Content Communities for Physiotherapists
Content communities look a bit like social networks – you have to register, you get a home page and you can make connections with friends. However, they are focussed on sharing a particular type of content such as photos, videos, bookmarks and research articles.
For example some of the most popular content communities are:
- Photo sharing – Flikr, Picasa
- Video sharing – YouTube
- Research sharing - Zotero, Mendeley, CiteULike
- Bookmark sharing – Del.icio.us, Digg, Stumble Upon
Content communities display characteristics of what are known as folksonomies. The term folksonomy refers to the way that information is organised – it is a play on the word taxonomy, a classification system. In a folksonomy the information or content is “tagged†with one-word descriptors. Anyone can add a tag to a piece of content and see what other people have tagged, too. Content communities generally make use of the folksonomy approach of tagging content to make it more easily found.
Professionally using content communities is all about having a place to search for specific content that might interest you and archiving this content in a way that is easily searchable by yourself and also by others in your community. Here’s what to do: Sign up to a content community of your choice to upload and share photos or videos, archive research and bookmark websites. Then search for like minded colleagues within these content communities, make a connection with them and search through their uploaded or bookmarked content for things that interest you. You can also sign up to their RSS feed to follow any activity that they make in the site, this will alert you whenever your connection uploads a new photo or video, shares a bookmark or highlights some research.
This video from Common Craft explains social bookmarking:
If you have used content communities in an innovative way for CE/CPD, education, research or business then let us know in the comments section below.
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