Feedly: a better alternative to Scoop.it as a curation platform

Scoop.it is no longer the ideal curation platform that it once was.

You are now limited to 50 posts on the free version which, if you take their recommendation that you post 10 items a day, means you can only host five days of material on the platform.

In theory you can set Scoop.it to automatically delete your oldest post as you add each new one, but I found this didn’t work. So, if you decide to stick with Scoop.it’s free version, you have to manually delete your oldest posts regularly.

This was the last straw for me with Scoop.it, which has become progressively harder to use over recent months. 

I used to find it a brilliant discovery tool, but one day my range of suggested items - based on an extensive key-word and blog-post trawl I had set up-  became far less relevant. I contact Scoop.it to ask what they had done and they said nothing. Whatever, it meant I had to find another discovery tool.

In the Curation section of Multimedia Journalism, Chapter 6 page 191, Scoop.it is the suggested platform. Feedly is my recommended  replacement for it.

All the tuition in the textbook is still relevant. You just need it apply it to Feedly. That tuition is in the textbook pages Module 6B8, pages 206-212 and the material discussed there is linked to here 

Getting started with Feedly

Here’s a guide to getting started with Feedly

That link takes you to detailed tuition, but this summary may be all you need to get started.

Log in to Feedly with Google or Facebook and choose the Basic option.

First, populate your feeds section by

Finding the content sources you want to monitor.

 Saving them all

Now you have a place to read suggested content and choose the items you want to curate

Create a board for each of the areas you wish to curate.

I’ve created two:

Multimedia Journalism 

and

Brand Journalism

Then, as you read, click the star logo to add your selections to the board you want to curate them on

You can share your selections on Twitter and other social platforms. Those posts on social media will draw readers back to your boards to read your curated items

The default layout is a little stark. I prefer the cards design, but there are other options.