807 days after I shared my first item via feedly.com, it is high time this splendid service receive my praise:

Curate Ergo Sum.

With instant apologies for pretence (I know little Descartes and less Latin), this praise still captures my feeling about feedly:

I curate, therefore I am

How else would I be able to stay on top of 385 different sources spanning traditional news providers, individual bloggers and predefined searches? Feedly and the underlying RSS aggregator Google reader allows me to create my own information channel. Neatly organised into categories, I scan headlines and opening paragraphs at a speed unimaginable a few years ago. I save whats grabs my attention and then I read:

Curate first! Then consume.

This dictum is our imperative now in a space bursting with information. It is what I followed to get up to speed on the topic of ‘data visualization‘ (or ‘information graphics‘). Once installed, feedly allows you to subscribe to syndication feeds (e.g. RSS) which you then select/create appropriate categories for (i.e. curate). I named mine ‘dadaviz’.

Picking any thread of a topic fabric (like data visualization) will unravel great parts of it due by hyperlinks – one feed leads to the next. I soon had more feeds in dadaviz than I cared for, so I created ‘dataviz2′:

Sources in feedly

This was where I relegated the feeds I was less interested in. My own topic fabric was emerging. I still curate first and then I consume. And with a nod to the feeds in my top flight, thank you to: Adrian Short and CASA Blog and Caseorganic Blog and Chart Porn and Cool Infographics and countculture » openlylocal and Crowd Simulation and Data Driven: Data Analytics, Dashboard Design and Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media and DataViz and Density Design and Digital Urban and FlowingData and GENeSIS and Guardian Datastore Pool and Impure Blog and Infographics news and information aesthetics and Information Is Beautiful and Juice Analytics: Agile Analytics and kasabi and LOD2 and London DataStore blogs and Matthew Ericson – ericson.net and News: Datablog | guardian.co.uk and nicolasrapp.com and OkTrends and Open Knowledge Foundation Blog and Periscopic Now and Peter Ørntoft and Placr News and Spatial Analysis and Strange Maps | Big Think and Strata 2011 and Suprageography and The Mapping London Blog and UrbanTick and Visual Business Intelligence and visualcomplexity.com and WallStats.com The Art of Information and Well-formed data and xkcd and ZAVEKA INFOGRÁFICA and …