Content Curation World

Robin Good: Paper.li one of the early players in the news aggregation, discovery and auto-curation space has been significantly improving its service which now offers also a $9/month Pro version.

Paper.li allows you to set a number of search queries on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, YouTube and to import specific RSS feeds to "aggregate" the most relevant on a certain topic or theme.

You as a curator can "preview" your yet-to-be-published news magazine and can manually pick and decide which "stories" to publish and which ones to drop by simply hovering your mouse on anyone of them.

"Editions" can be auto-scheduled and Paper.li can automatically announce on Twitter and via email to your subscribers when a new one is out.

PRO users get to have the last word before any edition gets published, by way of a "preview before promotion" feature that lets you control when notifications go out and gives you time to make changes, can add promotional banners, standard ads or other marketing materials in a set of predefined hot spots on their news page, and can "brand" their magazine with their own banner, background image and personalized colors.

More info: https://paper.li/learn-more.html

Try it out now: https://paper.li/

Robin Good: Many content curation tools promise to make your content publishing job easier, faster and better. But is it really so? Does less work and more automated aggregation/filtering guarantee a higher quality result?

Christa Carone writes on Fast Company: "New content curation tools make automating the job easier--but easy may not always be as effective.

It would be a mistake to let algorithms do the entire job for you. No one knows your audience like you do.

And, keeping the human touch in the process is more real, which is really important to today's info-overloaded consumer."

Yes, the human touch. Not the human click to rapidly share, repost or reblog. The human touch as in the act of adding value in ways that go beyond being someone who passes on interesting items.

And to achieve that, someone needs to manually stop, research, read, check and contribute something of value. it doesn't happen automatically.

"The companies that are truly winning over audiences and driving consumers are the ones that are experimenting with a balance of automated aggregation and human-directed curation.

It's a process of out-sourcing and in-sourcing.

I've been following Intel's approach. It recently launched iQ, an employee-curated digital magazine created to connect with a younger audience and share with them the bigger, living brand story.

Not only does the site provide original stories about tech, it also aggregates top tech stories from other sites that Intel's audience will find interesting... all closely watched by editor-in-chief Bryan Rhoades, who spurs conversations by judiciously placing some stories on the iQ homepage.

NASCAR, too, is experimenting in this space. A partnership with Twitter includes a site that compiles #NASCAR-related tweets from popular drivers, who send 140-character blasts from the track or wherever they may be-- along with those from sports writers and other industry folks.

They pull it off by using a search algorithm and human editors who understand narrative---and appropriate content."

Rightful. 7/10

Full article: http://www.fastcompany.com/1841964/the-content-conundrum-to-create-or-automate 

Robin Good: Good article by Rex Hammock on RexBlog.com highlighting the confusion arising from using the term curation when it is not really appropriate. 

He writes: "Somewhere along the way, the inherently-confusing metaphor of curation being applied to content on the web went from something like, finding relevant content and pointing readers to it to something like, find content on other sites and simply re-write what they say and place it on our site and that’s okay, as long as somewhere you credit the source.”

He has several more interesting points. here a few key excerpts from it: "While I believe “curation media” can be a helpful service to readers, the act of writing a story that rehashes another story — without adding some insight or background — is a disservice to all involved.

...

"...I’m not suggesting that the act of sharing articles you run across is anything but good. I’m not even suggesting that websites like Huffington Post or Business Insider are nothing more than re-writing services. (I’m not “suggesting” it, as it’s well known.)

This is the bottom line: To be of any value (or to prevent you from appearing foolish), your curation needs to be more than merely re-writing something that has already been re-written one or two times.

If you feel the need to do that, just link."

Rightful. 7/10

Full article: http://www.rexblog.com/2012/06/14/47898 

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.

You simply add the Twitter and FB accounts that you want to aggregate in a channel and your news channel is immediately created.

The look and feel of the final output is made up of a series of vertical blocks that showcase the tweet or FB content of each post and its related image.

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/ 

Lingspot is an enterprise level content curation platform capable of automatic content aggregation, filtering and in-depth content editing.

The Lingspot platform is made up by two key components: 

The Mixer, which allows you to aggregate unlimited content sources via RSS or via direct API hookup and to filter them according to your own specific criteria. More info: http://corp.lingospot.com/products/algorithmicpublishing/mixer/  

The Editor, which makes it easy even for the non-technical publisher to turn the curated content streams into complete self-updating pages. More info: http://corp.lingospot.com/products/algorithmicpublishing/editor/ 

Key Features:

a) Through a variety of third party relationships, Lingospot can aggregate topic-targeted multimedia, including photos and videos from professional sources (such as the Associated Press, Bloomberg, NBC, CBS, Forbes, etc.), as well as user generated photos and video, such as from Flickr and YouTube.

b) Whether it's books on Amazon or auction items on eBay, Lingospot can aggregate product information related to a specific topic. This topic-specific merchandise can be purchased by your readers with only a few clicks.

c) Lingospot allows your readers to initiate a conversation about a specific topic on the page where you are aggregating content about the topic. This turns every Topic page created by Lingospot into a micro community, where readers can connect with other readers interested in that topic.

Key features and tech specifications: http://corp.lingospot.com/products/algorithmicpublishing/specs/ 

Case studies and examples and examples of companies using Lingospot: http://corp.lingospot.com/customers/casestudies/ 

Pricing: a basic account starts at $500/month.

See more info here: http://corp.lingospot.com/products/algorithmicpublishing/pricing/ 

Find out more: http://corp.lingospot.com/products/algorithmicpublishing/  

(Reviewed by Robin Good)

Robin Good: Here's a great visualization of how different can be the traits of content re-use. In the left column you can see what would appear to be the ideal traits of a professional curator, while on the right you can immediately recognize the ones of scrapers, republishers, cheap aggregators and other "thin" publishers as Google would call them.

I think it can serve as an excellent reference, when in doubt about whether you are still doing the right thing or not, when it comes to re-using and republishing other people content.

The table is part of an excellent presentation entitled "Link Building by Imitation" and authored by link building expert Ross Hudgens.

Truthful. 9/10

http://slideonline.com/presentation/94-link-building-by-imitation