Content Curation World

OpenTopic is a news curation service which allows you to aggregate, monitor and filter any number of sources and to publish and share your selected ones to you selected outlets: from your WordPress site, to your social media channels and to your email newsletter engine.

Within OpenTopic you can create one or more "Topic" dashboards. These are essentially display pages that aggregate incoming fresh content from the sources you specify.  You can jump from one Topic dashboard to the next at the click of your mouse.

To curate stories you simpy select the ones that are relevant to your audience and you are provided with an editing module to modify and personalize the story content. At this point you can also select on which one of your outlets (Channels) that story will be published and you can customize the story differently for each one of them.

There is even an option that allows you to set-up some form of automated curation, by giving you the option to set up a set of simple rules, which when match, will trigger the publishing of a news story.

OpenTopic allows you to hook up to an extended number of possible Channels, making it easy for you to post from one location to your web site, RSS feed, social media and newsletter.

Last but not least, OpenTopic integrates a full analytics service, capable of reporting and showcasing the performance of your curation work across stories and distribution channels.

My comment: Excellent tool for social media and community managers, as well as web marketing specialists in need to support effectively the finding of relevant news on a topic and the easy publishing to different channels from a centralized platform. Easy to use.

Request an invite here: http://www.opentopic.com/

Brickflow is a web app which allows you to easly collect content from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr and YouTube and to package it up in a visual tile grid that can be viewed as a slideshow and which can be easily published, shared and embedded on the web.

With Brickflow you can build a visua story either by collecting stories and resources using hashtags or by searching with the integrated facility across all the above listed social media and then dragging and dropping your selected items into your visual grid.

Brickflow works in a similar way as Storify, providing though a different visual publishing metaphor for its final output.

The final bundle looks like a visual grid of tiles, that can also be played as a presentation (also in full screen).

From the official website: "Brickflow is an app for making curated social media slideshows in seconds. Build memorable stories and collections with content from Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr and more. It’s just like playing with Legos. The result, a visual summary of a topic, can be embedded into any website or blog"

Here is one good example: http://brickflow.com/landing/project/51d356739f252#/51d356739f252

More inspiring examples: http://blog.brickflow.com/

My comment: Very useful to curate visual summaries of breaking news stories, events or to summarize key resources to explore on a specific topic. Easy to use. Provides opportunity to remix existing "flows" into new ones.

Free to use.

Find out more: http://brickflow.com