Content Curation World

A good example of content curation at work is the Vox feature collection entitled "40 maps that explain the internet", which showcases in a highly digestible and visual format where the Internet came from, how it works, and how it's used by people around the world.

Although at first glance this may look just as a list of maps with descriptions, there's a lot of curation work that can be appreciated by looking just a bit beyond the surface. 

a) Titles and descriptions are well crafted, short, focused, but consistently clear and to the point. 

b) The 40 maps are intelligently organized into six different groups: 

c) Images of maps sourced from elsewhere are properly credited and linked. 

To the ignorant eye, this will look like "oh, just another collection of maps", but to the avid reader, scholar and to the curious enough to look beyond appearances, the value of this editorial work is on how it perfectly hides the amount of complexity and research work it has required while organizing and presenting an extremely clear and comprehensive body of valuable information on the chosen topic.

Curated by Timothy B. Lee together with editor Eleanor Barkhorn,

designer Uy Tieu and developer Yuri Victor.

A good example of curation at work. 8/10

Full feature: http://www.vox.com/a/internet-maps 

Bento is a website that, thanks to its author Jon Chan and the many user contributions, has gathered, organized and curated the very best resources available online where you can learn how to code.

From html to javascript, ruby, php, Java, perl, Bento offers learning guidance for over 80 different technologies and coding languages. 

Here is how Jon Chan, a 23 years old who launched this project in September of 2013, describes Bento: 

"Bento is what I would have liked to have when I was learning to code.

I started learning to code when I was very young - about ten years old. Then, the only things I had available were what I could find online and through a few dense books.

Now, people have the exact opposite problem: how do you break through the noise and find what's actually valuable to learn?

This site is here to help you figure that out."

Bento is a perfect example of effective content curation as it does not simply collect and list all of the resources available to learn each language but it only suggests the very best ones, organizing them in easy, medium and hard and providing also "best of" / direct solutions that save readers lots of valuable time.

Free to use. 

Useful, simple and immediate to use. Well organized. 9/10

Bento: http://www.bentobox.io/ 

More info: http://www.bentobox.io/about 

Submit new links here: https://github.com/JonHMChan/bento/

GEDB, the Global Education Database, is a great and extremely useful curated collection of the best apps, web tools, gadgets and moocs now available online for educational purposes.

Anyone can register to GEDB and submit any valuable resource or tool by filling out the dedicated form.

Submissions are reviewed for factual accuracy and integrity and approved and published within 24 hours. Readers and contributors can in turn rate the review and share it online.

This is a great educational resource, simple to consult and well organized. A treasure trove of qualified resources for anyone wanting to teach and learn with new technologies.

Free to use.

Try it out now: http://www.gedb.org/ 

I am convinced that the Flipboard paginated format and its high attention to visual design is an anticipation of things to come.

Just like Pinterest showed the way for an infinite number of look-alikes in more specific niches and applications, so I think that Flipboard has anticipated squarely a key emerging trend for digital publishing: highy visual design layouts that fit perfectly your screen size real-estate. 

This is why I have invested some time over the last few weeks to explore the Flipboard platform for content curation, a little more than I had done before. 

In the effort to leverage Flipboard outstanding visual layout abilities I opted for creating, amog others, a flip mag that would incorporate only images. A collection of the most elegant and inspiring "cinemagraphs" that I can find on the Internet.

Cinemagraphs are unique images that are partly photographs and partly video. 

Even though, Flipboard does not yet offer any tool to control precisely where each image will appear in the publication, or what kind of layout each page will have, the results that I have been able to achieve make me optimistic about what it will be possible to do once Flipboard opens up a full web-based editor to control many of these visual aspects.

Here it is: http://flip.it/7mBGA 

P.S.: Let me know what you think, and if you like it, please share it and subscribe to it. It's free.

N.B:: To obtain the best visual effect, I have sourced the images from their original URLs, most times outside of the article in which they appeared. So while there remains a link to all source images, it may not be readily apparent from what site, author or magazine this cinemagraph have been sourced. Being all of these images nothing short of small artworks I am looking for the best way to credit the original authors and publishers without having to add time consuming procedures.  

For more info on Flipboard check: http://sco.lt/8INYMz 

Thanks to NPR, Cristina Negrut (author of graduationwisdom.com where many of these speeches were first collected) and a team of 7, The Best Commencement Speeches, Ever, a site devoted exclusively to collect, organize and give access to the most inspiring addresses ever given, has been born.

This curated collection contains over 300 speeches which go back all the way to 1774, and it is fully searchable both by name and by specific themes.

This work is a great example of how the essential work of simply organizing and presenting, even something that already exists, carries so much value. As a matter of fact, the collection does not contain any of the original speeches, but it links to the source where the speech was originally published or archived, while highlighting a key passage from it, providing key meta-data and making all speeches organized and searchable in one place.

Another excellent example of content curation at work.

Free to use. 

Check it out now: http://apps.npr.org/commencement/ 

A curated selection of the best search engines organized according to what you need to find.

Useful. Great example of how to create a useful, curated information resource. 

Free to use.

Full resource: http://www.noodletools.com/debbie/literacies/information/5locate/adviceengine.html 

Verification Junkie is an excellent free online resource curating the most relevant tools for fact-checking and verification of online content.

"A growing directory of tools for verifying, fact checking and assessing the validity of social media and user generated content."

For each tool collected, Josh Stearns has provided a detailed description, and relevant links.

My comment: Verification Junkie is a great resource I would recommend to anyone writing or publishing online as well as a great example of an effective curated tools collection.

Excellent resource. A must go to for online journalists. 8/10

Link: http://verificationjunkie.com/ 

See also: http://verificationjunkie.com/about