Content Curation World

Ping.it is a new web app which allows you to create custom newsbots that automatically aggregate and filter news according to your own search and popularity criteria.

Such user-engineered custom feeds are called Probes, and you can create or subscribe to, to as many as you want. Such custom Probes can, for example, scout a selected set of sites/RSS feeds and distill from them only posts that contain certain keywords, and/or that have reached a certain popularity on social media (Facebook or YouTube).

Check some cool "probes" here: https://ping.it/MariusLian#tabs/Probes

Notably, on Ping.it, not only you can create "probes" that work for you, but the "probes" you create are also useful for others as well, who can put them to their own service.

Additionally you can also "ping" any story you find on the web (with the associated bookmarklet) and, optionally, associate it to a very specific "news collection" that you have created.

"pings" example: https://ping.it/MariusLian#tabs/Pings

"news collection" example: https://ping.it/MariusLian#tabs/Collections

Ping it is the first news discovery and curation app that has finally introduced more control for the user in building and customizing, easily, the way news are found, discovered, filtered and aggregated. Not only, it has introduced the idea that such customized bots/search-algos, can be re-used by others effectively.

Although the "probe" feature it is still very limited in functionality at this time, its introduction is a milestone event for news curators, as more control, on the user-side is exactly what information hunters really need. I expect that many more tools, large and small will need to follow on Ping.it foosteps.

Hats to Ping for introducing this feature, with the wish that they will further refine it and improve it as to make it really flexible and usable for many different types of needs.

Review on TheNextWeb: http://thenextweb.com/apps/2013/05/10/ping-it/

Free to use.

Try it out now: https://ping.it/