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/

The new Storify VIP for Wordpress plugin allows anyone having a Wordpress account to collect stories, images and video clips appearing on social media platforms and to integrate such content into their website news section and within their blog posts.

If you are not familiar with Storify, this is a news curation platform that allows you to easily find and re-post tweets, photos and video clips coming from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and other major social networks.

Key features include:

• Easily embed Storify stories into your site
  
  
• SEO-friendly
  
  
• Formatting optimized for WordPress posts
  
  
• Extensive API to customize the plugin’s functionality

With this new WordPress plugin you can use Storify’s popular drag-and-drop curation tools directly inside your WordPress dashboard and seamlessly post Storify stories on your blog with our plugin.

Without you having to do anything about it, Storify automatically maintains proper display and attribution of original sources, and lets you notify the people whose tweets were included in a story.

Storify stories can now be updated in real-time with new info or changing data and can be utilized for liveblogging events.

To Activate the Storify VIP plugin:
Click Plugins on your WordPress admin dashboard
Activate the Storify plugin

Free to use.

More info: http://vip.wordpress.com/plugins/storify/

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/storify/faq/

Lingospot for WordPress, a collaborative news curation platform that until now was specifically targeted at enterprise customers, has launched a new commercial service which allows anyone to monitor, filter, curate, share and publish news and stories on a number of specific topics at a reasonable cost.

Lingospot works in tandem with Wordpress, by making it easy to find, discover, tag, edit and curate the stories that you want to publish on your own website.

Lingspot allows you to create a number of channels monitoring specific topics, and it provides ready-made bundles of reliable news sources for many of these. You can edit in full the original content title, image and content of any story and assign it to specific categories and tags.

A unique aggregation and categorization feature organizes all incoming stories into three folders dedicated to "News", "Tips" and "Questions and answers" greatly facilitating the curators task. 

A bookmarklet is also available to capture any story from any web page and there can be multiple curators invited to contribute to a specific channel.

From Lingospot you can discover and curate new content and then save it as a draft in Wordpress ready to be published. Lingospot communicates directly via API with your Wordpress site publishing only what you choose to publish when you want so. You can also schedule when a post needs to be published and share any story directly to Twitter.

The "Stand Alone" Lingspot for Wordpress account costs $49/mo and it offers support for one website, up to five content channels, unlimited filters and social sharing. A higher priced option, costs $99 and offers the opportunity to have your fully managed WordPress-based website with no limitations and a number of extra features such as daily backups, customizable themes and more.

14-day free trial available.

Pricing: http://wordpress.lingospot.com/

FAQ: http://edit.lingospot.com/static/docs/questions.pdf

More info: http://corp.lingospot.com/

Sign-up now: http://wordpress.lingospot.com/

Automattic, the company behind WordPress has just released a tool which allows WordPress users to curate real-time news coming from Twitter and YouTube video clips without ever leaving the standard WP posting dashboard.

From TheNextWeb: "Akin to having Storify right in your WordPress platform, users can click on the “Add Media” button while they’re editing a post and see options to insert either a tweet or a YouTube video.

Being able to embed social content like this isn’t new — both Twitter and YouTube have made it possible for a long time, but WordPress is now streamlining it so that you can simply query based on keyword, hashtag, user, or geographic location, and it will populate the relevant content."

My comment: Sign of the times. Soon most publishing tool will integrate curation facilities that allow easy searching and integration of excerpts from articles, videos and other content types into original content. The WordPress Media Explorer confirms this trend while providing thousands of small independent publisher with ready-to-use simple curation facilities.

N.B.: At present the Media Explorer is available only for WordPress.com users, but it will be soon available as a Jetpack also for self-hosted WordPress sites.

Find out more: http://en.support.wordpress.com/media-explorer/ 

If you are interested in what could be a good workflow and set of tools to use to curate content on your own WordPress blog, Nathan Weller has a must-read article for you.

In it, he dissects and explains the tools he uses to curate content on WordPress, from how he aggregates and browses RSS feeds, to how he filters, edits and actually curates the content of each post.

Interestingly his focus is on quality, not on having his site populated by lots of "somewhat relevant" content pulled in automatically by one of the many "content marketing"-oriented curation tools available today.

I think you will find several interesting ideas that you may have not considered on how to approach your curation workflow, let alone checking the several insightful comments at the end.

Lost of valuable information, resources, examples and advice. 8/10

Full article: https://managewp.com/wordpress-content-curation