This past Saturday I presented “Digital Curation: The New Frontier of Knowledge” at KnowCamp, an Italian BarCamp in Modena about knowledge and the web.

If you’re not familiar with the Ignite format, it’s very exciting for both speakers and spectators. 5 minutes, 20 slides, 15 seconds each slide. It’s a timing nightmare and you’re always racing against the clock, but it’s a great exercise to really concentrate on the meat of your presentation and remove the extras. (I gave another Ignite earlier this year on the New Digital Company: Distributed, Online, Transparent)

In any case, the Ignite I gave has enough material and research behind it for a 1 hour talk, and it was hard to stop at 5. But since this topic is relatively new, I wanted to whet people’s appetites with a broad overview of digital curation: what, why, how, and a brief look at curation and protecting our data across all of these different social networks and sites we sign up to and subsequently fill up with our data. We often can’t get that data back.

I propose WordPress as a digital hub – a place where our original and curated content is created, published, and archived, and integrates with everything else. It’s not a perfect solution, but it is one you can own and it continues to evolve as new plugins are coming out every day (just today a plugin was released to sync WordPress with Google+ – it’s a great time to get started!)

Here are the slides (in English) from “Digital Curation: The New Frontier of Knowledge“. Video of my presentation is online at KnowCamp.it, but it’s in Italian. If you have any questions, let me know!