Sometimes we have to pinch ourselves to remember what life was like before the Internet. With unlimited choice at our finger tips, we spend more and more time being naturally inquisitive, researching, building our brains, being productive and sharing the fruits of our hard work with others. Few would deny that one of the biggest benefits of the Internet is that we can research virtually anything.
For those of us who use the Internet to stay up-to-date on fast moving subjects as part of our job, the sheer volume of resources created every day can sometimes feel overwhelming. That’s why people are turning to content curation services for help, to store, tag and share content that interests them.
There are many content curation tools available. The main one we we use is Evernote to help curate online content.
Over the past year Evernote has saved our bacon more times than we can remember. The service allows you to store text, bookmark (scrape) websites, audio, pictures, video and PDF files. We use it out and about, back at base and when in client meetings to keep a record of action points. You can tag your notes (to easily search based on themes you set) and there’s a web browser plug-in that allows you (with one click) to grab a whole web page and store it in your Evernote account.
Another (more vigorous) way of cutting your content down to size is the Summly App (currently available for iPhone and soon to be released on Android). This App scans articles using a sophisticated algorithm to auto-generate a list of bullet points to ‘sum-up’ the articles main points. Certainly not a replacement for reading the full article, but a productivity aid of note for busy researchers nonetheless.
If you are having difficulty getting though everything you want to digest, some would say that you should get better at knowing what you need to read. It’s good to know there is help on hand in either case, so choose your content curation tool wisely as it may make the difference between a couple more free hours a week.
