Introducing the Blurt Curation Initiative

Blurt Curation is a new initiative that seeks to support, encourage and showcase the work of Blurt's curators.

This includes both community curation accounts supported by the Blurt Foundation as well as private curation projects.

By making curation more effective, more professional and more engaging, we hope to improve the overall quality of the posts published on Blurt.

Let's move forward in small steps so that everybody who is on-board knows exactly what is asked of them.

One of the tasks will be to act as an aggregator of curation activities, especially of community reports and contest results. I feel that community contests themselves are currently covered by the #blurtcontests tag and @blurtcontests account, but adjudicating on winners is also a curatorial task, so I will be happy to promote those posts.

So the first thing I'd ask is that those curators who publish regular updates and news, or collections of best-voted posts, should use the #curation tag. With some 30 community groups, I don't see very many using that tag. You may use the #blurtcuration tag too, but as we currently only have five tags I feel that #curation is the most obvious location for such posts.

So, please use the #curation tag for all your official curation-related posts so I can see them.

Reblogging is the quickest form of promotion, but in its current absence I shall myself be posting compilations of curation-related posts. These could also include articles about curation techniques, how to be more effective and how to create a real sense of community.

The new Curation Guidelines will be published very soon, but there has been a lot of debate about them in the background, hence the delay.

The Blurt Curation initiative has been established by myself, @rycharde, so that all the Blurt curators can come together and form their own community. Please don't forget that if you, as curator, need any assistance or advice, there are the Curation Team Managers: @Angelica7 and @Zahidsun. You may approach them with questions either in a post comment or in Blurt's Discord server.

Also, as a curator, if you feel we've missed one of your posts or wish to update us on some matters, then feel free to leave a comment and a link to your article. Indeed, I would like to see more commenting in general, especially regarding post quality; it isn't always obvious why a particular post has been voted on, nor sometimes why some have been missed. Comments with words of encouragement or ways to improve a post can be used to guide and motivate bloggers.

One of my first tasks will be to look at each curation group and start collating who is doing what. A few tags are less than obvious as to their main topic area, so that should also improve any accidental tag-spam. This will include the private curation projects so they get the same exposure as the Blurt-supported groups.

This in itself will probably take a few weeks so... expect us!

@BlurtCuration