Content Curation World

Google has just introduced "Collections", for Google+, a new service which allows any Google+ user to group his posts by topic and to create public, shareable collections of his favorite links, articles, videos and images.

To use Google Collections, simply go to your G+ profile page and then select "Collections" on the drop down menu appearing on the top left part of the page.

"Each collection can be shared publicly, privately, or with a custom set of people. Once you create your first collection, your profile will display a new tab where other people can find and follow your collections."

You can either create new posts containing whatever type of content inside a collection, or assign an existing, published post to a collection you have just created.

You can create as many collections as you like.

Google+ Collections is available on the web and on Android (iOS coming later).

My comment: Google+ Collections adds opportunity for creating additional value to G+ users by letting interests drive community engagement. This is a feature that sooner or later any social network will offer. 

Free to use.

Try it out now: https://plus.google.com/collections/welcome 

More info:

Official Google announcement: https://plus.google.com/+googleplus/posts/7ZpGWeou2sV 

Featured collections: https://plus.google.com/collections/featured 

See also the official review from Techcrunch:

http://techcrunch.com/2015/05/04/google-turns-users-into-content-curators-with-new-collections-feature/ 

Video tutorial: https://youtu.be/gtVNkbtS9g8 

The new Google Bookmark Manager got me impressed. You may call it the Pinterest for Bookmarks or the new Pearltrees

for browser favorites, but notwithstanding your preference this is a true valuable curation tool to take note of.

The new release from Google is not just a great visual bookmarking tool for anyone using the Chrome browser, but it doubles up also as a great content curation publishing tool and under a hood of simplicity it packs lots of great, immediately useful features.

The browser integrated bookmarking manager makes it in fact possible to create visual link collections by adding URLs or by using the associated browser extension while on any site. These can be easily searched, nested, sorted and organized according to your preferences.

Each new bookmark allows you to pick an associated image, is editable in its title, description and URL and can be easily dragged, moved or copied over to different collections.

Bookmark collections from other browsers can be easily imported and a feature auto-generates a set of link collections based on common subjects. In addition, if you are logged into Chrome, your collections are synced across all of your computers. 

To curate and publish link collections, you only need to create a folder inside the Bookmark Manager and when it is ready for prime time, click the Share button to make it a fully public page.

N.B.: The new Bookmark Manager is not yet integrated with the Google Bookmarks service - https://www.google.com/bookmarks/ - keeping, for now, your browser bookmarks and the ones stored in the Google cloud two separate entities.

Excellent. A must have tool. 


Chrome extension:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bookmark-manager/gmlllbghnfkpflemihljekbapjopfjik  

More info: https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95714?hl=en 

I really think that Eric Enge of SearchEngineWatch did not have to go out of his way to post such an excellent analysis of what traits curated content should have to be appreciated by Google.

But given the amount of content marketers adopting curation as the latest magic wand, his work provides a very useful warning for the many attempting to substitute curation for good quality content.

As in real-life, when it comes down to giving more exposure to different curators, both humans and Google will attempt to select those that:

1) put a lot of effort into their curation

2) have a strong editorial voice and

3) a distinctive point of view

and which heavily rely on:

4) recognized expert analysis7cmmentary and reviews

5) access to data otherwise not accessible

6) freshness

Rightful. Useful. 8/10

Full article: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2290885/Content-Curation-SEO-A-Bad-Match 

Qwant is a new meta-search engine, tapping into the best news, web, video, image and social content sources and allowing you to clip and save your favorite results into topic-specific notebooks.

Specifically, Qwant offers for each search you perform, five column of results covering your specified topic:

1) top web results

2) top social results

3) Wikipedia references

4) media results (images and video clips)

5) top products

Each of the column can be filtered according to your specific keywords.

You can also easily save and archive any such result into your personally created notebooks, which can be made private or public.

You can also easily share any content item directly from Qwab to your Facebook and Twitter accounts, and you can explore and search public curated search notebooks from other users.

Supports 15 languages including French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Turkish, Greek, Hebrew and Russian.

Free to use.

Try it out now: http://www.qwant.com/

More info: http://www.qwant.com/help

*see similar tools in the "Search Curation" section
of Content Curation Tools Supermap

Matt Rosoff writes on Business Insider UK:

"A lot of people think Google Search is like a map: An objective guide to the best and most important material on the internet. It's not.

Google Search is the most important product of a very wealthy and successful for-profit company. And Google will use this product to further its own commercial ends." (Not to help people find the most relevant info to their own learning needs.)

This is an excellent article that should be read a couple of times slowly to remind oneself of Google key aspirations and limits.

In it, the author illustrates with relevant references how Google uses whatever means it has to further the interest and revenues generated by its search engine ad business (AdWords / AdSense).

It also highlights, that like any other dominant, monopoly-like company it risks of being challenged in courts around the world, and this is "what Google desperately wants to avoid. If a government body issues a formal legal ruling that Google Search is an anticompetitive monopoly that needs to be regulated, it opens the floodgates".

Meanwhile Google Search is and will be increasingly challenged by smaller but more relevant, specialist search engines, like Amazon or Yelp.

But Google, hungry by its profit-driven goals, keeps also increasing the amount of information it provides itself inside search results, versus original content and resources that are out there on the web.

In four years time Google has doubled the amount screen real estate that it uses to promote its services or ads.

All of this to say, that Google is a for-profit company and not a humanitarian endeavour built and maintained to provide a true guide to the best information available online. 

For whoever has the interest, passion and skills to search, filter and organise information this is important news. 

There's an opportunity to provide higher quality, better vetted information results than Google presently does. At least in some areas. 

If Google is too busy about serving ads and pushing its own services, there will have to be someone else who can provide to Google, or other search engines, trusted quality search results on specific subject matters. 

As for Google there is one area where it cannot really compete with talented humans: trust. 

True information curators, of the expert kind, may indeed become in great demand in the near future. And personal trust will determine which one you and I will rely on. Whether Google will exist or not.

Right to the point. Informative. 9/10

Full article: http://uk.businessinsider.com/google-is-not-a-charity-2015-3 

The future of search may not just be about Google and Bing. In the future of search, believe it or not, there are going to be a lot of people like you and me who will be providing much more helpful information guidance to specific requests than Google could ever do.

I know this sounds probably unrealistic to you, but I think there are now many good indications that this likely going to happen much sooner than you expect.

One of the key reasons why, human beings will start to reclaim this highly valuable search territory, is the fact that in the last few years we have slowly but deeply surrendered our ability to evaluate, decide and select what is "real" to Google's own algorithms, in ways that can only be detrimental to us.

You have probably read in recent times that Google is moving to use "semantic search" rather than the keyword-based approach it has been using until now. 

Do you know that "in semantic search, the decisions are not based on statistics, but rather on world models"?

"How about searching for "Dictators of the World?" The results, which include a list of famous dictators, are not just the judgment of whether someone is a dictator, but also an implicit judgment of choosing individual examples for the concept of a dictator. 

When building knowledge over concepts such as "Dictator" in the search engines, we are implicitly accepting a set of assumptions."

"It is needed to question and monitor these models, for in the past, the significance was only in the human mind. Now, it is also in the mind of the engines that forward us information. 

The search bears an editorial point of view, and its results reflect this point of view. 

We can’t ignore the assumptions behind these results. The invisible judgments will frame our conscience."

Here is a must read article by Zeh Fernandes, that wants to ignite an open discussion about "how the Google monopoly is affecting the way we search for and receive information on the internet".

I think that this is a topic deserving the highest attention and I highly recommend to read in full this excellent article, especially to content curators, information librarians and any other individual concerned with our future ability to vet, organize and make sense of the ocean of information surrounding us.

Alternative search tools and content curators are the future.

Good reminder of what we are eating daily. Insightful. Eye-opening. 10/10

Read this: http://zehfernandes.com/the-evil-side-of-google/ 

A good example of how you can provide a lot more insight to others by painstakingly curating a specific topic by collecting, organizing and juxtaposing effectively all of the relevant pieces.

Dr.Pete. also known as Peter J. Myers has curated an insightful visual montage that showcases all of Google search engine result page features in one page.

The result is a pretty amazing view, that, at least in my view, would be much more welcome than the existing results. Much more so, if it was me, the user searching, being able to decide which one of these features to turn on or off depending on my needs.

The time has come for me and you to decide how we want to slice, view and rank search results and this wonderful user-generated montage points to how much more could be seen if it was me or you to decide what to display inside your SERPs.

Inspiring. Instructional. Informative. 9/10

Original story: 

http://moz.com/blog/mega-serp-a-visual-guide-to-google 

Interactive illustrated image: http://www.thinglink.com/scene/444884388539269122

*hover your mouse on the different sections to see a descriptio of that feature