Content Curation World

If you are into content curation for the long run, do not make this mistake.

Nuno Figueroa, who shared, in an interesting and informative article on Business2Community, his deep frustration with content curation tools and with the incredible amount of work one has to do to find, vet, add value and share truly valuable content online, wrote:

"I still have to do all the searching for new and good content sources and filtering the content I get. Separating the crap from the awesome. All by myself. This is hard work and very time consuming".

But wait a minute! What you describe here is the key, absolute value a curator can provide: his time.

The more we try to bypass this in favour of tools that can automate this time-consuming and difficult work the more we give up the opportunity to truly add unique value to your curated content.

Not to say that a good curator should not have a great toolset to help him out.

But remember: There will never be any tool that can do better search than you (unless you know nothing about what you are curating). No tool that can tell whether an article is a retake of another one or a true original, or that can evaluate the insight and ideas a new perspective from a new author unknown author can bring.

This in my opinion is what a content curator does.

Would a painter or a sculptor want to automate or speed up parts of his artistic creation process?

Unless the artist goal was focused exclusively on quantity and he had no enjoyment in the creation process there would be no need or desire to speed up or automate the creation process as this is what the artist, by definition, has chosen to do.

Similarly the content curator is socially useful and provides value to other people by utilising his many skills and experiences to gather, find, collect, organise, add value and present information artifacts covering a specific topic, interest, issue or event. His realisation is in doing such things not in bypassing or speeding up these steps.

This is one of the consequences of selling content curation as a content marketing "device" that can save time and make you look good.
 

If you are after *volume* and *eyeballs* you will publish funny cats.

But volume and traffic will not command much more than increasingly slimming advertising budgets. And for how long more?

What we should be all after his instead learning and refining those curatorial skills that can help us provide the only thing our readers care about: having truly trusted guides that provide high-value information services for the specific interests they have.

Yes, a content curator will also use, test and experiment with many different tools to aid its ability to search, find, collect and organise information, but definitely not in order to save time but in order to enhance and expand his abilities to provide greater value through those activities.

What do you think?

Lutz Finger, reports from SxSW on the topic of algorithms, curation and the future, as the skills of content creators, data analysts and code programmers are seemingly converging for the first time. 

Among others, he reports Steve Rosenbaum (founder of Magnify.net) significant own words at SxSW: "...a wise combination of human judgement enabled by algorithms will become the new king of content."

But while there are great new tools, startups and ideas leveraging the great potential of big data and human curation, there is a big, invisible danger, still looming on us.

"The danger is that any algorithm might fall prey to someone trying to influence it.

This might be the ones programming the algorithm or the users. We for instance saw governments trying to skew algorithms by introducing fake online personas (Learn more about the US government persona-management software).
 

But the biggest and realest danger lies in us.

If we believe that there is only one truth and that is the one generated by a black-box algorithm we might be deceived easily."

Informative. Resourceful. 7/10

Full article: http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140320132545-6074593-the-age-of-the-algorithms-sxsw-summary 

See also: www.masternewmedia.org/future-of-search

Image: Bjoern Ognibeni - SxSW

Evaluating which content curation tool to use may not be such an easy task. As you probably know there are literally hundreds of content curation tools out there, and many seem to be just clones of each other, leaving the novice curator in doubt as to what are the real differences between each one.

A good starting point to select anything is to know well what you are looking for and what you need it for, as your needs and objectives will shape the features and traits that your ideal tool will need to have.

In this article I have tried to simplify this job for you by listing 21 different things you may need your content curation tool to do, that you can use to check and compare the curation tools you have pre-identified. 

For each selection criteria I have also added a few specific questions that should help you make even more sense of what you need to look for.

Full article: http://www.masternewmedia.org/content-curation-tools-selection-criteria-to-evaluate/ 

See also: Content curation tools supermap

Benjamin Yoskovits, author of "Lean Analytics", shares a few great examples of how, simple, but highly focused, content curation services, can indeed provide great value, while helping build great communities.

These include:

• Product Hunt
• Happy Inbox
• AddonList
• GrowthHackers
• LaunchThisYear
• Quibb  
• USV

Interesting overview and background info on each.

Definitely worth a check. Great resources. 8/10

Full article: http://www.instigatorblog.com/curation-of-the-web/2014/01/10/ 

(Image credit: 5 dice by Shutterstock)

If you are curating content, whether for the purpose of personal learning, or for creating a useful public information resource, your very first objective should be how can you add value to the existing information that you are going to work on.

Harold Jarche, does a wonderful job of explaining in simple terms what's the difference between sharing on social media, reposting or making your bookmarks public, versus the actual vetting and selection of each individual content item in light of the context and objective for which it is being curated.

The cherry on the pie from the author is an invaluable synthesis and bringing together of related items from Ross Dawson, Maria Popova and me, that allows you to scan and see at a glance 14 different ways in which you can truly add value to whichever set of information bits you are dealing with.

A great reference for anyone looking to improve the quality and value of its own curated work.

Useful. Inspiring. 8/10

Full article: http://socialmediatoday.com/hjarche/1964106/ask-what-value-you-can-add 

Here is the idea: "The drive for offering ‘more’ is not always the best path.

It does not always create something unique. It does not always better serve a target audience. It does not always differentiate you from the competition. It does not always offer something that can’t be found elsewhere. It does not always solve a problem, or fulfill a desire."

Collecting and regurgitating all of the news that "appear" to be relevant may not be such a great idea after all.

"With unlimited server space and free distribution, the temptation can be too great to share AS MUCH content as possible, with the theory that they are better serving the many sub-niches of their market. In other words, you may often see less curation, and more collection."

I don't know if I'd be so generous to label "collection" this uncontrolled regurgitation of content with little real vetting and verification (let alone curation), but Dan Blank, has an interesting story about curation and collectors that I woud not hesitate to recommend reading.

There are some good insights in it.

One of them rings like this: "...collecting behavior is to collect AS MUCH of something as possible, and not curate or edit their collection at all." 

Indeed I see many supposed curators doing exactly this.

Because, as Dan writes correctly "...with unlimited bandwidth and free distribution channels with digital media, it can be sooooo tempting to post more and more content, aimed at more and more target markets.

Plus, the temptation to seem as large as possible, and to give Google as much content as possible to crawl for all of those searches."

But there's a lot more valuable stuff and insight to get by reading in full the original story (even if it was written in 2010).

Insightful. Truthful. 8/10

Full article: http://wegrowmedia.com/digital-publishing-curation-vs-collection-vs-experience/ 

(Image credit: Robin Good)

According to Ina Steiner on eCommerceBytes.com eBay has hired Michael Phillips Moskowitz to act as Chief Curator and Editorial Director and will be launching in the coming weeks its own curated collections features.

To see some of the upcoming curation features that eBay is going to offer to facilitate recommendations and trusted shopping among eBay 120 million active users, go and check out http://www.ebay.com/usr/ohjoystudio who is likely a beta user having already access to them.

"On her eBay Profile page, you can see her collections presented in very much the style of Pinterest boards."

Curated shopping collections are a powerful trust-enhancing method to help buyers share their know-how while helping others make more informed choices. eBay is only one among many other large online e-shops (Etsy and Amazon have both recently introduced similar features) to make curation features available to its users.

Interesting. Informative. 7/10

Full article: http://www.ecommercebytes.com/cab/abn/y13/m10/i01/s01 

Pawan Deshpande of Curata offers a very good guide for content marketers fascinated by content curation opportunities but doubtful about the risks deriving from duplicating existing content or copying excerpts or titles from published articles.

The article provides good advice relative to SEO, general approach and strategy, managing Google search and G+ and titling by outlining the major DOs and DON'Ts of content curation for marketing.

Key recommendations to avoid problems include:

• No reposting of full text articles
• Curate from a varied pool of sources
• Don't re-use full size images
• Using no-follow tags
• Using sub-domains

 In the author own words: "Annotate curated content with your own insights, change titles, link to credible articles, publish from a variety of sources and ALWAYS give more than you take when it comes to third-party content."

Good advice for content marketers.  7/10

Full article: https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140702165024-1132213-panda-4-0-has-arrived-but-you-can-still-curate-content-here-s-how 

Here's a refreshing look at the future of news that highlights the importance of going deeper into creating value for readers by providing more focus, relevance, context and opinion.

These are the characters that properly define what we now refer to as "curation" when it comes to content and news.

The following passages, extracted from the book, The News: A User's Manual, are by Alain de Botton, and have been excerpted from a lengthy article on The Week entitled "The Future of News".

"News organizations are coy about admitting that what they present us with each day are minuscule extracts of narratives whose true shape and logic can generally only emerge from a perspective of months or even years — and that it would hence often be wiser to hear the story in chapters rather than snatched sentences.

They [news organizations] are institutionally committed to implying that it is inevitably better to have a shaky and partial grasp of a subject this minute than to wait for a more secure and comprehensive understanding somewhere down the line.

...

We need news organizations to help our curiosity by signaling how their stories fit into the larger themes on which a sincere capacity for interest depends.

To grow interested in any piece of information, we need somewhere to "put" it, which means some way of connecting it to an issue we already know how to care about.

A section of the human brain might be pictured as a library in which information is shelved under certain fundamental categories. Most of what we hear about day to day easily signals where in the stacks it should go and gets immediately and unconsciously filed.

... the stranger or the smaller stories become, the harder the shelving process grows. What we colloquially call "feeling bored" is just the mind, acting out of a self-preserving reflex, ejecting information it has despaired of knowing where to place.

...We might need help in transporting such orphaned pieces of information to the stacks that would most appropriately reveal their logic.

...it is news organizations to take on some of this librarian's work. It is for them to give us a sense of the larger headings under which minor incidents belong."

The call for understanding how much greater value can be provided by curating news and information in depth, rather than by following the shallow, buzzy and viral path beaten by HuffPo, Buzzfeed and the rest of the gang, is clear.

But beyond context and depth, real value can only be added if we accept the fact that going beyond the classic "objective fact reporting", by adding opinion and bias in a transparent fashion, can actually provide greater value in many ways, as Alain de Botton clearly explains:

"Unfortunately for our levels of engagement, there is a prejudice at large within many news organizations that the most prestigious aspect of journalism is the dispassionate and neutral presentation of "facts."

...

The problem with facts is that there is nowadays no shortage of sound examples. The issue is not that we need more of them, but that we don't know what to do with the ones we have...

...But what do these things actually mean? How are they related to the central questions of political life? What can they help us to understand?

...The opposite of facts is bias. In serious journalistic quarters, bias has a very bad name. It is synonymous with malevolent agendas, lies, and authoritarian attempts to deny audiences the freedom to make up their own minds.

Yet we should perhaps be more generous toward bias.

In its pure form, a bias simply indicates a method of evaluating events that is guided by a coherent underlying thesis about human functioning and flourishing.

It is a pair of lenses that slide over reality and aim to bring it more clearly into focus.

Bias strives to explain what events mean and introduces a scale of values by which to judge ideas and events. It seems excessive to try to escape from bias per se; the task is rather to find ways to alight on its more reliable and fruitful examples. 

There are countless worthy lenses to slide between ourselves and the world." 

Overall, these ideas offer a truly refreshing look at the future of news and at the relevance that context and opinion could play in transforming this medium from a vehicle of mass distraction to one of focused learning and understanding for those interested. 

Must read. Rightful. Insightful. 9/10

Full article: http://theweek.com/article/index/256737/the-future-of-news 

Reading time: 10':20"

Sam Burroughs says it right: "What if we considered content curation from a user centered design perspective? What would audience centered curation look like?"

His suggestions are right on the mark:

• Stop thinking you need to post always something. If you haven't got something good, don't.

• Focus on a very specific interest and audience. 
   
• Evaluate and share your opinion.
   
• Let readers know how much time it takes to read the source you are suggesting to check.  
   
• Explain, always clearly why something you are curating is relevant. Contextualize. 

More signal, less noise.

A good review of five things you need to pay attention to, for your content curation to generate some results.

Right on the mark. Practical advice. 8/10 

Full article (4 mins read): http://weelearning.co.uk/2014/01/five-ways-curators-can-improve-user-experience/ 

Image credit: (Teamwork concept by Shutterstock)

Ben Betts provides a useful framework for understanding how to leverage the potential of content curation both at the organizational and at the individual level.

In his vision, content curation takes up four broad roles that help us learn.

These are:

1) Inspiration - curation done by others outside of a formal learning framework

2) Aggregation - same as inspiration but done within a formal learning context

3) Integration - what is referenced as PKM (personal knowledge management) (see Harold Jarche for more info).

4) Application - how to apply insights derived from curation process into daily work or activities. 

For each one of these, the author provides a good description, examples and insight into its usefulness and value and into how organizations can use it.

Some delightful insights include:
 

• inspiration - curating community feedback and insights
   
• aggregation - curated resources are better than courses
   
• integration - curation & critical thought core to teaching and learning processes
   
• application - curation as a personal "learning locker" 

Valuable reading for anyone interested in understanding more about the value of content curation for learning.

Insightful. Useful. 8/10 

Full article: http://www.ht2.co.uk/ben/?p=527 

I have been testing and trying so many different content curation tools that I have been developing a good sense of what is needed most when it comes to searching, collecting, organizing and presenting information collections online.

In this two-part article I have outlined what I expect to be the most relevant changes and innovations that will be likely integrated in the content curation tools already available out there or that will become the key foundations for new ones that are yet to appear.

My article doesn't pretend to be a guide or a comprehensive catalogue of all the features that content curation tools should consider integrating, but simply an exploratory journey into some of the areas and features where I see a need for better support and where I expect to be surprised the most next.

Follow me in this short journey and add to the comments what are your personal expectations and needs on this front.

Full article: http://www.masternewmedia.org/content-curation-tools-future-part1/ 

Even though Google has become very good at understanding and providing relevant results for many popular queries, many search users are getting lazy and taking those results as currency. 

John Ball writes on Search Engine Land: "People don’t think, analyze, or really even understand how search works anymore. They just assume it will work and they’ll get the results they need. 

This is a very real trend, and likely to continue."

And he goes on: "For example, consider Google Now — no searching required, just results you’re likely to need and can further refine. Also, consider Google Glass. Glass doesn’t even support advanced searching — it’s all short, to-the-point answers, likely based on the Knowledge Graph, which is rapidly expanding."

If you are a journalist, researcher or content curator, you are likely uninterested in such auto-selected results and prefer to dig, explore more and vet before drawing a conclusion.

To go beyond the surface of Google forcedly limited search spectrum, it is of great help to be able to use Google search modifiers. These are manual commands that you can insert in your search queries and that allow you to ask to Google to bring you the results you want in the way you want it.

If you are not familiar with these or have not been using them in a while, I do suggest to scan through them again as they can be real life-savers in many a situation. 

Very useful for any good journalist, researcher or curator.

Useful. Good examples. 8/10

Full article: http://searchengineland.com/top-10-search-modifiers-why-they-matter-what-they-are-how-to-use-them-173343 

Steve Rosenbaum (the author of Curation Nation) strikes some pretty powerful chords that fully resonate with my vision and expectations about the future of content curation.

On the assumption that "The speed, scale, and number of distinct elements of produced content will double every 24 months." (call it Rosenbaum law) he rightly asserts that, as if there was already enough content, we are going to be literally inundated by tons of it soon.

In this light content curation is much more than what content marketing providers would have you think (save some time and get more interesting content out). Content curation is rather a socially critical activity that will make it possible for people to learn, find the information they need and indpendently evaluate what product to buy.

Steve Rosenbaum outlines five principles around which the economy of content curation will establish itself. They are:

The First Law: People don’t want more content, they want less. 

The Second Law: Curators come in three shapes... 

The Third Law: Curation isn’t a hobby, it’s both a profession and a calling. Curators need to be paid...

The Fourth Law: Curation requires technology and tools to find, filter, and validate content...

The Fifth Law: Curation within narrow, focused, high-quality categories will emerge to compete with...

My comment: Steve Rosenbaum is right on track with this one and his five principles are 100% correct. If you are into content curation for the long ride, read them again.

Rightful. On track. 9/10

Full article: http://www.thevideoink.com/features/voices/the-coming-age-of-the-curation-economy-building-context-around-content/