Content Curation World

Defcomb is a new interesting web app, which while in full development, already offers some valuable features for anyone interested in monitoring and analyzing specific topics.

The app, which is fully free as of now, allows you to: 

1) Add your selected RSS feeds, OPML file or to tap in Defcomb extensive global archive of feeds to determine your content sources. 

2) Determine keyword-based filters by grouping multiple keywords

into sets.

3) Generate a news feed from your selected content sources filtered by anyone of your keyword sets or their combinations.

4) Publish a public RSS feed for each one of your news feeds.

5) Visualise occurrences of your specified set of keywords inside your sources across time

Applications for this tool may include personalised news and content discovery, topic tracking, text mining and data-visualisation.

N.B.: For novices, watch out. This tool is not difficult to use, but it may not so intuitive the first time around. Best thing to do to avoid wasting any time is to watch the short screencast video available on the home page (is video-only, no audio) and to read this short tutorial: 
http://defcomb.tumblr.com/post/101673641978/introducing-the-defcomb-news-reader  

Great potential. Already useful. 8/10

Free to use.

Update: Due to the high number of requests free signups have been temporarily closed.
** To get an account send an email to peter@defcomb.com with subject: "Interested in trying Defcomb - Recommended by Robin Good"

Try it out now: http://defcomb.com 

Example of filtered news stream: http://www.defcomb.com/public/scenarios/415 

I have included Defcomb in my T5 tools directory:
http://tools.robingood.com and in the experts tools for journalists here: http://experts.journalism.io

Kurator is a web service which allows you to easily customize one or more visual magazines that automatically aggregate the hashtags, lists, Twitter users, Facebook pages and RSS feeds you specify.

Specifically, you can aggregate from the following sources:

• Twitter User
• Twitter List
• Twitter Keywords
• Twitter Hastags
• Twitter Mentions
• Twitter Top Followers
• Facebook Page
• Facebook Keywords
• RSS Feed

You can also filter and specify specific keywords that you want to be included/excluded.

Kurators offers the ability to title each stream, and to customize somewhat the look of the final magazine by providing a few templates and layouts and access to the controls to adjust the font style, size and color.

The final stream can be published as a web page on Kurator or exported directly to WordPress as a "page".

My comments: Kurator is a useful tool to rapidly aggregate and publish one or more streams on a specific topic and to be able to integrate this content stream into their WordPress sites.

Unless you are a graphic designer or a tech person it is hard to customize and improve on the ready-made look presently available.

Kurator offers no option to manually curate your final stream and it is almost inevitable with this approach to get some duplicate items and some outright spam.

Good for anyone needing to rapidly create one or more rich-content pages on one or more specific topics.

The difficult, curation work here is all in setting up effective filters to aggregate the valuable content you are looking for. Easier said than done.

Free to use.

Try it out now: http://kuratur.com/

FAQ: http://www.kuratur.com/faqs/

My test page: http://kuratur.com/RobinGood/content-curation-news.html