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Content Curation World
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What a Content Curator Needs To Know: How, Tools, Issues and Strategy
Curated by
Robin Good
Author: Robin Good
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Scoop.it!
Robin Good's insight:
It is only a matter of time before trusted aggregators and human curators will become the main sources of reliable information for most people. In fact, the January release of the 2015 Edelman Trust Barometer shows that for the first time ever, the informed public trusts more search engines - aka Google - than traditional news and media outlets.
Even more interesting is the fact that "Seventy-two percent trust information posted by friends and family on social media, blogs and other digital sites, while 70 percent trust content posted by academic experts." as it highlights the fact that Google and search engines may be only an intermediary step in the journey toward a news ecosystem that will see trusted human editors, experts and curators for individual subjects who aggregate and curate content from multiple sources as the key reference points for news. This is must-read data for anyone interested in seeing where the future of news and search are headed. Enlightening data. 9/10 original article: http://www.edelman.com/post/intellectual-property-trust-age-digital-media/ 
Kathleen Gradel's curator insight,
February 5, 2015 8:14 PM
Click to Robin Good's Scoop.it, for his astute comments on this article: http://curation.masternewmedia.org/ 
Catherine Hol's curator insight,
February 7, 2015 12:03 PM
People have less trust in "owned media", and want information from a variety of sources online.
Scoop.it!
Robin Good's insight:
A curated selection of the best search engines organized according to what you need to find. Useful. Great example of how to create a useful, curated information resource. Free to use. Full resource: http://www.noodletools.com/debbie/literacies/information/5locate/adviceengine.html
Steve Whitmore's curator insight,
June 17, 2014 7:59 AM
Good reference list. I didn't realize there were so many search engines. 
ManufacturingStories's curator insight,
August 14, 2014 5:22 PM
For more resources on Social Media & Content Curation visit http://bit.ly/1640Tbl
Scoop.it!
Robin Good's insight:
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
Lila Hanft's curator insight,
October 30, 2013 3:25 PM
This could be really useful for documenting successful SEO or for setting benchmarks.
Scoop.it!
Robin Good's insight:
Audio excerpt: https://soundcloud.com/user458849/curation-and-search-joel Full interview: http://valueofsimple.com/smart-and-simple-matters-podcast-023-with-robin-good/ MP3 full interview: http://traffic.libsyn.com/valueofsimple/023_SmartAndSimpleMattersPodcastFromValueOfSimple.mp3 Subscribe to iTunes podcast: http://valueofsimple.com/itunes
Scoop.it!
Robin Good: If you are looking for a way to create RSS feeds from Google profile listings and Google+ searches, here is a working solution: Feed+ for Google Chrome. Feed+ supports two different types of feeds: a) Public user feeds: this turns all public messages of a selected user on Google Plus and turns it into an RSS feed. To create the feed, you either need to enter the profile ID which you find on the public profile page on Google+, or the full profile url. b) Search results: this creates an RSS feed from a selected search term. It combines all public posts that include the search phrase. Go get it here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/eaiadkmgpppkonfodnepmoknpaphnlij?utm_source=labnol.org (Alternative tool: Google Plus Feed)
ChaplainAl Kolades's curator insight,
June 26, 2014 2:26 PM
Its all here at www.chaplainal.com Come and learn, Come and share, come and be motivated. Come also to be used by God.
Scoop.it!
Robin Good: If you are serious about becoming a great curator, in your specific areas of interest, one of the key skills you may need to hone and refine is searching. While everyone can type a query in Google, only a very small minority knows how to go beyond that simple and intuitive ask-by-typing approach. If you need to find alternative sources, additional proofs or more people writing on a specific topic, you need to be able to articulate your search engine queries in more sophisticated ways. Google has opened registrations to its new Power Searching online course, providing anyone with the opportunity to learn highly valuable search skills and to receive a Google certificate after successfully completing it. From the official web site: "Power Searching with Google is a free online, community-based course showcasing search techniques and how to use them to solve real, everyday problems. The course features:
Upon passing the post-course assessment, a printable Certificate of Completion will be emailed to you. Registration is open from yesterday (June 26th), to July 16, 2012. New classes will become available Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday starting on July 10, 2012 and ending on July 19, 2012. Course-related activities will end on July 23, 2012.
(via Ed Stenson)
Scoop.it!
Robin Good: Adam Vincenzini on TheNextWeb has put together a nice and useful list of the 30 dedicated search engines that you can use to explore and research specific content areas.
From blogs to video and forums, here is a good list of search engine tools from where you can start your own research.
Helpful. 7/10
Full list: http://thenextweb.com/lifehacks/2012/04/29/30-specialist-and-super-smart-search-engines/ Via Ana Cristina Pratas
Jeff Domansky's curator insight,
June 29, 2013 8:42 PM
Great list and useful alternatives to Google search.
Scoop.it!
Great post written by Eric Brown for Social Media Explorer - This is what caught my attention:
Curation — the act of human editors adding their work to the machines that gather, organize and filter content.
“Curation comes up when search stops working,” says author and NYU Professor Clay Shirky. But it’s more than a human-powered filter.
“Curation comes up when people realize that it isn’t just about information seeking, it’s also about synchronizing a community.”
Part of the reason that human curation is so critical is simply the vast number of people who are now making and sharing media.
“Everyone is a media outlet”, says Shirky. “The point of everyone being a media outlet is really not at all complicated. It just means that we can all put things out in the public view. Via janlgordon
Scoop.it!
This is an interesting comparison and I think it's a good start....... search and curation continue to evolve and there's lots more to this story, stay tuned...........
Intro:
Curation platforms vs Search engines Nowadays, search engines like Google are essential tools for every Internet work. But are they the best place to search anything? We believe that a manual...
Search engines present a list of content, ranked by a relative relevance between the results. Curation platforms like Bundlr present themed groups of content, usually ranked by popularity, but always highlighting the author of the selection.
Search engines work better when:
We’re looking for definite answers The source long term authority matters The quantity of results is important
Curation platforms work better when:
Events are recent or on-going (and traditional sources are slow to catch up) There are multiple points of view Concrete example are prefered to definitions
http://blog.gobundlr.com/post/8821314660/curation-platforms-vs-search-engines Via janlgordon
Tom George's comment,
August 12, 2011 12:56 PM
Wow Jan,
This is a great one. Notice I commented on this at the end of the post using Facebook. http://bit.ly/nX8ObV If you send me a facebook request, you can comment back anytime you like and also be notified if someone else happens to comment on your curation. I gotta do some training now back for more later Thiis is great. Did you know you can also share any other Scoop you like from another curator?? |
Scoop.it!
Robin Good's insight:
Matt Rosoff writes on Business Insider UK: 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". 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. 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
Stephen Dale's curator insight,
March 24, 2015 4:54 AM
Put simply - Google (and for that matter any commercial search engine) may skew search results to promote their own commercial interests. The question to ask yourself is "are the (search) results good enough?" - I'd say in Google's defence "yes they are".
Reading time: 5mins
Scoop.it!
Robin Good's insight:
Lutz Finger, reports from SxSW on the topic of algorithms, curation and the future, as the skills of content creators, data analysts and code programmers are seemingly converging for the first time. Among others, he reports Steve Rosenbaum (founder of Magnify.net) significant own words at SxSW: "...a wise combination of human judgement enabled by algorithms will become the new king of content." But while there are great new tools, startups and ideas leveraging the great potential of big data and human curation, there is a big, invisible danger, still looming on us. "The danger is that any algorithm might fall prey to someone trying to influence it. But the biggest and realest danger lies in us. Informative. Resourceful. 7/10 Full article: http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140320132545-6074593-the-age-of-the-algorithms-sxsw-summary See also: www.masternewmedia.org/future-of-search Image: Bjoern Ognibeni - SxSW
Georges Millet's curator insight,
March 25, 2014 4:10 AM
Knowledge & life turning today into a (google) search. Algorithms are key!
Stephen Dale's curator insight,
March 26, 2014 4:35 AM
"We are in the era of the algorithm. They decide what news we will see, they decide which person is important and they will even merge more and more into our non-digital lives.
But the biggest and realest danger lies in us. If we believe that there is only one truth and that is the one generated by a black-box algorithm we might be deceived easily."
A reminder, then, that algorithm's should not take the place of critical thinking.
Scoop.it!
Robin Good's insight:
Even though Google has become very good at understanding and providing relevant results for many popular queries, many search users are getting lazy and taking those results as currency. John Ball writes on Search Engine Land: "People don’t think, analyze, or really even understand how search works anymore. They just assume it will work and they’ll get the results they need. This is a very real trend, and likely to continue." And he goes on: "For example, consider Google Now — no searching required, just results you’re likely to need and can further refine. Also, consider Google Glass. Glass doesn’t even support advanced searching — it’s all short, to-the-point answers, likely based on the Knowledge Graph, which is rapidly expanding." If you are a journalist, researcher or content curator, you are likely uninterested in such auto-selected results and prefer to dig, explore more and vet before drawing a conclusion. To go beyond the surface of Google forcedly limited search spectrum, it is of great help to be able to use Google search modifiers. These are manual commands that you can insert in your search queries and that allow you to ask to Google to bring you the results you want in the way you want it. If you are not familiar with these or have not been using them in a while, I do suggest to scan through them again as they can be real life-savers in many a situation. Very useful for any good journalist, researcher or curator. Useful. Good examples. 8/10 Full article: http://searchengineland.com/top-10-search-modifiers-why-they-matter-what-they-are-how-to-use-them-173343
Maureen Greenbaum's comment,
November 5, 2013 7:55 AM
I left this comment I think you are wrong about AND - that is Google's default<br>see https://support.google.com/web...<br>You need OR if you want either term but Google does AND automatically otherwise<br>@sumware
Scoop.it!
Robin Good's insight:
Gooru is a curated search engine focusing on K-12 free learning resources which allows teachers and educators to easily find relevant materials on most topics and to organize them into shareable collections, quizzes and customizable playlists. "Quickly and easily pinpoint the exact resources for your teaching needs by filtering search results by grade level, resource type, and Common Core State Standard." "...drag and drop pre-existing collections to save them in your personal library. Once saved, you can customize collections by uploading your own resources, adding narration to resources, and inserting questions to test for understanding." Classpages, which can be password protected, allow to assign collections and quizzes to students in specific classes. In Gooru it's possible to create multiple Classpages and to manage assignments across different sections all in one place. "As students study collections and answer questions, teachers receive direct feedback on their mastery and progress, allowing them to personalize instruction to individualized learning preferences." My comment: A great tool for teachers and educators working with the need to find pre-screened quality learning guides and with the desire to customize to a deeper degree their students learning resources path. Also another solid example of where the future of search is happily headed. Free to use. Try it out now: http://www.goorulearning.org/ Find out more: http://about.goorulearning.org/product/overview/ Intro presentation of what Gooru is: https://docs.google.com/a/goorulearning.org/presentation/d/1TWpEWcliK3nOXrh9jnApgHNpcGEuCx1PaEBjFi9e4mk/edit#slide=id.geac2c7dd_2182 More useful info here: http://about.goorulearning.org/community/
ManufacturingStories's curator insight,
September 18, 2013 9:59 AM
Robin - Another great analysis. Thanks for all of our hard work & curation.
Scoop.it!
Robin Good's insight:
Ditto is a FREE, automated weekly backup of Twitter, Facebook and Gmail with integrated search capabilities. To curate, means also ability to archive, preserve and safely store the data/information/content available in your newsradar/collection/lineup. As a matter of fact, if you decided to follow-up on an academic pursuit of your data-curation interests, you would be immediately confronted with the learning of the best methodologies, tools and workflows utilized to preserve and archive digital data. In addition, given the times we are in, and who controls our data, you can never know what happens next, and whether you are always going to be able to access both your account and the data that's in it. For these reasons I think it is relevant for anyone involved in professionally managing content / data, such as a content curator does, to have the ability to easily and automatically backup all of his Twitter / Facebook data as well as his own Gmail. With Ditto, you can export all of your backed up data from Facebook, Twitter or Gmail, into a handy PDF file. Free to use. (max 3GB of archive space can be used - if you leave out your Gmail, that's plenty of space.) Find out more: https://ditto.norton.com/ Try it out now: http://ditto.norton.com/services
Dr. Michael Simmons's curator insight,
May 20, 2013 3:30 PM
Daunting, but probably the direction in which we need to go.
Scoop.it!
Robin Good: Though I had seen and scooped this article before, I must have not done a very good job of really reading it from back to back. Paul Kedroski, who wrote this over a year and half ago, really captured the historical essence of content curation on the web. This is an absolutely must-read article for anyone wanting to grasp what is happening with content curation on the web, hwile seeing things in proper perspective. He wrote: "What has happened is that Google's ranking algorithm, like any trading algorithm, has lost its alpha. It no longer has lists to draw and, on its own, it no longer generates the same outperformance -- in part because it is, for practical purposes, reverse-engineered, well-understood and operating in an adaptive content landscape. Search results ...so polluted by spam that you often started looking at results only on the second or third page... ... There are two things that can happen now. a) We could get better algorithms, which is happening to some degree, with search engines like Blekko and others. b) Or, we could head back to curation, which is what I see happening, and watch new algos emerge on top of that next-gen curation again. Think of Twitter as a new stab at curation, but there are plenty of other examples. Yes, that sounds mad. If we couldn't index 100,000 websites in 1996 by hand, how do we propose to do 234-million by hand today? The answer, of course, is that we won't -- do them all by hand, that is. Instead, the re-rise of curation is partly about crowd curation -- not one people, but lots of people, whether consciously (lists, etc.) or unconsciously (tweets, etc) -- and partly about hand curation (JetSetter, etc.). We are going to increasingly see nichey services that sell curation as a primary feature, with the primary advantage of being mostly unsullied by content farms, SEO spam, and nonsensical Q&A sites intended to create low-rent versions of Borges' Library of Babylon. The result will be a subset of curated sites that will re-seed a new generation of algorithmic search sites, and the cycle will continue, over and over. In short, curation is the new search. It's also the old search." Must read. 9/10 Full article: http://www.businessinsider.com/googles-search-algorithm-is-spinning-out-of-control-2011-1
Stewart-Marshall's comment,
July 11, 2012 11:40 AM
Excellent - a very prophetic analysis - wished I'd read it a year and half ago :-)
Beth Kanter's comment,
July 11, 2012 12:34 PM
I only use google like a phone book -when I'm looking for a specific reference. But if I'm doing research on a topic, my strategy for years has been to go to the key sources (curators) and look through their libraries. I find the lack of context that search returns - makes me want to throw up. It is a much better experience to see it in context through the yes of someone who knows the content area.
Scoop.it!
Robin Good: Curation is often about searching, exploring and digging through tons of materials to find a perfect match, a complementary resource, a citation or quote that can help add more value and meaning to your "collection" or to your curated content. Yet, many curators have not yet explored and mastered the tools available to them to make their search efforts even more effective. Not that you can't find these on Google's own help pages (http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=136861 ), but there is more information in this guide that can be quite useful including the syntax, the capabilities, and an example for each operator. Very useful. 9/10 Full guide: http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators.html
Scoop.it!
This post was written by Tony Karrer from Aggregage
He has some interesting things to say about an article he read by Ville Kilkku, which was all about the future of content curation, the title of the piece he's referring to in this post is "Klout, Triberr, paper.li, and the future of content curation".
Intro
He says,
He then talks about three major trends in content curation:
From individual content curators to crowdsourced content curation: Individuals cannot keep up with the pace of new content, even though they have better discovery tools than before. Crowdsourcing can, although it is not suitable for promoting radical new ideas: the dictatorship of the masses is unavoidably conservative.
From manual to semi-automated content curation: Individual content curators are forced to automate as much of the process as possible in order to stay relevant. From content curation to people curation: When there is too much content, you vet the content creators, manually or automatically. Those who pass get exposure for all of their content.
What caught my attention:
How do these trends interact? Social networking of the content creator is vitally important in order to create an audience as isolated content becomes increasingly difficult to discover and curation focuses on people instead of individual content. Build it, and they will come, is dead.
http://www.aggregage.com/blog/curation/people-curation Via janlgordon
Robin Good's comment,
September 8, 2011 3:50 AM
Thank you Jani, as always good stuff.
I would like also to kindly ask you, if you feel so, to share your comment and advice to this post, which relates strongly to our curation work and to how the Scoop.it management handles our requests, feedback and us: http://www.scoop.it/t/real-time-news-curation/p/435456801/should-scoop-it-and-other-curation-tools-credit-original-sources-it-seems-not-missing-source-element-and-link-inside-rss-feed Many thanks in advance! 
's comment September 10, 2011 12:36 PM
Great article -- thanks!
Scoop.it!
Lots of people might know about this, some do not, no matter what, it's still good to see it in print. Human curation works and will play a significant role on the web.
Excerpt: After almost a decade, Google is somewhat sheepishly admitting that humans are, well, useful after all.
What Google is embracing -- finally -- is the emergence of human curation as a central and critical editorial effort in the increasingly noisy web. Curation, it seems, trumps robots when it comes to both interestingness and editorial tone and voice.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-rosenbaum/google-news-humans-beat-r_b_926641.html Via janlgordon
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"Wonder was built to bring human-centric guidance back to the pursuit of knowledge on the web."
in other words: "Away from algorithmically sorted lists of links, and back to human-guided curation, evaluation and advice for those who don't need just a store address on a map".
Wonder is a new free web service which touts to be your online personal research assistant. Behind its minimalist website there's a crew of human beings that actually goes out to gather and bring back to you valuable answers and resources to your questions.
How does it work?
You just register via FB, Twitter or with your own email and then you are presented with a very simple screen in which you are asked "what are you wondering"?
You type in a question, and within a very reasonable amount of time (in my cases, in always less than 30 minutes) you receive a hand written email answer by a person with a first and last name. Not only. The person provides you also with multiple links to relevant resources that can help you find out and discover more about the topic of your interest.
Why it's relevant: Independently of the quality of the results that Wonder may initially bring to you, this new service highlights a growing trend toward trusted guides, expert curators of information, and their human voice and away from algorithmically sorted list of results like Google offers.
P.S.: In my initial tests a reply for a very specific question in one of my areas of expertise didn't bring back particularly valuable or useful suggestions as this knowledge would require an expert in the field, but less specialistic questions brought back useful responses written in a very human-style and supported by very high-quality relevant links and resources.
Here is one such question - answer as an example for you:
My Research Request:
How can I trust the answers provided by those behind Wonder if I know nothing about who they are?
Mike Smith reply:
Let me assure you, I am no robot. The resources curated by Wonder are compiled and collated by real human beings (such as myself) who take the time to sort through the vast amount of information available on the web.
I view the task of the Wonder researcher as being rather similar to that of your local librarian. And any good librarian isn't going to tell you how to think: they will present you with what knowledge and information they have available and arrange it in such a way that you must come to your own conclusion. Do you demand the librarian's credentials? Do you peruse their degrees and certifications? No, because her/his credentials lie in the quality of the work they have laid before you. Even if you detect bias or prejudice in what has been presented to you, then the curator's task has already been accomplished: you have assessed, for yourself, the quality of the information you have encountered and have honed your critical faculties that much more.
View Research
- Content curation (i.e. Wonder) is similar to consulting a librarian for literature on a particular subject
- Content curators (e.g. librarians) have empirically improved critical thinking skills in students
- Content curators (e.g. librarians) are tasked with fostering critical thinking in the evaluation of information sources
This is the future in preview.
Try it out and see what you think of it.
Free to use.
Try it out now: https://wonderlib.com/