Content Curation World

Robin Good: Steve Buttry has published a good article on his blog providing very specific suggestions and tips to those needing to aggregate, republish and curate news content for their organization.

Key topics covered:

-> Linking

-> Attributing
-> Quoting

-> Attribution checks

-> Adding value

-> Original reporting

-> Data analysis

-> Commentary

-> Filtering

-> Supplementing

-> Adding related stories

-> Rounding up

Valuable advice. 8/10

Full article: http://stevebuttry.wordpress.com/2012/05/16/aggregation-guidelines-link-attribute-add-value/ 

Steven Rosenbaum has an interesting article on Fast Company, outlining the reasons why curation is here to stay and the importance that curators will play in your information consumption diet.

He writes: "...So anyone who steps up and volunteers to curate in their area of knowledge and passion is taking on a Herculean task.

They're going to stand between the web and their readers, using all of the tools at their disposal to "listen" to the web, and then pull out of the data stream nuggets of wisdom, breaking news, important new voices, and other salient details.

It's real work, and requires a tireless commitment to being engaged and ready to rebroadcast timely material.

While there may be an economic benefit for being a "thought leader" and "trusted curator," it's not going to happen overnight.

Which is to say, being a superhero is often a thankless job.

The growth in content, both in terms of pure volume and the speed of publishing, has raised some questions about what best practices are in the curation space."

He also has some pretty straightforward advice on what, as a curator, you should never do:

"1. If you don't add context, or opinion, or voice and simply lift content, it's stealing.

2. If you don't provide attribution, and a link back to the source, it's stealing.

3. If you take a large portion of the original content, it's stealing.

4. If someone asks you not to curate their material, and you don't respect that request, it's stealing.

5. Respect published rights. If images don't allow creative commons use, reach out to the image creator--don't just grab it and ask questions later."

And he definitely has a point on all of these. 

Recommended. 7/10

Read the full article: http://www.fastcompany.com/1834177/content-curators-are-the-new-superheros-of-the-web?partner=rss 

Robin Good: Steve Buttry, who has already written several articles on content curation (see the end of his original article), just published this in-depth essay celebrating the launch of a new curation team at Digital First Media and pointing to many of the critical factors neeeded for a content / news curator to be effective.

He covers a lot ground while giving a particular emphasis to the importance of linking and attribution. He writes: "Where you can’t learn much about the source of content you’re curating, consider crowdsourcing the question: Note the name and organization, tell readers what you’ve found and that you’re continuing research and ask them what they know about the source.

Where the source of online content is unclear, you should be clear about what you know and where you found the material."

and...

"Sometimes the name of a person or organization is not sufficient attribution.

If the person or organization is not well-known, do a little research (Google will provide quick answers in many cases; sometimes an “about us” page will help).

Especially in political content, you want to note whether you are linking to partisan sources. A liberal or conservative think tank or political action committee is an entirely different kind of source from a professional media outlet or an independent fact-checking site."

Steve Buttry also includes some valuable key guidelines on "how to add value" when curating content and suggests several types of curation approaches that can be used in the newsroom.

Good advice on curation and practical tips. 8/10

Full article: http://stevebuttry.wordpress.com/2012/07/19/curation-techniques-types-and-tips/

(Image credit: Shutterstock http://tinyurl.com/crw65b4)

Robin Good: JISC provides a very well documented guide to the use of Creative Commons licences (also referred to as CC licences) which can greatly facilitate the copying, reuse, distribution, and in some cases, the modification of the original owner’s creative work without needing to get permission each time from the original rights holder.

In addition to this the correct use and embedding of CC license may greatly help in the effort to make original sources more transparent to the final reader, in many context, including news and content curation efforts of many kinds.

Creative Commons licences can be embedded into a variety of resources, such as PowerPoint, images, Word docs, elearning resources, podcasts and other audio visual resources.

While specifically prepared for UK public sector organizations this document can be quite useful for anyone interested in the use of CC licenses to distribute digital content online.

Key Benefits of embedding CC licences for content curation and attribution:

• It can help the user see that the resource is an 'open' resource and licensed under a specific CC licence terms
   
• It can help reduce the future 'orphan works' (works for which the rights holders are unknown or cannot be traced), and assist in creation of appropriate attribution, citation and potential negotiation for further permissions. By embedding the selected CC licence to the licence details even if the resource gets detached from its metadata. This is particularly the case if the resource is found via a search engine instead of the original website platform which might host specific copyright restrictions.

More info: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/programmerelated/2011/scaembeddingcclicencesbp.aspx 

(Thanks to Amber Thomas for finding this resource)

Robin Good: Maria Popova has just launched a classy and laudable initiative, focused on increasing awareness and in highlighting the importance of honoring always where or via who you have got to a certain article, report, video or image.

Credit and attribution are not just a "formal" way to comply with rules, laws and authors but an incredibly powerful emebddable mechanism to augment findability, discovery, sinergy and collaboration among human being interested in the same topic.

She writes: "In an age of information overload, information discovery — the service of bringing to the public’s attention that which is interesting, meaningful, important, and otherwise worthy of our time and thought — is a form of creative and intellectual labor, and one of increasing importance and urgency.

A form of authorship, if you will.

Yet we don’t have a standardized system for honoring discovery the way we honor other forms of authorship and other modalities of creative and intellectual investment, from literary citations to Creative Commons image rights."

For this purpose Curator's Code was created.

Curator's Code is first of all "a movement to honor and standardize attribution of discovery across the web" as well as a web site where you can learn about the two key types of attribution that we should be using:

a) Via - which indicates a link of direct discovery

b) Hat tip - Indicates a link of indirect discovery, story lead, or inspiration.

Each one has now a peculiar characterizing icon that Curator's Code suggests to integrate in your news and content publication policies. 

Additionally and to make it easy for anyone to integrate these new attribution icons in their work, Curator's Code has created a free bokkmarklet which makes using proper attribution a matter of one clic.

Hat tip to Maria Popova and Curator's Code for launching this initiative. 

Whether or not you will sign Curator's Code pledge, become an official web site supporting it, or adopt its bookmarklet instantly is not as important as the key idea behind it: by providing credit and attribution to pieces of content you find elsewhere, you not only honestly reward who has spent time to create that content, but you significantly boost the opportunity for thousands of others to connect, link up to, discover and make greater sense of their search for meaning.

Read Maria Popova introductory article to Curator's Code: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/03/09/curators-code/ 

How to use the Curator's bookmarklet: http://vimeo.com/38243275 

Healthy. Inspiring. 9/10

Curator's Code official web site: http://curatorscode.org/ 

N.B.: Too bad that the Curator's Code bookmarklet doesn't work with Scoop.it, as the one excludes the other. But you could save the two codes for the special attribution characters in a text note and copy and paste whicever you need. Given the need for simplicity and integration this is not an ideal solution but I am sure that between Maria and Guillaume at Scoop.it they will find a way to make this work easily for all. Maria and Guillaume: what do you say?