Wakelet is a great tool for creating your digital scrapbook

This article is republished with permission from  Wonder Tools , a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps.  Subscribe here .



Wakelet  is one of my favorite tools for digital scrapbooking—saving, organizing and sharing social posts and other links. It lets you save posts from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube—or any site—into a digital page you can share.



Here are four things you can do with Wakelet.



1. Curate a topic of importance to you



If you follow a particular topic, Wakelet is great for gathering and organizing Tweets, stories, videos, or anything else on that subject. You can annotate any link you add with as much or as little text as you’d like.



I like the fact that you can view social posts and videos in full right within Wakelet. You can then share a link to your collection with anyone you choose, either so they can view it or add to it. You can then continue adding to that collection over time. 



Here’s a Wakelet collection I came across recently called  Black Voices , celebrating fiction and non-fiction for children and teens, curated by the team at a British library.



2. Gather highlights of an event



I’ve used Wakelet at conferences to save useful Tweets, videos, or other links related to that event. It’s a useful way to curate public notes on the event because you can easily include others’ social posts as well as your own annotations.



Some examples:




I created this collection  for a talk I gave last year for the Social Media Weekend conference.  What’s in it:  I saved resources I used and others’ Tweets. 



I took  these live notes  at a #PaidContent event I hosted a few years ago  What’s in it:  Tweets and links from event presenters and attendees.



Summary points and highlights  allowed me to look back at insights and resources Amy Webb shared in her 2014 Top 10 trends talk. 




3. Assemble a portfolio of your work



Collect the work you do into a nice page that you can add to whenever you want. You can annotate things, divide it into sections, and use the built-in social search to find things to add. Here’s an example of  a student portfolio on Wakelet .



4. Use it with your team



Explore this  batch of interesting Wakelet collections  to see more examples of how people use it. 




Teachers use it to share resources with students. 



Journalists use it to share curated content with readers. 



Marketing teams use it to collect comments people make on social platforms. 



Designers use it to collect visual inspiration via images, videos, & social posts. 








I loved  Storify . It was a fantastic tool for saving the best tweets on a particular hashtag or gathering up highlights from various social platforms. You could include YouTube videos, Facebook posts, Flickr images and more. Sadly, it shuttered in 2018. 



Now  Wakelet  has emerged to take its place. It’s simple and free to use. (So many useful tech tools have shuttered that I once paused to collect  a Twitter list of more than 50 useful tools that have been closed .)



More Wakelet examples




30 Resources  for free public domain images



Travel Hacks  for when we can start traveling again



Ancient Greek Philosophy  for reflecting on our lives



World Oceans Day  resources for exploring the underwater universe



An Educator’s Journey : an example of a personal portfolio/journal approach



A Wakelet Newsletter : a curated note shared with a community of Wakeleters




How to Get Started with Wakelet



Once you create a free account at Wakelet.com, add the  Chrome ,  Firefox , or  Edge  browser extension. That will enable you to save anything you encounter on the Web to a Wakelet collection. You can also download the  iOS ,  Android , or  Amazon  app version if you want to save things from a mobile device.



How to Save Things



When you encounter any article, video, social post—on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or any other site—you can save it to Wakelet. The simplest way is to just right-click and save it to a Wakelet collection. Collections are basically just special pages that house a particular set of links that you’ve saved.  



Another way to save sites to Wakelet is to click on the little bookmarklet in your browser bar once you’ve installed the browser extension. You can also search for something at Wakelet.com or just add a URL. 



This article is republished with permission from  Wonder Tools , a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps.  Subscribe here .