We all know about the explosion of information and its effect on us. More and more is being created on a daily basis: new articles, new books, new headlines, new videos, new music. We also know that more and more that is being created is either untrue, mindless drivel, evilly addictive, or simply not intended for you (e.g. Facebook postings or twitter posts which make no sense to you probably weren’t written for you—the nature of the medium simply makes it easy for you to see it).
One answer to information overload is better and better search engines. This is the problem Google, Yahoo, and Bing are each attempting to answer, with results of varying quality. (I personally use Google but have found Bing to be very good too.)
Another answer to information overload is social media: links that your friends and the people you “follow” online recommend. I get a substantial number of “leads” this way.
Yet another answer is to follow a very specific, selected set of feeds. (There is no one “best” set of RSS feeds to follow in your feed reader: it all depends on what you are trying to uncover. For example, I follow over 300 different feeds, but I have them grouped in different categories—news, recruitment, war, disease, social media, etc).
These three answers can be leveraged into a fourth answer—a service that missionary advocates can offer to others which would be of great value: the Digital Curator. Back in February 2008, Steve Rubel wrote an excellent short article, The Digital Curator in your future. He has written about it again today, identifying some case studies in The next big trend: it’s all about curation.
A digital curator is a “content specialist responsible for an institution’s collections and their associated collections catalog.” A digital curator, in a sense, separates the junk from the high-value pieces.
I suggest missionary advocates can serve a useful role for others in missions and in churches by being “digital curators” to high-value pieces of information related to missions and your specific niche in it. There’s enough information being created “out there” that you don’t necessarily need to create new things. What you need to do is uncover it, link to it, and tell us (briefly!) why it is important. Annotated links to original content elsewhere is a key value that is fairly simple to incorporate.
So here’s how to do it:
1. Get really good at following sources of information that are useful and of high-quality. You want to minimize your own personal noise, while increasing the amount of good stuff you find. I am constantly searching for new RSS feeds, but in each category I generally only maintain two folders: 1) the “top 10” sources and 2) the 10 feeds that are “on probation.” You can also try following primarily an Alltop feed (you can set up your own customized alltop page at my.alltop.com), or you can try following lots of folks on Twitter who send links your way (I get a lot of my persecuted church news this way).
2. Find the way that suits you best to share the links you discover. I balance “favoriting” entries in Twitter that have to do with missions (seehttp://www.twitter.com/nsmjustinlong/favorites for a running list, or the front page of http://www.strategicnetwork.org), and I retweet or post items that specifically have to do with missions and “swarming” (decentralized networks). I use a WordPress plugin (Twitter Tools) to aggregate my tweets into Aside links on strategicnetwork.org. I use a custom PHP script that I wrote to bring these links together (along with articles) and email them out to the momentum@strategicnetwork.org email list (join with an email tomomentum-join@strategicnetwork.org).
What are the “important links”? You’ll need to figure this out for yourself, based on your vision and plausible promise. It’s not always the stuff that gets retweeted. The question to ask yourself is how a particular resource or link is important to you in fulfilling your promise—and then figure it will likely be similarly valuable to those who share your vision. And tell us how it’s useful.
One last note: in order to do this, you need a strategy for how you are going to use the various services out there. Our blog at strategicnetwork.org is used as an aggregation point for all the material I link to and write. Twitter is used for real-time feeds of links. I use Facebook for notes about me, personally, so if you want to know more about Justin-the-guy-and-the-family you need to connect with me there. (I also repost all my Twitter stuff to Facebook so you get both.)
You can do this too. If you decide to be a digital curator, email me –justinlong@gmail.com – and let me know. I’ll probably want to follow you!
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