Finally I have logged into Flipboard with my Facebook and Twitter accounts and created personal digital magazines based on the comments, images and links of my friends and colleagues. This is wonderful stuff. (See my previous post and video here.)

Even more significantly, my Twitter Lists, which have been around for a while allowing me to organise the people I follow into categories, have suddenly taken on a new, powerful role acting as content feeds for Flipboard magazines. Now I can create my own personal iPad magazines, and act as Editor-in-Chief by choosing the magazine topic and the contributors.

I have just tested this out and called my first digital title, 'Social Web', the name of one of my Twitter Lists. You can look at my growing list of contributors here, and even follow this list. (Thanks everyone and sorry to those I've forgotten!!) Sometimes people will contribute great stories on social media, web 2.0, mobile devices and the digital space. Other times they'll chat about the impacts of the internet on politics or the clean feed. Or even about lunch. And if they talk about lunch too much I can drop them from the Flipboard feed.

Twitter is where millions of professionals exchange ideas and links to high-quality content because they want to stay at the cutting edge of their industry. And most industries in the first-world are moving at fast, if not exponential, rates driven by significant advances in technology.

Currently there are 2.5 million Twitter accounts in Australia and just over 9 million Australians using Facebook. Flipboard allows you to take this crowd-sourced content, aggregate it in a neat - can I say beautiful? - way and consume it much more easily than Twitter or Facebook has allowed up to now. Because, let's face it, that's what it's about: the form factor.

Within 10 years we have come a long way, or perhaps completed a full digital circle. Content exploded onto the web in the 1990s and early 2000s, searchable on Google and other search engines. Social media and web 2.0 technologies created the opportunity for crowd-sourcing and aggregation of content so we became exposed to 'trusted' streams of information flowing to us through Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and more. Now the iPad has allowed Flipboard (and I'm sure other solutions will follow) to turn those streams of content into a magazine-like format, a form we have always loved to kick back and consume (now digital and highly interactive), and made us our own editors.

Posted via email from Beyond Digital Media