Content Curation World

Refreshbox offers a good opportunity for anyone wanting to warm up to content curation without needing to invest a truckload of time.

The new free service allows you to easily pick any webpage or resource you find online, and to add your personal title and description /commentary to it, while saving to a draft newsletter that will be sent out to your readers once a week.

Contrary to what is suggested on the "What's This" page on the Refreshbox site, I strongly recommend that you do not just pick but also introduce and contextualize the gems you find, that's the real-value you can provide, while Refreshbox takes care of providing free-of-charge:

1. a web page for your curated newsletter(s),

2. a searchable hub where others can find it and

3. an easy-to-use subscription and distribution service without asking you anything in return.

Refreshbox allows you to place up to 5 links in each newsletter edition, and to hook up to other services (e.g.Product Hunt) to pick up your likes and preferences automatically and add them to your curated newsletter draft.

Excellent tool to warm-up to content curation by picking and collecting great resources to distribute via email.

Try it out now: www.refreshbox.co 

Chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/refreshbox-add-links/ilbegopaglacdlahboheibkofipgmgno/reviews 

MonitorBook is a new free web app which allows you to track changes to any piece of content on any web page available online. 

MonitorBook is very easy to use. You just install the bookmarklet available in the Instruction section of the site and then as soon as you are on a page where you want to track changes to something, you click the bookmarklet and then select the piece of content on the page that you want to track. That's it.

If you go back to your web account on MonitorBook you will find inside the section called Trackings the page element you have selected to track and any possible changes that have happened to it.

I look forward to see RSS output and more advanced options to decide every how long to check and what to report.

Handy for anyone needing to keep a page under tabs though without an alerting system the key benefit may be lost.

Free to use.

Pro version available.
Pricing info: https://monitorbook.com/#pricing  

Try it out now: https://monitorbook.com/ 

Check this short clip to see how MonitorBook works: http://vimeo.com/104398714 

Happy Friends is a new free tool created by Dave Winer which allows you to closely follow those Twitter accounts for which you don't want to miss a beat. 

Happy Friends makes it easy for you to add (but not to delete for now) any Twitter account you want and to easily expand it to see all of its most recent tweets. 

The result is a simple interface which lists your favorite Twitter sources and allows you to check rapidly what each one of them has posted. 

What may escape anyone not reading this, is that by clicking on any of the headlines displayed inside Happy Friends you get to see the full Twitter card display, just as it was intended to be seen on Twitter with integrated images and video. 

Happy Friends fulfils for me a true need, as with Twitter typical readers and tools (including lists) it is very difficult to track specific sources postings without doing a few click acrobatics. 

I hope that in one of the upcoming versions, the formatting of the tweets will also be improved as to make it easier for the eye to rapidly scan the information presented. The twitter grey icons on the left do to little to quiet down the noise created by all the the tweet texts and links appearing on the Happy Friends page. Vertical spacing between items and separating text from links would significantly improve legibility and rapid eye-scanning of the content.

Very useful.

Free to use.

Try it out now: http://happyfriends.camp/ 

See also: http://happy.smallpict.com/2014/06/24/welcomeToHappyFriends.html 

and: http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2014/06/28/happy-friends-turns-twitter-mailbox-select-friends/ 

BuzzSumo is a powerful web app which allows content curators to find trending top content highlighted by social media shares and key influencers on any subject you specify.

Content can be filtered by "type" (including articles, guest posts, infographics, videos and interviews) and by *time" with the ability to see just the last 24 hours, the past week, month or six months of data.

Influencers can be filtered by bloggers, journalists, influencers, companies and regular people. 

An excellent tool for curators to find valuable new content and key contacts, influencers or prospective customers on any subject.

Free to use and test even without signing up.

.

Try it out now: 

• http://app.buzzsumo.com/top-content 
• http://app.buzzsumo.com/influencers 

If you find tracking news on Twitter a difficult task due to the amount of stories showing up, and the often missing context helping you understand the value and relevance of what is being shared, here is a new tool that may help you quiet down the visual noise and find more rapidly what is really important.

Vellum is a new free web app born out of a quick experiment at the New York Times R&D labs which allows you to see all of the most relevant Twitter stories coming from the people you follow, stripped of their commentary and showing their original title, description and source.

Vellum filters out text only tweets that contain no links and surfaces only those tweets that have already been retweeted by multiple people in your network.

"Vellum acts as a reading list  for your Twitter feed, finding all the links that are being shared by those you follow on Twitter and displaying them each with their full titles and descriptions.

This flips the Twitter model, treating the links as primary and the commentary as secondary (you can still see all the tweets about each link, but they are less prominent). 

Vellum puts a spotlight on content, making it easy to find what you should read next.

We also wanted to include signals about what might be most important to read right now, so links are ranked by how often they have been shared by those you follow on Twitter, allowing you to stay informed about the news your friends and colleagues are discussing most."

An excellent news discovery tool for content curators.

Useful. Easy. Free. 8/10 

Free to use.

Try it out now: http://vellum.nytlabs.com/mylinks 

More info: http://blog.nytlabs.com/2014/04/25/vellum-a-reading-layer-for-your-twitter-feed/ 

See the etymology of the word Vellum

Wepware is a new web app which allows you to capture any web page or portion of it and organize it into Pinterest-like boards which can be easily published and shared on social media channels.

Unique strengths include the ability to capture dynamic information boxes (flight schedule, sport scores, etc.) that will continue to be updated even when they are inside your curated collections. In addition, such live dynamic info snippets can be easily pasted on any web page you want and kept there as a live reference.

My comment: Powerful dynamic capture feature allows the creation of unique dynamic dashboards that collect and organize information from various sources in real-time.

Available as a Chrome browser extension.

Free to use.

Try it out now: http://www.wepware.com/ 

More info: http://www.wepware.com/web/landing 

Newspeg is Pinterest for the news. Interface, dialog boxes and most of the superficial stuff you interact with on NewsPeg is 99% identical to what you are used to on Pinterest, making it easy for anyone already familiar with the visual pinning giant to start pinning news in no time at all.

As expected, there is a standard browser bookmarklet, allowing you to capture news content on the fly. Like on Pinterest you can create as many thematic boards as you like and easily add stuff to them with a click of your mouse. All content you pin on NewsPeg can also be easily shared on Facebook and Twitter.

My comment: Supereasy to use and adopt, provides a news curation format that provides more view and less depth than other competitors, and which can have its advantages in many vertical niches. Definitely a good practicing and experimental ground for anyone needing to get his feet wet with news curation. 

P.S.: One small weakness I have run into with NewsPeg is that, news articles, often don't have much in terms of images or video, but NewsPeg, just like Pinterest, won't let you pin something that has no readily available visual content inside of it. I appreciate the value of visuals, but if I need to curate the news, is the tool that you should provide with some alternative solution for when I run into situations like these.

Free to use.

Try it out now: http://www.newspeg.com/ 

Read more about it: http://recoveringjournalist.typepad.com/recovering_journalist/2014/01/introducing-newspeg.html

Added to News Curation Tools section of Content Curation Tools Supermap

Docubase is a project of the MIT Open Documentary Lab that aims to create a collaborative, participatory community around a growing collection of innovative documentaries curated by experts and outsiders alike.

Documentaries can be searched and sorted easily in a number of ways (most recent, most viewed, alphabetical order / or as a list rather than a mosaic). The interface is slick, colorful and simple to use.

More than 140 documentaries are already available and a selected group of curators has put together a number of publicly available playlists designed aroound key themes connecting these clips. 

Playlists: http://docubase.upian.com/playlist/ 

The curators: http://docubase.upian.com/curator/ 

A fantastic resource for documentary lovers and a great example of how in an open and participatory project, curation can play a fundamental role.

Free to use.

Try it out now: http://docubase.upian.com/ 

More info: http://docubase.upian.com/about/ 

Suggest projects to be included: http://docubase.upian.com/contact/ 

Read more about it: http://opendoclab.mit.edu/docubase_conversation 

#mitdocubase

Siz.io is a free web app which allows you to collect your favorite video clips into thematic "shortlists".

Shortlists are organized into main categories ranging from News, to Animals, Games, Funny, Cinema, TV and more.

You can add video clips from YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion, Instagram, Vines and more by simply copying and pasting their URLs.

My comment: Good resource to find shortlists of curious, funny and entertaining videos. Easy-to-use. Feature request: play all clips in a shortlist as a back-to-back sequence.

Free to use.

Try it out now: http://siz.io/ 

Added to the section: Video Curation of the Content Curation Tools Supermap

Triggable is a new web abb (currently in alpha) which allows you to monitor mentions of specific people, events or topics across your favorite news and social media channels.

You select your favorite sources both from within a pre-selected pool of quality news channels as well as by adding your favorite RSS feeds.

Triggable collects relevant mentions, collects them and optionally alerts you via email.

My comment: Interesting and promising alternative to the likes of Google and Yahoo Alerts (and Talkwalker Alerts), and to the new cool kid on the block: Mention. 

Free to use.

Try it out now: http://www.triggable.com/ 

(Image credit: Tech background by Shutterstock)

Unmark is a web app which allows you to easily bookmark any web page you deem relevant, and to assign to it a to-do labels, a description and the option to permanently archive it.

Unmark keeps track and displays all of your bookmarks in an elegant vertical timeline and can manage hashtags utilized in the note/description field allowing easy categorization.

Existing bookmarks can be easily imported from your favorite web browser, Pinboard, or Delicious. Supported browsers include Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer 11. 

An available bookmarklet makes bookmarking any web page only a click away and with the Unmark Chrome Extension installed you can search your links directly from Chrome’s Omnibox (the place you type in your searches or the URL you want to go to). Also, you can add all of your open tabs to Unmark with a single click. And, if you want to skip the labelling process altogether, you can right-click on a page and add it to Unmark without seeing a window (speedy speedy).

The basic version is free, open-source and immediately accessible by anyone after registration.

A "Pro" version, costing $12/year adds the capability to search through all of your bookmarks.

An elegant and easy to use tool to more effectively manage anyone with an intense bookmarking activity.

• Try it out now: https://unmark.it/ 
   
• FAQ: http://help.unmark.it/faq 
   
• Overview: http://help.unmark.it/ 
   
• Bookmarklet: http://help.unmark.it/bookmarklet
   
• Chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unmark/cdhnljlbeehjgddokagghpfgahhlifch/related 

N.B.: Unmark has been created by Plain, the same guys who made the outstanding in-line editor for Wordpress: Barley.

Blendspace is a web-based content curation tool, designed specifically for educators and teachers. Blendspace sits somewhere between Pinterest and Storify as its power and simplicity make it easy to search multiple sources, import content and visually display it and organize it into boards.

Its unique strength resides in:

1. Multiple layout pre-sets
2. Presentation-mode
3. Collections are embeddable
4. Easy drag/drop reorganization of boards
5. Team collaborators (upcoming feature)
6. Works across all computers and devices

Very easy and intuitive to use, makes the research and collection task intuitive, and organization, presentation and publishing very effective.

I really like how Blendspace works and the results it produces. If you are looking for visual tool to create collections of resources on a specific topic for your class or training program, I'd give Blendspace a try.

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

Added to Curation Tools for Education inside Content Curation Tools Supermap 

Zimilate is a new content collection and organizing tool that allows you to create Pinterest-like boards containing files of any kind, documents, PDFs, newly created text notes as well as images and full web pages that can be easily captured with a dedicated bookmarklet/extension.

Content items can be tagged, manually ordered and collected into "spheres", which can be set to be "private" or public.

It's very easy to drag and drop items from one collection to another and to re-order items in any way you want.

Team collaborators can be invited to contribute content to any of your collections.

All contents collected in Zimilate are fully searchable.

Zimilate is a powerful content curation app, similar to Pinterest but with added functionalties (more content types supported and powerful web page capturing) and more flexibility (reordering of items in a collection) which make it a potentially valuable alternative. At the same time, since it is so new, it lacks Pinterest core feature that allows you to easily select any image from a web page and to pin it to a board. With Zimilate, for now you need to click and save the image and then import it.

Free to use.

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

Check this review: http://www.ilovefreesoftware.com/14/webware/zimilate-free-website-save-organize-web-content-notes-images.html 

Added to Content Curation Tools directory.

Thanks to Francesco Guglielmino for finding it.

Google Research is a little-known sidebar available inside Google Drive documents and presentations which allows you to do just-in-time Google searches and to easily curate relevant results, including images, videos, text excerpts, links with full automatic attribution references, into the document or presentation you are preparing.

The Google Research sidebar facility can be called at anytime up by simply going to the Tools menu and selecting "Research" or by selecting any word in your text and then typing Ctrl+Alt+Shft+I.

Once in view, the mini Google Research sidebar, is ready to search across not just the Google standard web results, including news, images, videos and Google Scholar databases, but is also able to instantly filter and sort for you relevant Quotes, Dictionary items, as well as stuff from your own Google Drive documents and tables.

To identify more rapidly relevant resources inside this search sidebar, Google offers the option to "preview" any result, by opening an additional sidebar showcasing a resized view of the web page in question).

Once identified a relevant resource you can either drag and drop it right into your open Google document / presentation (great for images which will also automatically credit)*, or "insert the resource as a link", or "cite" it (by being able to select between MLA; APA and Chicago citation formats).

I have found the Google Research Tool extremely useful, handy and simple to use. If you are researching, writing or curating any kind of article, presentation or report in Google Drive, I highly recommend you try it yourself and let me know what you think of it.

Free to use.

http://drive.google.com 

*I am not suggesting to freely re-use images of others simply because they are accessible via the Google Research Tool. Generally, It is not a good idea to re-use other people images without appropriate authorization from the author.

Scissorsfly is a great new web app which allows you to "photograph" any screen or part of it and to collect and organize these pictures into Pinterest-like boards.

The capture functionality allows you to not just to pick images available on a web page as you would do with Pinterest but it allows you to clip any part of a web page or a full visible screen as you may see fit.

Differently than on Pinterest, the collected items can be easily arranged, positioned and resized on the board.

Scissorsfly provides a Chrome browser extension (Firefox and Safari coming soon) that once clicked provides a small toolbar with all of the key commands available.

Free to use.

Excellent capture and collect tool, provides lots of the original functionalities available in the now defunct Clipboard.com. Unfortunately there is no ability to capture a full web page, from top to bottom, but outside of this, I really found Scissorsfly to be an excellent tool for capturing and curating ay type of content available online.  

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

Chrome app store: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/scissorsfly/hjhmkhdbecgcmhohojlcjddicnbgahcp/details 

Archive.is is a free web service which allows you to capture, store and archive permanently any web page you submit. 

Archive.is permanently stores a double copy of your selected web site: one that is an image snapshot of the page, and another which contains the full text of it. Archive.is also provides a download link that contains a zipped copy of all the files making up your selected page, and which can be opened offline in any web browser. 

Archive.is can save most any type of web page including Facebook pages and it allows you to easily search and see all of the pages already saved for a certain domain.

There is no registration or login required and you don't need to install anything. 

A free dedicated bookmarklet makes it easy to capture and archive any web page you happen to be on.

If you are looking for a free, simple and easy to use service to archive any web page permanently, I recommend Archive.is.

Free to use.

Try it out now: http://archive.is/ 

Useful info on blog page: http://blog.archive.is/   

Added to Permanent Web Page Archiving Tools section of the Content Curation Tools Directory

Gibbon is a new web app which makes it extremely easy to create beautiful-to-look-at learning playlists by simply adding specific article or video links to your custom-made content compilation. 

Gibbon actually goes the extra mile by grabbing the full content from each original source you curate, by integrating it into your learning playlist, and by stripping out of any design distractions it may have been accompanied by. 

Learning playlists can be easily edited, arranged and shared with others. 

Gibbon offers a wonderful and elegant design, providing a clutter-free, elegant and very effective way to present and organize content lists.

Furthermore Gibbon adds a few specific touches that make this curation tool particularly fit for learning a topic, by providing reading time estimates for each link in a list, striking out titles of completed readings, highlighting with simple icons the type of content showcased (articles, video, etc.), and creating a focused and distraction-free reading environment.

My comment: Gibbon looks very promising to me, as it attempts not to be another generic curation tool but addresses a very specific need and application while providing a very well designed and usable tool.

Notwithstanding the beauty and simplicity of the UI I felt the need for an integrated search tool that would facilitate me in grabbing those content items I wanted to add into a learning playlist. 

I also had several problems in trying to add new content to my test playlist. New URLs would "time out" easily while being fetched and all of the content added via the bookmarklet or the Google extension didn't show up in my collection.

A very promising tool to effectively curate content learning playlists.

Free to use.

Try it out now: https://gibbon.co/ 

Added to the Curation for Learning Tools section of the Content Curation Tools Supermap.