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Robin Good: John McCarus, SVP for Brand Content at Digitas, ignites an interesting panel about content creation vs content curation. This is the second in a series of three videos highlighting a 2012 conversation on the future of media on the social web organized by Ben Elowitz, CEO of Wetpaint. From mere republishing and copying of someone else materials without attribution or credit (certainly not something to be categorized under "curation") to the new cadre of emerging journalists, who not only write, but also monitor, research, pre-digest and cull the most interesting content - not written by them - for their own audiences. Key takeaways:
-> Curators help to expand a publisher’s reach, but the publisher risks losing credit (and traffic). -> Curators who link back and republish only enough to pique interest will keep publishers happy. “It’s like the forest episode of Planet Earth: the animal eats the nectar and sort of destroys the plant but spreads the pollen all over.” Jason Hirschhorn, Media ReDEFined Interesting. 7/10 Original video: http://vimeo.com/37553245 Full article: http://digitalquarters.net/2012/02/video-rebooting-media-think-tank-content-creation-vs-curation/ 
Robin Good: If your company is looking for ways to facilitate users exploration of your product catalog and sharing on other social media channels, Evershare provides a complete suite of tools, targeted at medium to large-sized companies that does this and more. From the site: "EverShare provides everything a retailer needs to take full advantage of frictionless sharing on both Facebook and the ecommerce site while removing the hassle of maintaining Facebook APIs... EverShare combines the power of frictionless sharing and social curation to drive dramatic increases in referral traffic (from frictionless) and on-site conversion (from socially curated content)." Interesting. 7/10 Find out more: http://www.sociablelabs.com/frictionless/ 
Robin Good: Similar to Paper.li, NewsMix.me allows anyone to easily create one or more news channels which automatically aggregate news and posts by your selected sources on Twitter (including "lists"), and Facebook. P.S.: Unfortunately, rarely a Twitter stream or FB page is ever posting constantly on the same topic, making the aggregated result not as useful as it could be by allowing any source to be filtered for specific keywords. Interesting. 7/10 Try it out: http://newsmix.me/ 
Robin Good: If you are looking for ways to let your scoop.it content to reach more people and to get discovered by those who are not yet aware of you, the new Pinterest integration in Scoop.it should certainly be a welcome addition. With this new addition, not only you can share your curated stories inside your Scoop.it newsradar with your Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Tumblr and Wordpress friends, but you can also "pin" selected ones to create alternative "collections" on Pinterest. N.B.: To access the new "Pin it" button on Scoop.it, click the sharing button below any scoop and you will find it there next to the G+ one. 
Robin Good: Josh Sternberg at Digiday highlights a trend that is only going to get bigger in the near future: brands, as they realize the increasing need to be active publishers, are recognizing the problems and limitations that this task involves. "The problem is publishing is a lot harder than it looks, or rather it’s a lot harder to do it with the consistency, day after day, that’s needed to build a long-term audience. That’s leading some brands to hook onto the idea that their role lies more in the curation of content." But in choosing this path, the article recommends, brands need to be careful in what and how much they curate. Here some valuable advice from the article: "Brands need to be careful in not only what, but how much they curate. There can’t be articles that make the reader question why a brand is sharing it. Also, brands need to make sure they’re not just regurgitating content, but instead offering readers/followers valuable information, as readers will quickly determine the curated content — and thus the brand — is not worth their time. Since consumers have their own tools for curating – Storify, Storyful, etc. – brands have to know each of their customers and have the credibility in their field to get consumers to trust the content they spread." Truthful. 7/10 Full article: http://www.digiday.com/publishing/brands-apply-for-content-curator-roles/ Robin Good: The new Bottlenose makes it easier and more effective to ride the incoming news wave while suggesting and offering relevant content and new sources. The new version of Bottlenose relesed yesterday is now capable of filtering "Twitter, Facebook, and RSS, creating a unified stream that puts those networks in one place." "The goal, though, is not only aggregation, it’s about understanding what each message is about at a granular level so that it can build a robust profile about you and your interests to help you discover relevant information you might have missed, new friends, articles, and so on. The cool thing about Bottlenose is that it gives you the opportunity to set sophisticated alerts and uses action-based rules to help you get on top of the noise, regardless of whether or not you’re actively engaged in the app or not. ... The app is still in somewhat limited beta, but for those looking to get access (I recommend checking it out), head over to the homepage, sign up, create an account, and if you’re prompted, use “Getsonar” for the access code. Oh, and if you have a Klout score over 30, you’ll get in automatically." (Source: Techcrunch) Find out more: http://bottlenose.com/ 
Robin Good: Back in 2010, Mahendra Palsule, wrote an interesting article on the "role of curation in the attention economy". In it he wrote: "When you share something on any network, you are telling your social circle – “Look at this, this is something I think you will find interesting.” In essence, you are asking for attention from your followers. Your followers distribute whatever attention currency they have budgeted for you among the things you share. The attention each item receives depends on the total number of items you share. If you overdo it, you are reducing the value of each shared item... What the formula doesn’t take into account is that by blindly and indiscriminately increasing one’s ‘give and take’ in social media, one is decreasing the relevance of one’s shares to one’s followers. By ‘giving back’ to certain people, you’re at the same time ‘taking away’ from your other followers. When the relevancy of your shares decrease, your reputation and trust declines." Unless you are a ruthless relevance evaluator of whatever passes in front of your eyes, with an investigator attitude in researching and looking beyond the surface of each news story, the idea of gaining reputation, authority and visibility through curation may be only a trendy illusion. "Social media tools might indicate you have a large number of followers, your ‘influence’ is ranked highly in terms of numbers, and you become popular as a friendly person. But your followers may not be clicking on the links you tweet or buying the products or services you recommend." So, rule number one is to have focus and to share only what is truly and verified to be relevant for your audience. "Curation is such a buzzword these days, that some have gone so far as to dub every act of social media sharing as ‘curation’ – from Foursquare check-ins to Blippy purchases, to Yelp reviews. I consider some of these examples as annotations or adding meta data to a crowdsourced database. Considering each act of social media sharing as an act of curation is like considering all sex to be an act of love. The one way I’ve seen true reputation and influence increase on the social web is when one’s shares are relevant to followers. This necessitates a brutal and ruthless evaluation. Is this content relevant to my followers? Irrespective of which influencer wrote it, irrespective of which ‘guru’ endorsed it, the relevance question is of prime consideration in deciding whether I endorse, share and propagate it to my followers." Good. 8/10 Full article: http://www.skepticgeek.com/socialweb/role-of-curation-in-the-attention-economy/ (Image credit: www.spreadshirt.it) 
Mind IT is a free online graphical bookmark manager, uses mind map techniques for rapid bookmark management and access.
Get started in 3 easy steps: 1. Create a user account here To view your list of linkmaps, press on the "My Maps" button on the MindiT menu. ... "MindiT is a free online graphical bookmark manager. ...specifically designed MindiT to promote rapid collection, management, and access to online information."
To learn more, check out the short video tutorial
The common trait to all the tasks above: they all require massive online research. This is where MindiT comes in. Collect - Organize - Access - Retain MindiT is built on the premise that a clean, concise, colorful graphical representation of bookmarks is much more intuitive and useful than the standard list or tree based solutions commonly available.
More info: http://www.mindit-bookmarking.com/ Via evangelina chavez, Heiko Idensen Robin Good: Chill, the video sharing and discovery site, has just introduced a new feature that allows anyone to clip and share, on a Pinterest-like thematic board, all of the video clips he finds on the web. The new Chill bookmarklet works very much like the Pinterest one. When you click it, a page shows you all of the video clips found in that page and offers you to clip and "post" the one you want, with your comments. It's as easy as that. The generated "curated" Chill video boards are easy to scan and browse, though, in my view, a great boon would be the ability to check a few of those videos and to click a play button that plays them full screen back to back. This way I have the best of curated content, my own selection, and the final lay-back and watch gratification option. Very promising. Go try it out now: http://chill.com/bookmarklet 
Robin Good: Amber Naslund, at Brass Tack Thinking blog, has a great article touching on the importance of curation and on the danger of easily selling personal self-expression and serendipitous re-sharing of other people's content with true content curation. And she is so damn right about this. Here a few key highlights from her article: " 1) To me – and by definition – curation requires conscious thought with the purpose of adding value, context, or perspective to a collection of things. It’s deliberate work, gathering things together for a reason and lending a keen editing eye to those assets, whether it be pieces of art or pieces of writing. ... 2) Turning your Twitter feed into a clockwork-scheduled stream of all the stuff you find in your RSS feed is not curation, it’s distribution. And since collecting and redistributing content is arguably easier than creating it, everyone does it. Which serves to create a great deal of noise, and as we’ve lamented for some time now, it becomes increasingly difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff and home in on information resources that are consistently valuable, and favor mindful selection and sharing over optimizing a feed to populate a bunch of links and drive traffic or gain fans and followers. 3) Can curation be accomplished online? I think so. But it’s rarely what we actually see happening when we immerse ourselves in social networks, and it’s not what we’re doing when we click the “share” button over and over again. ... 4) The business case for curating content has long been that you can become an expert resource for others, a trusted source of information or expertise that sets you apart. But becoming a trusted source of information implies a willingness and ability to apply filters, to have exacting standards, to discern the good from the simply popular, the valuable from the gimmicked and hyped. Which requires work. A lot of it. Not just an app and the ability to put your collection and distribution on autopilot." Thank you Amber, you are so damn right. Insightful. 9/10
(Image credit: http://Streetfilms.org) 
Robin Good: If you are curating a specific topic you may find yourself often wading through tons of useless content and wondering where you can find some good stuff. One option is to start using some good news discovery tools which can greatly help you filter out some of the useless spammy content that fills in most unfiltered searches and feed streams. Here is my mindmap on news discovery tools which can help you in finding your best crop of interesting stories on the specific topic you are interested in. It contains over 30 news discovery tools and services all with a direct link. Direct map link: http://bit.ly/bestnewsdiscoverytools (Thanks also to Beth Kanter for featuring me and this list in her recent live presentation in NY - find out more in her curated report here: http://storify.com/kanter/what-can-nonprofits-learn-about-content-curation-f ) Robin Good: That's what I suggested back in 2008 to those who wanted to stay ahead of the game while doing breaking news coverage. Once again it is all about sifting through everything and gathering the best for a specific audience. It's all about quality, and nothing about speed. Original video 4':31": http://youtu.be/f5KO24k9A9c Robin Good: Curtis Bonk, professor emeritus at Indiana University, shares in this interview I did with him two years ago, what he thinks are the new skills required to teachers of the 21st century to leverage the power of the Internet for learning. And curation is among them. Original video: http://youtu.be/WgM2nyCt-jU |
Robin Good: Curatr, an elearning platform built upon the idea of discovery through the curation and sense-making of existing information, has just released an updated version of its platform which you can check out here: http://www.curatr.co.uk/index2.php Live demo: http://www.curatr.co.uk/index2.php?view=demo Curatr allows professional trainers, experts, and teachers, as much as students to organize and curate information for the purpose of learning.
What I like very much is the Curatr promotional video, which says lots of true things about education and about the way we should carry it out in the future. The next-button-robot approach to information memorization needs to be replaced with a new approach: learning to understand how learners construct knowledge. Curatr is about the construction of the scaffolding that allows people to learn and to find the resources that should help them best learn what they are interested into. Promising. Insightful. 8/10
Liz Wilson: A good introduction for any marketer thinking about beginning with curation as part of their content marketing strategy.
I chose this article because I sometimes think that we can easily assume that most everyone understands what curation is. But most probably the vast majority of small or medium-sized businesses do not (I'm thinking particulary of the UK).
Sue McKittrick (an analyst working on content strategy and more - http://www.psgroup.com/research_mckittrick.aspx) aims her introductory curation article at marketers who are confused about curation, or who have very little knowledge.
As a real-world example she utilizes Adobe's highly successful online curated magazine www.cmo.com, while also providing a shortlist of some of the best enterpise curation tools available out there.
If you are briefing a new client that is considering "content curation" as a strategy, this would be a useful article to leave with them.
Full article: http://www.contentmarketinginstitute.com/2012/02/content-curation/
Via Liz Wilson 
Robin Good: News and content curators are always hungry for RSS feeds, as these are the best vehicle to receive any change-update from a web site without needing to go out and check. But not always, web public services that let users generate content, are open and happy to let you grab a RSS feed. Case in point Pinterest. While the service provides a RSS feed for any user that includes all of the updates and posts he has made, these are all uncategorized and mixed together, regardless of which board they were collected in. "To generate this RSS simply click on the user’s profile and select the RSS icon on the left of the page. Another way to do this is to add feed.rss to the end of the user’s profile; for example, if you want to see the latest pins by Felicia Day your RSS URL would look like this http://pinterest.com/feliciaday/feed.rss." To get instead the RSS feed for a specific board, here is what you need to do: "...first open the board (e.g. Felicia Day’s Geekin Board), then, remove the last “/” from the URL and add .rss – your end URL will look like http://pinterest.com/feliciaday/geekin.rss The RSS feed will show you the last 20 or so pins created in that board rather than the full contents." Useful. 8/10
Jan Gordon: This is a post after my own heart, brought to my attention by gdecugis, thanks Guillaume, you know I love Scoopit, glad to spread the word about this winning duo, Pinterest and Scoopit.
Feel free to visit my other topic, Pinterest Watch to learn more about this social network
Here's my commentary based on my experience of using Scoopit and Pinterest
To me, Pinterest and Scoopit go hand and hand. They are both visual and it's important to consider if you're on Scoopit already or thinking about it, expressing yourself on both platforms, (if it makes sense for your business) because it can be very powerful.
Here are some of the reasons it can help your business:
Scoopit is a platform that showcases your expertise, share your hobbies and other interests through content in a beautiful format. It is part of your online personna and it's a vibrant community I have met some wonderful people here.
Pinterest is also a community with some of the same people from Scoopit and many others, (new people are joining everyday). Linking your posts from Scoopit to your pins on Pinterest not only drives traffic to your scoopit site and visa versa but those people can see another side of you that you can't express there.
Pinterest is like a delicious menu of visuals that captivate and attract people to you. I have put all my business boards at the top and my interest boards underneath them.
Pinterest gives people the ability to see who you are beyond your posts. If you're a brand, this is where you can create an online story of text and visuals that gives consumers points of entry through common interests. It's a brilliant way to do business.
I could go on and on but I'll let you see for yourself how I've combined Scoopit and Pinterest together which continues to produce unbelievable results, increase in traffic and brand new relationships from both sites.
Commentary by Jan Gordon covering "Pinterest Watch"
See my pinterest site here: [http://pinterest.com/jangordon/] - Click on the images and they lead you right back to my Scoopit topics.
Read post here: [http://blog.scoop.it/en/2012/02/24/you-can-now-share-your-scoops-on-pinterest/] Via janlgordon, janlgordon Robin Good: The new Storify news curation tool is now available for the iPad, bringing the ease of drag and drop to the curation world. "Founded in 2009, this seven person company has done a remarkable job surviving the market and being one of the major players in the world of content curation. ... [Storify has been adopted by] 22 out of top 25 news sites in the United States... Just like Twitter has their trending topics, Storify’s service allows people to keep track of the relevant social media trending topics. Users are able to tell their own story about these major events (like Whitney Houston or Greece’s economic downfall or even Madonna’s Super Bowl halftime performance), and embed them on their own website. Be your own crowd-sourced storyteller, by dragging in tweets, status updates, photos, and videos from a variety of social networks in order to help you create a better story and telling experience." (Source: http://bub.blicio.us/storify-launches-free-ipad-app-to-help-content-curation-on-the-go/) Check out this video interview shot yesterday with the Storify team demonstrating the new app: http://youtu.be/u-Ua4LIbzMY The Storify app is free to download right from the iTunes store: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/storify/id488223180?ls=1&mt=8 Find out more: http://storify.com/storify/storify-for-the-ipad-is-here Robin Good: Critical thinking is a key strategic skill needed by any serious professional curator. "Critical thinking provides the keys for our own intellectual independence..." and it helps to move away from "rashy conclusions, mystification and reluctance to question received wisdom, authority and tradition" while learning how to adopt "intellectual discipline" and a way to express clearly ideas while taking personal responsibility for them. Key takeaways from this video:
Highly recommended for all curators. 9/10 
Robin Good: Nonetheless Magnify.net founder Steven Rosenbaum states "“I believe in the freedom of innovation", his company has just been awarded U.S. Patent No. 8,117,545 covering hosted video discovery and publishing platforms. The patent description clearly covers any web-based service which allows you to create a topic-specific channel with manually or auto-curated video content. Here the exact wording: "A hosted system provides any Internet user with the ability to quickly set up and customize a video channel, preferably as a web page or site that can be reached from any Internet-accessible device having a web browser. The solution includes tools for use by channel site creators to customize the look, feel, and page design. A particular web page or site may be associated with a given subject. As used herein, a page or site that has such an association is sometimes referred to as “subject-specific...” I don't know what's your take on this, but I personally don't see this as good news for curation and video curation startups, who are presently innovating in this space (like Blinkx, Redux, Chill, Vodpod, Magma, Yokto, Shufflr, Griddeo, Shortform, Mixd.tv, Embedr, Plizy, Vidcaster, Yubby, and many others). Patents, whether in the hands of large or small players are the antithesis of open innovation and it is for me difficult to support who in the name of a better future, choses to utilize the means of his worst enemies to achieve its business ends. While Magnify.net investors may indeed pretty happy about this, I am not. Worrysome. 4/10 (Pass this news on) 
"...I want to point out that people with better PKM skills, an ability to create higher value information, and a willingness to share it, will become more valued members (nodes) in their professional networks." (Harold Jarche) Robin Good: In this short article analyzing the PKM (personal knowledge management) process it is interesting to note the strong affinity it has with curation. "The critical part of PKM is in personalizing information and experience, or to use a business term, adding value. Ross Dawson shows five ways to add value to information (my examples/descriptions follow): 1) Filtering (separating signal from noise, based on some criteria) 2) Validation (ensuring that information is reliable, current or supported by research) 3) Synthesis (describing patterns, trends or flows in large amounts of information) 4) Presentation (making information understandable through visualization or logical presentation) 5) Customization (describing information in context)." More info and examples presented in the article do not seem to include yet the appearance of a trusted news curator as a means to develop such PKM, which although is defined as "an individually created process", it could rely in the near future not just on tools, but also on the filtering and curation work of other humans. Or not? Full article: http://www.jarche.com/2010/03/sense-making/ 
The Yahoo!'s Content Optimization and Relevance Engine (C.O.R.E.) creates 13 million story combinations a day on Yahoo!'s home page. Check out this data visualization: http://visualize.yahoo.com and explore what readers in different age and demographics groups, or with different interests or locations are reading on Yahoo. A great interactive visualization example that show how curating existing data and presenting it in an accessible and interactive way can create extra value. Check it out: http://beta.visualize.yahoo.com/core/ 
From the article: "What retailers need to understand is that there is no direct path to online consumer sales. Consumers desire to broadcast and share their lives, and their web behaviors therefore strike out on a non-linear path to purchase. The whole concept of social commerce is now realizing that every platform and network is a potential lead for an online sale. Social discovery platforms are developing cult followings because they allow users to establish their authority in a certain subject area and to showcase their ability to create inspirational collections of products, items and even destinations. Simple self-expression through the curation of products should be considered every retailer’s dream. As a retailer, all you have to do is supply images and ideas in a way that’s accessible to the online user/consumer and sparks their desire to do all this work for you. In one swift addition to a consumer “pin, post or add,” retailers can build brand awareness, increase online engagement and create direct links to product pages that lead to purchase conversions. ... The future of e-commerce, search, social marketing are now tied to consumers attempting to curate experiences that represent their personalities." Find also in this excellent article by Macala Wright thirteen product curation sites reviewed. Very good. 8/10 Full article: http://fashionablymarketing.me/2012/02/social-discovery-product-curation/ 
Robin Good: Jim Love, writes on his blog "Change the Game", a long article about curation and its reason d'etre. Interesting thoughts overall, but the most valuable part, is in a few paragraphs, that distill clearly three important characterizing traits for quality curation. An intelligent agent goes through the volume and the clutter and brings us a distilled version, reduced to it’s essence. Great curation does three things. I call them the “3 Rs” - short for reduced, relevant and reliable. Curation reduces the volume information from a particular domain to make it more manageable. It distills things to their essence. It ensures that the information is relevant. Does it fit our interests and our needs? This is more difficult than it seems. Especially where the topic is new or unfamiliar we don’t always know what is valuable or how to describe it. It can also be intensely personal. We all have slightly different levels of need and the nuances of those needs are sometimes subtle. Lastly, information must be reliable. Accuracy is critical and in the current world, difficult to establish. Is the story correct? Is the source reliable?" Rightful. 8/10 Full article: http://changethegame.ca/2012/02/05/cutting-through-the-clutter-curation-and-the-new-3-rs-of-content/ 
This is an excerpt from a Mike Shatzkin article published in 2009 and entitled: "Aggregation and curation: two concepts that explain a lot about digital change." If you are into curation, aggregation or into understanding why traditional publishers, record labels and newspapers are struggling so much in this digital era to keep their traditional services and products sustainable, you will likely find some eye-opening answers and explanation in here. Here the key takeaways I have found inside it: "Aggregation is one of the core concepts of content presentation and commercialization. Any analysis of what happened to the record business, what is happening to newspapers, or the future of books and bookstores and magazines and TV that does not feature this concept prominently is almost certainly flawed. Aggregation, of course, simply means pulling together things which are not necessarily connected. Curation is a term that has always referred to the careful selection and pruning of aggregates, such as for a museum or an art exhibition. But the concept in the digital content world means the selection and presentation of these disparate items to help a browser or consumer navigate and select from them. Aggregation without curation is, normally, not very helful." The music album, the CD, the newspaper. "...one thing has been common to all of them and to all other newspapers: they cover the waterfront. (I have called that being “horizontal.”) They aggregate news of the world, the nation, and the city with sports, weather, stock quotes, advice to the lovelorn, and many other things. They sell almost all their advertising against the aggregate and against the brand, not against any specific item or interest being aggregated. And the competition for each paper is against other curated aggregates. Newspapers sold the curated aggregate to people who didn’t want most of it because the total price was a good deal for the parts they did want, just like the album was a good deal even if you only liked some of the songs. And now they are suffering precisely the same fate as the record album. The unit of appreciation is smaller than the [aggregated] whole. ... So the long story short on newspapers is this: a business model of selling a horizontal (many-subject) aggregate, curated by something other than subject, was based on the economics of a physical world where aggregation produced efficiencies of production and distribution. The Internet changed that. It is no longer necessary for an aggregator to provide news to deliver me sports, or to provide a whole newspaper to deliver me the weather or a stock quote. The importance of curation becomes more prominent. ...the more horizontal is the collection, the less likely it is to work in the digital world." Must read. 9/10 Full article: http://www.idealog.com/blog/aggregation-and-curation-two-concepts-that-explain-a-lot-about-digital-change (Unearthed by Peter Hoeve - Curated by Robin Good) |
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