Content Curation World

If you find tracking news on Twitter a difficult task due to the amount of stories showing up, and the often missing context helping you understand the value and relevance of what is being shared, here is a new tool that may help you quiet down the visual noise and find more rapidly what is really important.

Vellum is a new free web app born out of a quick experiment at the New York Times R&D labs which allows you to see all of the most relevant Twitter stories coming from the people you follow, stripped of their commentary and showing their original title, description and source.

Vellum filters out text only tweets that contain no links and surfaces only those tweets that have already been retweeted by multiple people in your network.

"Vellum acts as a reading list  for your Twitter feed, finding all the links that are being shared by those you follow on Twitter and displaying them each with their full titles and descriptions.

This flips the Twitter model, treating the links as primary and the commentary as secondary (you can still see all the tweets about each link, but they are less prominent). 

Vellum puts a spotlight on content, making it easy to find what you should read next.

We also wanted to include signals about what might be most important to read right now, so links are ranked by how often they have been shared by those you follow on Twitter, allowing you to stay informed about the news your friends and colleagues are discussing most."

An excellent news discovery tool for content curators.

Useful. Easy. Free. 8/10 

Free to use.

Try it out now: http://vellum.nytlabs.com/mylinks 

More info: http://blog.nytlabs.com/2014/04/25/vellum-a-reading-layer-for-your-twitter-feed/ 

See the etymology of the word Vellum

JP Rangaswami highlights and defines seven key principles for effective filtering in this age of excessive information. 

Two of them are of particular important to the future of information access as they may have a very deep impact on society and on our ability to be in control of how to select and find what is relevant for us.

1. Filters, of whatever kind, should be user-driven and not publisher-driven. 

2. Filters should be interchangeable, exchangeable, even tradeable

"What we don’t know is how to solve a much bigger problem: what to do when there are filters at publisher level. Once you allow this, the first thing that happens is that an entry point is created for bad actors to impose some form of censorship.

In some cases it will be governments, sometimes overtly, sometimes covertly; at other times it will be traditional forces of the media; it may be generals of the army or captains of industry.

The nature of the bad actor is irrelevant; what matters is that a back door has been created, one that can be used to suppress reports about a particular event/location/topic/person."

Insightful. 7/10

Full article: http://confusedofcalcutta.com/2014/01/03/3740/ 

Reading time: 5'

(via Howard Rheingold)

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