Content Curation World

PressForward is a free open-source, WordPress plugin for curating most any type of content within the standard WordPress publishing workflow.

PressForward is in fact a full-fledged RSS feed reader and aggregator which can capture content coming from any site while allowing full editing and curation abilities. It is an ideal tool for news curators wanting to have a news gathering and discovery tool integrated into their standard publishing and editing environment.

PressForward is designed to be used by multiple users, like in a distributed newsroom, where several individuals or even a small community suggest and submit and others edit, approve and post selected content.

To gather content PressForward offers a standard bookmarklet to capture any content you find on the web, and can also import OPML files to allow you to aggregate and filter all of your favorite RSS feeds. 

Last but not least, PressForward keeps close tabs on the sources you utilise, by automatically creating attribution links for any content you curate and allowing you to have your posts optionally auto-redirect to the original source. 

Free to use. 

• Download plugin: https://wordpress.org/plugins/pressforward/ 
   
• Tutorials: http://pressforward.org/the-pressforward-plugin/screencasts/ 
   
• FAQ: http://pressforward.org/documentation/faq/ 
   
• User Manual: https://github.com/PressForward/PressForward/wiki 
   
• Who is behind the project: https://github.com/PressForward/PressForward/wiki 
   
• Check also this excellent in depth review of PressFoward: http://opensource.com/life/15/4/how-to-use-pressforward 

A project of Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media

N.B.: Of note the partnership initiative offered to any organisation interested in develop high-quality, collaboratively-sourced and edited publications, which offers up to $10,000 in funding and 

• A dedicated technical support channel;
• Workshop and training support for start-up personnel;
• Consultation for the first year of publication.  
• Deadline is April 30 2015. 
• More info here: http://pressforward.org/become-a-pressforward-partner/ 

Defcomb is a new interesting web app, which while in full development, already offers some valuable features for anyone interested in monitoring and analyzing specific topics.

The app, which is fully free as of now, allows you to: 

1) Add your selected RSS feeds, OPML file or to tap in Defcomb extensive global archive of feeds to determine your content sources. 

2) Determine keyword-based filters by grouping multiple keywords

into sets.

3) Generate a news feed from your selected content sources filtered by anyone of your keyword sets or their combinations.

4) Publish a public RSS feed for each one of your news feeds.

5) Visualise occurrences of your specified set of keywords inside your sources across time

Applications for this tool may include personalised news and content discovery, topic tracking, text mining and data-visualisation.

N.B.: For novices, watch out. This tool is not difficult to use, but it may not so intuitive the first time around. Best thing to do to avoid wasting any time is to watch the short screencast video available on the home page (is video-only, no audio) and to read this short tutorial: 
http://defcomb.tumblr.com/post/101673641978/introducing-the-defcomb-news-reader  

Great potential. Already useful. 8/10

Free to use.

Update: Due to the high number of requests free signups have been temporarily closed.
** To get an account send an email to peter@defcomb.com with subject: "Interested in trying Defcomb - Recommended by Robin Good"

Try it out now: http://defcomb.com 

Example of filtered news stream: http://www.defcomb.com/public/scenarios/415 

I have included Defcomb in my T5 tools directory:
http://tools.robingood.com and in the experts tools for journalists here: http://experts.journalism.io

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

Twitter has just announced the availability of a new feature that will be gradually rolled out to all Twitter users and which allows you to create custom curated Twitter channels on any topic you want.

But you need not wait.

To start using immediately Twitter Timelines what you need to do is to head over to https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/ and to register yourself for the free web app owned by Twitter.

Once you are logged in, all you need to do is to click on the leftmost vertical icon-bar on the + sign, and then to select Create Custom Timelines from the ensuing dialog box. 

Once you have created a Custom Timeline all you need to do to populate it is to manually drag tweets from your others news/tweets gathering columns into it.

Once created in Tweetdeck any Custom Timeline is immediately visible inside Twitter at a dedicated URL and can be easily shared or embedded inside any site or blog.

My comments: The Twitter Custom Timelines feature opens up a universe of possibilities for curated news channels, and other highly specialized thematic channels. Finally there is the opportunity not to have to consume stories and news that are completely irrelevant to your interests simply because they come from someone you follow. By following highly specific custom timelines it is now possible to consume only the type of content you are truly interested into from your favorite trusted curators.

Free to use.

Try it out now: https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/ 

Check also: https://blog.twitter.com/2013/custom-timelines-in-tweetdeck 

If you are looking for some good inspiring examples of how content and news curation can be put to good use, Bob Geller has published this past spring a useful article reviewing five different content curation approaches 

that are very successful.

The five sites reviewed in this article "have all been tremendously successful in leveraging third party content, optimizing it, adding value, and building audience. They range from the famous to the obscure. There are some common threads, yet each has a different formula."

Noowit is a new curation and publishing platform that allows you to do on the web something very similar to what Flipboard allows you to do with your smartphone or tablet. You can curate a beautiful-looking web magazine, by selecting content from its internal news discovery engine or by clipping any content you find on the web with the dedicated NOOWIT bookmarklet.

On the backend you can select individual topics, authors and specific sources you want to subscribe to, to keep yourself informed. You can provide specific RSS feeds or import your collection of RSS subscriptions.

You can create multiple content sections inside a magazine and when you add new content you can easily decide in which section it is going to end up.

A swift navigation scheme provides almost seamless integration between the excerpted content that appears in the magazine and the full, original resource that you can navigate to without losing touch with the rest of the magazine.

NOOWIT magazines can be set to be public or private and they can be viewed across devices and screen of all sizes.

Like on Flipboard it is not possible to edit, modify or add to content that you pick and select to be added to your magazines.

My comment: NOOWIT easily creates great-looking digital magazines of your selected articles and resources. It is a great tool for anyone wanting to create easily a "splashy" curated digital magazine that looks great across devices with the minimum effort possible.

Private beta: http://www.noowit.com/

Preview: http://www.noowit.com/pbeta

Example I created: http://www.noowit.com/RobinGood

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/

ExpressCurate is a free WordPress plugin which allows you to capture any content you find online, and to edit and curate it directly inside WordPress.

Key features include:
 

• Grab and load any URL content
   
• Provides editable title, image and content areas
   
• Pre-loads multiple key content chunks from original content and meta-data and makes them ready for insertion
  
  
• Offers SEO dedicated fields 
   
• Auto-suggests relevant tags
   
• Can add annotation and text boxes into curated posts
   
• Auto-link to original and personalized attribution text

ExpressCurate also provides:

- a Chrome extension to easily capture and curate content as you browse, which provides an editing interface similar to what Scoop.it provides with his bookmarklet. The extension also adds a cool "curate" link to your Twitter interface which allows you to curate also any content on the 140 character platform. See this screenshot: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/spa/782adzfe036gp2y/vklvggma.png 

- a free WordPress theme for curated news and magazines sites.

A good and easy-to-use content curation tool for anyone using WordPress. Excellent free solution for authors and journalists who only need an easy and effective solution to start curating without needing to learn or adopt a new platform.

Free to use.

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

FAQ: http://news.expresscurate.com/category/faq/ 

Here's a refreshing look at the future of news that highlights the importance of going deeper into creating value for readers by providing more focus, relevance, context and opinion.

These are the characters that properly define what we now refer to as "curation" when it comes to content and news.

The following passages, extracted from the book, The News: A User's Manual, are by Alain de Botton, and have been excerpted from a lengthy article on The Week entitled "The Future of News".

"News organizations are coy about admitting that what they present us with each day are minuscule extracts of narratives whose true shape and logic can generally only emerge from a perspective of months or even years — and that it would hence often be wiser to hear the story in chapters rather than snatched sentences.

They [news organizations] are institutionally committed to implying that it is inevitably better to have a shaky and partial grasp of a subject this minute than to wait for a more secure and comprehensive understanding somewhere down the line.

...

We need news organizations to help our curiosity by signaling how their stories fit into the larger themes on which a sincere capacity for interest depends.

To grow interested in any piece of information, we need somewhere to "put" it, which means some way of connecting it to an issue we already know how to care about.

A section of the human brain might be pictured as a library in which information is shelved under certain fundamental categories. Most of what we hear about day to day easily signals where in the stacks it should go and gets immediately and unconsciously filed.

... the stranger or the smaller stories become, the harder the shelving process grows. What we colloquially call "feeling bored" is just the mind, acting out of a self-preserving reflex, ejecting information it has despaired of knowing where to place.

...We might need help in transporting such orphaned pieces of information to the stacks that would most appropriately reveal their logic.

...it is news organizations to take on some of this librarian's work. It is for them to give us a sense of the larger headings under which minor incidents belong."

The call for understanding how much greater value can be provided by curating news and information in depth, rather than by following the shallow, buzzy and viral path beaten by HuffPo, Buzzfeed and the rest of the gang, is clear.

But beyond context and depth, real value can only be added if we accept the fact that going beyond the classic "objective fact reporting", by adding opinion and bias in a transparent fashion, can actually provide greater value in many ways, as Alain de Botton clearly explains:

"Unfortunately for our levels of engagement, there is a prejudice at large within many news organizations that the most prestigious aspect of journalism is the dispassionate and neutral presentation of "facts."

...

The problem with facts is that there is nowadays no shortage of sound examples. The issue is not that we need more of them, but that we don't know what to do with the ones we have...

...But what do these things actually mean? How are they related to the central questions of political life? What can they help us to understand?

...The opposite of facts is bias. In serious journalistic quarters, bias has a very bad name. It is synonymous with malevolent agendas, lies, and authoritarian attempts to deny audiences the freedom to make up their own minds.

Yet we should perhaps be more generous toward bias.

In its pure form, a bias simply indicates a method of evaluating events that is guided by a coherent underlying thesis about human functioning and flourishing.

It is a pair of lenses that slide over reality and aim to bring it more clearly into focus.

Bias strives to explain what events mean and introduces a scale of values by which to judge ideas and events. It seems excessive to try to escape from bias per se; the task is rather to find ways to alight on its more reliable and fruitful examples. 

There are countless worthy lenses to slide between ourselves and the world." 

Overall, these ideas offer a truly refreshing look at the future of news and at the relevance that context and opinion could play in transforming this medium from a vehicle of mass distraction to one of focused learning and understanding for those interested. 

Must read. Rightful. Insightful. 9/10

Full article: http://theweek.com/article/index/256737/the-future-of-news 

Reading time: 10':20"

It's the second time that I go back to this insightful article by Jonathan Stray, dating back to 2011, but which was visionary and rightful then as it is still now. The first time I did, right after it came out, I didn't actually realize in full how relevant and important was the idea being communicated through it.

On the surface the article talks about an hypotethical Editorial Search Engine as a desirable news app. But if you look just beyond the surface, which is by itself fascinating, in essence, Mr. Stray indicates how useful and effective it would be if news publishers moved on from reporting and into 100% curated coverage of a certain topic, issue or story, opening a fascinating discovery gateway around each story and allowing in time for these streams to intersect and interconnect with each other.

By doing this, we can not only make the news much more interesting and relevant, but we can transform them into instruments for in-depth learning about anything we are interested in.

In this light the future of news could be very much about Comprehensively Informing an Audience on a Specific Topic. And if you stop enough time to re-read it and think about it, this is a pretty powerful and revolutionary concept by itself.

He specifically writes: "Rather than (always, only) writing stories, we should be trying to solve the problem of comprehensively informing the user on a particular topic."

"Choose a topic and start with traditional reporting, content creation, in-house explainers and multimedia stories. Then integrate a story-specific search engine that gathers together absolutely everything else that can be gathered on that topic, and applies whatever niche filtering, social curation, visualization, interaction and communication techniques are most appropriate."

Jonathan Stray makes also a very inspiring connection to Jay Rosen of NYU and his idea of covering 100% of a story which in my view correctly anticipated the niche content curation trend while going beyond it in its effort to explore gateways to innovation. 

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Insightful. Visionary. Inspiring. 9/10

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Flipboard, as you probably already know, is a great app (available on iOS and Android) which not only allows you to read and keep yourself updated on your favorite topics in a fresh and highly visual experience, but, since recently, it also offers you the ability to become a "curator" of whatever topic you are into.

Your job is simply to pick great stuff you stumble upon and to save it into the appropriate magazine you have created. It's not conceptually much different than clicking a Facebook "like" button and adding your comment, but we the added option of generating in the meanwhile a beautifully laid out digital magazine.

The secret here, to do something that it is of some value, it is to choose on a very specific "theme/topic" and to get picky about what you choose to publish in your magazine(s).

In this useful article Sue Waters collects and curates some of the best tips, video tutorials and techniques to make the best of your Flipboard curation experience in a step-by-step guide.

Useful. Resourceful. Media-rich. 8/10

Full guide: http://theedublogger.com/2013/06/12/flipboard/

Why do you curate content? Are you doing it because you didn't know anymore what to write about or are you doing it because it feels like you can save a lot of time by curating instead of writing?

What drives your desire to republish, mention or introduce other people's content? The ever-growing need for fresh content? The desire to become more visible on seach engines thanks to more content and on-target use of relevant keywords?

What is it really that makes you curate?

Cendrine Marrouat has a short but stimulating article, where she invites you to do just that. Stop and think why curation is something that you value so much?

I don't know what your reasons may be, but I have decided to stop and list at least my five top reasons for curating content as I do.

You can read them in the comments of Cendrine stimulating article, right here: http://www.creativeramblings.com/reasons-content-curator/

Stimulating. Valuable questioning and modelling. 7/10

(Image credit: Thinking man - Shutterstock)