Content Curation World

Gaurav Mishra does an excellent job in explaining and illustrating in greater depth the concepts and ideas introduced in his presentation: Future of Crowdsourcing: Creation to Curation, Search to Synthesis, Content to Things.

The key axiom in the article is that crowdsourcing is slowly shifting: 

a) in terms of input: from creation to curation,

b) in terms of output: from search to synthesis, and

c) in terms of focus: from content to things.

For example when it comes to input, we are moving from crowdsourcing platforms that helped us to create logos or simple graphic designs to new services that will actually curate for us the best design candidates to take into consideration.

A great enlightnening example of this shift, can be seen by looking at one of the many excellent resources listed in this article: ImageBrief, an online service which connects creatives with photographers, who themselves handpick images from their hard disks to match the criteria listed in the submitted creative briefs. 

My comment: Gaurav comprehensive vision and ability to spot relevant shifts and trends is not only uncanny, but also systematic. No matter which article or presentation you look at in his collection you can be sure to find something always of value. 

Excellent. Insightful. Resourceful. 9/10

Full article: http://gauravonomics.com/future-crowdsourcing-trends/ 

Sauna.io is a social curation platform allowing you to easily pick the best content, images and video from your social media connections coming from Facebook and Twitter.

Sauna.io provides Pinterest-like private dashboards in which it surfaces for you the most relevant stories that may interest you, coming from a set of 12 different content themes from which you can elect your favorite ones.

Categories of interest available: http://o7.no/11lB3zp (screenshot)

You can create as many dashboards as you like and feed them with specific Twitter user accounts and/or RSS feeds of your choice.

Sauna.io lets you also comfortably read any potential interesting story by sliding in a side panel in which you can read the content in detail.

You can vote each story, or select to edit / curate it, by working on the title, description, image and tags associated to it, and then easily share it on your Facebook or Twitter accounts.

Free to use.

My comment: A good social discovery and sharing tool for anyone interested in having a pleasing discovery experience and an easy way to also edit and curate each story selected.

Categories are still very limited and broad at the moment.

Good UI and usability. Definitely worth trying.

Request an invite here: http://www.sauna.io/

Swavy is a new web app which allows you to easily find the best content available in one of your categories of interest, and to share with your network of contacts on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIN.

Similar to Rallyverse, it allows you to connect to your Facebook Profile or to one of your Facebook Pages, and in a future version you will be able to manage multiple dashboards where you monitor and find content for different sets of social accounts.

Swavy allows you to schedule your social media posts and it suggest the most relevant hashtags and @handles to utilize in each one.

Swavy integrates powerful and easy to understand analytics highlighting your key best sources, content types, trending keywords, and stats for all of your posts.

Swavy also allows you to invite other team members to work on fnding and curating the best content on your selected social media channels.

Check out this review on TheNextWeb: http://thenextweb.com/apps/2013/03/21/swayy-discover-curate-content/

Free to use.

Try it now: http://www.swayy.co/

If you re looking for examples of content curation platforms outside of the popular ones, you may want to give a look to what appears to be the most popular curation platform in Japan: Naver Matome.

From what I gather and can see, this is something very similar to Tumblr, providing an intuitive publishing platform supported by easy-to-use features to easily grab, capture, credit and republish most any kind of content or social stream.

"Naver Matome is a very simple curation platform that launched back in July of 2009. To date it has accumulated over 41 million users and over 1.2 billion page views per month. The platform is now operated by NHN Japan (perhaps best known as the company behind the Line chat app) after a merger with Naver in November of 2011.

On the site, users are able to create pages that bundle images, links, and videos under a topic of their choice, ranging from dieting, to politics, to web services.

There are many reasons behind the platform’s sucess including its friendly user interface, the wide genre of topics curated, compatibility with different social networks (especially Twitter), and strong SEO for both Yahoo and Google with 70% of its traffic coming from the two search engines."

Source: http://www.startup-dating.com/2013/03/navermatome-curation

Enginuity is a socially curated search engine targeted at content marketers, bloggers and other content publishers who want to easily find already socially vetted and interesting / trendy content on a specific topic and share it to their preferred social media (Facebook, Twitter, G+, etc.) channels, publishing platforms (WordPress, Tumblr, Blogger, etc.) or social management tools (Hootsuite, Buffer, etc.).

The search results in Enginuity are pre-grouped into web, news, reviews, images, video clips and viral results and ranked by their trendiness and level of sharing on social media channels.

Enginuity also supports direct export to your selected stories to a set of dedicated RSS feeds which you can create and name freely.

My comment: Useful tool for content marketers who are not subject matter experts looking for trendy content that can be easily posted to their media properties. Easy to use. Very broad sharing and distribution options.

Free plan available. Requires registration.

Find out more: http://theenginuity.com/index.php

Plans & pricing: http://theenginuity.com/plans.html

*Added to the Content Curation Tools Supermap in the section: Search Curation

Faveeo is a news discovery web app which makes it easy to set up sophisticated queries to monitor specific topics, industries or issues.

A visual map of topic modules facilitates identifying relevant topics and building complex persistent searches by simply dragging and dropping relevant modules.

Faveeo then provides you with relevant news and web suggestions as well as with on-topic PDFs found on the web which you can either discard, save, or immediately share on your favorite social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIN, Tumblr) or with your own internal community or team.

Inside Faveeo you can create several separate "magazines", which are nothing else but individual dashboards monitoring the queries you have set up and suggesting interesting news and stories for you to share.

Last but not least Faveeo is a collaborative tool which allows you to invite and collaborate in curating specific topics with your selected teammates or fans.

My comments: while the interface, query buildup and overall usability are quite OK, if not altogether innovative and effective (like in the case of the query buildup), I did not find the results being suggested as well as the alternative keyword-categories in the map being proposed to be of high value-relevance for my needs.

It may have been my topics, but it felt like there's more work needed to make the discovery engine surface more relevant and useful stuff.

I also missed more relevant meta-information in the "news evaluation area" that would help me scan more rapidly and effectively the incoming stories (date, source, author).

This doesn't mean you shouldn't give it a try immediately and see if it can fit your news discovery and sharing needs.

Free 30-day trial available.

Find out more: http://www.faveeo.com/

More info: http://www.faveeo.com/about-faveeo

Check this useful video intro by CEO Alexis Dufresne (the UI has changed but the basic ideas remain the same): http://youtu.be/xbLBj9bnkyc

ContentDJ is a commercial web app which allows you to easily monitor your favorite topics via keywords and to share the most relevant ones to your preferred social media channels (Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIN) or to your self-hosted WordPress blog.

In addition to these core capabilities, ContentDJ integrates an excellent social media editorial calendar facility which allows you to schedule and organize your postings to different social media according to your preferences, as well as a clean-cut and well orgamized dashboard of stats covering your social media activities.

ContentDJ has an excellent user interface making easy and intuitive to set up and configure your account in minutes. The app can notify you via email, according to your preferred scheduled time slots, about new content being available for your review.

Pricing starts at $6.75/mo where you get:

• three trackable keywords ($14.25/mo gives you five)
• one social account connected ($14.25 gives you two)
• social media editorial calendar
• daily email digest

P.S.: ContentDJ promises also a Playlist page, a public web page in which you can organize and showcase your best stuff, but it looks like as this feature has yet to be released, or is not part of what you can presently access through the free trial.

Key strengths:

• easy-to-use
• intuitive interface
• aggregates and visibly rank incoming stories
• easy to pick or reject content stories
• publishes directly to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIN
• posts directly via XML-RPC to self-hosted Wordpress sites
• create a post from scratch feature
• free trial - no credit card required

Limits:

• no free base level account available
• no editing for selected stories (possible in editorial calendar)
• no possibility to input selected RSS feeds or sources to monitor
• no bookmarklet
• unclear billing options on purchase page
• no in-depth tutorials or videos

Review: https://lonelybrand.com/blog/curate-content-more-efficiently-with-content-dj/

Free 14-day trial available.

Find out more and try it out now: http://contentdj.com/

RebelMouse may be one of the best free tools out there to do news, social or content curation for your personal brand, company or organization.

Beneath the appearance of a social media aggregation app, lies a super-powerful curation and publishing infrastructure which allows you to aggregate and monitor any social media stream from Facebook to Instagram and Pinterest, and lets you import RSS feeds and add specific filters to get exactly what you want.

While most reviewers will see RebelMouse as a tool to "quickly assemble a Web page populated with links from your Facebook and Twitter streams, using a slick graphical presentation that looks quite a bit like Pinterest" (source: HuffPo), I think this social aggregation and publishing has indeed a lot more to offer and it has all of the required features to become a great content curation and publishing solution.

With RebelMouse you can do seven key things. You can:

1. pick any content you find on the web and you can curate it and post to your rebelMouse site by using the freely available bookmarklet
   
   
2. aggregate any number of Facebook and Twitter streams, including specific searches, users and hashtags, as well as any RSS feed you want.
   
   
3. filter this content according to your own rules
   
   
4. auto-publish any of this content, or
   
   
5. set individual sources to be manually "curated" by you. 
   
   
6. "embed" your RebelMouse generated site on your website or "map" (by paying a small fee) your own domain to it.
   
   
7. create multiple sub-pages with RebelMouse and a dedicated navigation system that can point also to your own existing web properties. Each of these sub-sites can be customized to focus on a specific topic or event.

On the design and "look and feel" front, RebelMouse provides a set of alternative templates, but the look is basically the same across the board with variants relating to the font styles and colors.

It is also true that you can personalize your RebelMouse site and alter the design however you'd like with the custom CSS option that is already available.

But it is certain, that providing a set of advanced, professional-looking templates, where users could for examples decide manually the size of certain tiles, would provide enormous added value to users who would see RebelMouse as a possible direct gateway to publishing their own site.

Rebelmouse site examples:

• http://garyvaynerchuk.com/
  
  
• https://www.rebelmouse.com/digitslam/
  
  
• https://www.rebelmouse.com/WSJ/
  
  
• http://graphics.wsj.com/fashionweek/?mod=e2tw
  (Wall Street Journal for Fashion Week)
  
  
• http://graphics.wsj.com/davos/
  (Wall Street Journal for Davos)
  
  
• https://www.rebelmouse.com/KING5Seattle/
  
  
• https://www.rebelmouse.com/MediaReDEFined/
  
  
• http://rebelmouse.com/RobinGood/
  
  
• https://www.rebelmouse.com/rebelmouse/the_12_best_rebelmouse_pages_o-87372661-0.htm

Check also these other RebelMouse reviews:

• http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/top-stories/203595/how-news-orgs-are-using-rebelmouse-for-blizzard-fashion-week/
  
  
• http://www.business2community.com/content-marketing/rebelmouse-for-content-curation-review-0419851
   
• http://www.business2community.com/social-media/rebelmouse-twylah-or-scoop-it-whats-your-pick-0426837
  
  
• http://pandodaily.com/2012/06/08/rebelmouse-is-the-social-media-aggregator-weve-all-been-waiting-for/
  
  
• http://www.businessinsider.com/this-2-months-old-startup-is-the-most-promising-to-launch-in-a-while-2012-7

Free to use.

For $9.99/month you can also "map" your RebelMouse pages to your own domain, so that your RebelMouse content stays on your own site.

https://www.rebelmouse.com/rebelmouse/power_your_domain_with_rebelmo-119834938.html

In addition you can also further customize the RebelMouse page look, by being able to remove the "Following" and "Featured" modules from your pages.

Here is how to embed Rebelmouse in your site: rebelmouse.com/faq/id_like_to_have_rebelmouse_pow-62050623.html

FAQ: https://www.rebelmouse.com/FAQ/

Try it out now: https://www.rebelmouse.com/

*Highly recommended to all would-be curators out there.