list to create a filtered view for the blog/eNews, for people who prefer a more edited version.
How's that sound? I'm up to try it if a couple of you are up to help...
I hear you on the editorial aspect. This is why I love idealware! I don't think it would be all that difficult to set up a user review system for us nonprofit techies out there. I don't know of another site that does that. It's a way we can editorialize ourselves without putting all the work on you! Thoughts? If you're game, I'd be up for helping. (I smell a drupal website!)
Yes Laura, it is really consuming to go through a mass of links, winnow it down, and round it up! I spent hours and hours on the nptech tag stuff - looking for stuff and reading and summarizing what's in the stream.
Maybe we should find some funding to support a collaborative tagging service?
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