Waking up to Wakelet

Content curation and social sharing

Just over a year ago, I was alarmed by the news that Storify – a service which I had used to capture the tweets for NetIKX events – was to close. Luckily, an alternative service appeared on the scene in the form of Wakelet, which has proved to be a useful tool for both personal and public content curation. Although I had initially used it in much the same way as Storify, purely for collating tweets from events using the event hashtag, it is possible to capture any content from the web and save it into a collection, known as a ‘Wake’. This can be private, public or shared with a limited group of people if you choose to give them the link to your Wake. You can include notes on individual items, add cover images and background images and customise the view of your collection. There is extensive help documentation on creating collections and adding content is straightforward with browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox and Safari. There are mobile apps – which I haven’t yet tried – for both Android and iOS. Also, if you have multiple Wakelet accounts it is easy to switch between accounts from the home page.

I am still exploring all the possibilities of Wakelet, including its use as a bookmark collection (for which I am still firmly wedded to Diigo), a personal document repository and personal reading list management system – which might be somewhat trickier, but I have yet to discover a personal version of the reading list software used in academic libraries. (I sometimes wonder if there is a genuine gap in the market for this, or if I am the only one who wants it!)

Here’s an example of my Wake from the ISKO UK biennial conference in July 2019:

And my (embryonic) collection on metadata, linked data and the Semantic Web:

I would love to hear from any other Wakelet users – do you have any interesting use cases, tips and tricks or general information about Wakelet? I’d also be very interested in hearing from anyone who is using it as a collaborative tool.