Content Curation World

Robin Good: Steve Buttry, who has already written several articles on content curation (see the end of his original article), just published this in-depth essay celebrating the launch of a new curation team at Digital First Media and pointing to many of the critical factors neeeded for a content / news curator to be effective.

He covers a lot ground while giving a particular emphasis to the importance of linking and attribution. He writes: "Where you can’t learn much about the source of content you’re curating, consider crowdsourcing the question: Note the name and organization, tell readers what you’ve found and that you’re continuing research and ask them what they know about the source.

Where the source of online content is unclear, you should be clear about what you know and where you found the material."

and...

"Sometimes the name of a person or organization is not sufficient attribution.

If the person or organization is not well-known, do a little research (Google will provide quick answers in many cases; sometimes an “about us” page will help).

Especially in political content, you want to note whether you are linking to partisan sources. A liberal or conservative think tank or political action committee is an entirely different kind of source from a professional media outlet or an independent fact-checking site."

Steve Buttry also includes some valuable key guidelines on "how to add value" when curating content and suggests several types of curation approaches that can be used in the newsroom.

Good advice on curation and practical tips. 8/10

Full article: http://stevebuttry.wordpress.com/2012/07/19/curation-techniques-types-and-tips/

(Image credit: Shutterstock http://tinyurl.com/crw65b4)

Robin Good: The new Storify news curation tool is now available for the iPad, bringing the ease of drag and drop to the curation world. 

"Founded in 2009, this seven person company has done a remarkable job surviving the market and being one of the major players in the world of content curation.

...

[Storify has been adopted by] 22 out of top 25 news sites in the United States...

Just like Twitter has their trending topics, Storify’s service allows people to keep track of the relevant social media trending topics. Users are able to tell their own story about these major events (like Whitney Houston or Greece’s economic downfall or even Madonna’s Super Bowl halftime performance), and embed them on their own website.

Be your own crowd-sourced storyteller, by dragging in tweets, status updates, photos, and videos from a variety of social networks in order to help you create a better story and telling experience."

(Source: http://bub.blicio.us/storify-launches-free-ipad-app-to-help-content-curation-on-the-go/)

Check out this video interview shot yesterday with the Storify team demonstrating the new app: http://youtu.be/u-Ua4LIbzMY 

The Storify app is free to download right from the iTunes store: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/storify/id488223180?ls=1&mt=8

Find out more: http://storify.com/storify/storify-for-the-ipad-is-here 

Robin Good: As you have probably already read somewhere else, this last weekend, Twitter launched a first-of-a-kind type of page.

The page, which you can see here: https://twitter.com/hashtag/nascar revolves around the last NASCAR car racing event, that took place last Sunday and it apparently aggregates interesting tweets and comments from a group of passionate NASCAR fans.

The interesting thing is that this page is in fact not an automatically aggregated page of tweets having a specific hashtag. There have been plenty of tweets in here with no hashtag at all, or not even mentioning explicitly NASCAR.

This is a human-curated page of tweets, selected from a curated list of relevant people for this topic.

This is the real news.

GigaOm writes about it: "The NASCAR page may not seem like anything to be concerned about, since it appears to be just a typical grouping of tweets collected by hashtag.

But there is editorial control behind it as well as algorithms, with an editor choosing which messages — including photos, videos and commentary from NASCAR insiders — were highlighted during the event, and which streamed by unacknowledged."

By mixing and matching technology-powered identification of relevant people and tweets for a specific topic, with an active layer of human curation allows Twitter to generate a page that's filled with value.

Here's what Twitter itself wrote on his blog before launching it: "...throughout the weekend – but especially during the race – a combination of algorithms and curation will surface the most interesting Tweets to bring you closer to all of the action happening around the track, from the garage to the victory lane."

And while this is only a first experiment from Twitter, I would bet that it will not be the last.

The value provided by adding a human curation layer, both to the selection of the sources as well as to the selection of the actual tweets, is huge.

What's your take?

Twitter NASCAR page: https://twitter.com/hashtag/nascar 
 

Twitter blog announcement: http://blog.twitter.com/2012/06/off-to-races-with-nascar.html 

Check also: http://rossneumann.tumblr.com/post/24960053871/twitter-wants-to-put-social-media-editors-out-of