I've been thinking a lot about curation over the last year, the major pushback against information overload and time deficit imposed by Internet abundance.
The result of this was a proliferation of satellite sites around my own sites (SoTI and MicrobiologyBytes), such as Scoop.it, Pinterest, and to an extent, curated streams on multiuse sites such as Twitter, Google+ and Facebook. For the sake of sanity, it's time to make some difficult decisions in terms of concentrating effort.
Ideally, the result of a curated stream is an increased flow of traffic to the central site, stimulated by the authority and focus of the curated content, as well as being a service in its own right. But Andrew Baron, long my bellweather on Internet publishing, points to the difficulties imposed by interlinking with other services. So compromise is inevitable.
I'm shuttering my Scoop.it and Pinterest sites (they've already gone from the sidebars of the blogs - nobody noticed) - with the caveat that the AoB Scoop.it stream stays as it is a useful multiauthoring tool, and that Pinterest could return if I ever found a suitably visual use for it (and decided to use it over Tumblr).
With Twitter currently at its peak, my various Twitter accounts stay, as do the Facebook pages for MicrobiologyBytes and AoB. But my main offsite effort is now directed towards Google+, with my personal stream, MicrobiologyBytes and Annals of Botany pages all showing the fastest growth and greatest interactivity. This is where my effort is now directed offsite.
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