I’ve started a new experiment.
I’ve created a Google+ Page titled Bird Photography Today, which is affiliated with the Bird Photography community I co-run over there. I’m starting with sharing the images we’re choosing at Photos of the Day so we can better highlight the best of the photography that’s being shared in that community, but as I figure out the logistics and what works best over there.
I’d love to get your feedback and suggestions on what kind of things might be appropriate for the page. the vistion I’m working on for this is for it to become a “daily newsletter” of highlights and features of interest to bird photographers. right now I’m starting simple and seeing how it evolves.
If that sounds a bit like a specialized version of “Things You’ll Find Interesting“, you’re correct. I spent some time just watching things after I moved that to Tumblr. There are things I really like about it. Readership is about double what it was in its previous incarnation. But still, it’s not the platform I want to base my curation work on.
I’ve been looking long and hard at what my “perfect” platform for this would be. The best model I’ve come up with is the site style known as a Planet, but organized around URLs instead of feeds. A simple version would have a single contributor (me), but it’s not hard to see how you could extend that into a full community and allow others to contribute links as well. If you build a good core moderator/contributor team, you could make it a really strong content stream.
Take that one step further and build in a full reputation system into it similar to what Stack Exchange uses. Now you can hand off link submission and link curation to the community, and allow the community to decide which members can contribute or moderate and curate, and how prominent links that are submitted would be displayed. It’s a fascinating model to contemplate. It’s one I’m going to continue to chew on and maybe at some point prototype out.
Having decided on that at the “ultimate” model for handing this kind of data, I took a step back and and started thinking about systems that have similar content management and display styles to what I was thinking of for this — and I kept circling back to a Google Page. And if you want to create a contibution/discussion space to go with the curated content on a page, add in a community.
And having realized that, I decided to experiment with it a bit and see what happens.
If I like it, don’t be surprised if “Things You’ll find Interesting” moves off of this blog and off of tumblr and heads in that direction….. We’ll see how things go…
I know it’s trendy in some circles to have declared Google+ a ghost town and boring and not worth wasting time on; since Communities came online, I think there’s been a huge shift in usability and interest in G+, and it’s turned into a rather fun and interesting place, especially if you’re a photographer. But if you want to continue to make fun and ignore it, BMG. But I think there are a lot of nice building blocks there. Next stop for me is probably Google Hangouts and setting up “Office Hours” for a project I haven’t yet announced….
Google Pages for curated content and Google Communities for group involvement and discussion both seem to be really useful tools that integrate well together, and I’ve found the content creation, sharing and curation capabilities rather nice. So now it’s time to jump in the pool and see how they work in practice instead of in theory… Come on over, join the fun, and tell me what you think…