Content hunting

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Prospecting for content

Gather your picks and shovels

1. Open your favorite browser window (or several).

1. Open your favorite text editor as a scratch pad, you'll want to copy/paste links from the browser and make notes.

Simply relying on browser history or bookmarking is probably not the best strategy, you'll want to capture your findings and get them recorded on the wiki at the end of your search. Editing directly into a wiki page is also less-than-ideal as you don't want to get distracted by formating and the like while the hunt is on.

1. If you are doing this collaboratively (in real-time) you'll probably want to open an IRC chat session on a suitable channel.

Focused content hunt

You've got an idea of what sort of content you want to find.

Searching with your favorite search engine on carefully chosen terms is likely to return a lot of links, and you can't necessarily visit them all. One good strategy is to use this search to find super-nodes from which to do more focused browsing. For health and science content: government agencies/ministries, NGO's, patient and research advocacy groups and universities are all likely to have produced suitable content or gathered together links to high-quality content. Furthermore, as these are all generally non-profit organizations, the chances of finding content that is (or can be) made available under suitable licensing terms are substantially improved.

Surprise content discovery

Sometimes when you are looking for one thing, you stumble across something else entirely. Serendipity is a wonderful thing. Open a fresh text window and paste the link with some notes on topic, copyright, that will allow you (or someone else) pick up that thread. If you working collabaratively with a group on a focused content hunt, it's best not to get distracted by another topic, no matter how rich a vein of content you've found; but don't lose track of it either. It could become the starting point of a new focused content hunt you launch later on, or you can drop it onto an appropriate wiki page for someone else to follow up.

Hub-and-spoke versus linear search

Content evaluation

There are a number of characteristics that make some content better suited for use thanother content.

Pretty rocks

We all like picking up pretty rocks. We need pretty rocks. With some buffing and polishing, they might become a gem. With a lot of work, a bunch of pretty rocks can be shaped and carefully placed into a beautiful mosaic. But on their own, a pretty rock is just a pretty rock.

Nuggets

Some times you get really lucky and pickup a piece of pure gold that is just sitting there.

Vein of high-grade ore

There is a lot of good stuff in there, but it will take some processing and maybe even heavy equipment to get it ready for use. Tools like wget can be useful for harvesting a chunk of content from a web-page for off-line processing.