Organized: A great thing to be when guest editing at someone else’ blog

Last week I had the hon­our of cur­at­ing One Degree’s Week in Review. My con­tri­bu­tion: Melt­downs, Mon­it­izaton and Monks. The week in review: Fri­day the 13th edi­tion, Feb­ru­ary 2009

Quick back­ground:

OneDegree.ca is one of Canada’s lead­ing online pub­lic­a­tions about digit­al mar­ket­ing, online com­mu­nic­a­tions and social media — penned by some of Canada’s most insight­ful and innov­at­ive inter­net marketers.

Now, what was inter­est­ing in this exer­cise was the fact that I had to gath­er a week’s worth of ‘inter­est­ing things’, keep them organ­ized and ready for review and inclu­sion into the final article.

What made this pro­cess easi­er is that I set aside time to apply a sys­tem to this. It kept me organ­ized and focused…no multi-task­ing allowed. Here’s how I did it.

1. Scan lots of sources. In my case, I tracked trend­ing top­ics on Twit­ter with Tweet­Deck (and it’s super-cool Twits­coop func­tion), reviewed my reg­u­lar Google Alerts on top­ics I’m inter­ested in, Scanned my RSS feeds for inter­est­ing blog posts.
2. Har­vest the best items and add them to my del.icio.us book­mark stream, adding appro­pri­ate tags. In my case I used 1degree
3. Repeat daily, or more often if needed

So, on Edit Day, I had a rather large list (60+ items) of del.icio.us book­marks and oth­er items to review and try and find a com­mon theme or themes (for the title), build the sub­mis­sion and select appro­pri­ate categories.

At this point, it was easy to see com­mon threads, themes and cat­egor­ies. Then it was a simple task, based on the num­ber and fre­quency of sim­il­ar items, to determ­ine which made the submission.

All told, I likely spent 20–30 minutes each day col­lect­ing con­tent. Then on Edit Day, it took me maybe 90 minutes to build the final art­icle.  All in, maybe 200 minutes total; 3+ hours.

Since this is the first time I’d applied this sys­tem, I’m think­ing with prac­tice and exper­i­ence I’ll be able to bring that time down in future.