Curating Online with Tumblr

Jenna Wortham writes in the New York Times,

The Internet is awash in content — and a whole lot of it is junk, spam or inane status updates. How do you begin to navigate through the zillions of news articles, Web sites, tweets and other stuff online to find content that matters to you?

You need digital curators.

More and more, bloggers are becoming online "curators." They no longer just generate content--they aggregate it based on their particular theme, agenda or taste.

Mindy McAdams even suggests that curation is a form of online journalism. I really recommend taking a look at her piece on this, as well as Jeff Jarvis' writings about curation on his excellent blog Buzz Machine.

Far be it from me to miss out on this exciting new trend. Globaloria needs a curated space of its own!

A perfect tool for virtual curating is a platform called Tumblr. I'd really like for you all to experiment with Tumblr by setting up your own account and trying your luck as an information aggregator. Just visit www.tumblr.com and poke around. I'm conducting my own experiment with Tumblr for Globaloria!

You can access the Globaloria Tumblr in the links section along the right hand side of the screen, or in the Tumblr feed just below the links. I strongly recommend you add it the new Globaloria Tumblr account to your Google Reader so you're sure not to miss out on updates.

What makes Tumblr different from Blogger is that it situates the multimedia component of blogging as the centerpiece of each post. While you're certainly able to compose text-heavy postings, Tumblr makes it especially easy and fun to share links, quotes, videos and images from the Internet with a mere click of the mouse. Better yet, Tumblr and Twitter are affiliated and I have found Tumblr to be a great gateway to the Twitter culture, which is becoming increasingly relevant in Web 2.0 culture.

As I explore the Internet day-to-day, I will Tumble interesting content I find that I think you'll all enjoy, and over time refine a curated space dedicated to the vision of Globaloria! I'm really excited about this forum for expression and hope you'll share your perspectives on it with me.

Your GB,
Rachel