Content Curation World

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.

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

Etceter is a new content curation tool which allows you to create and arrange information pages on any topic, by bringing and organizing together web site links, video clips, images and/or original texts.

Any curated information page, containing as many media elements as you need, is called a Pill. You can group and assign different Pills (which are by themselves collections) to broader categories you define and which are called Boxes.

On Pills pages you have the option to organize contents into one, two or three columns and you can easily re-arrange items by simply dragging and dropping them into new positions.

Etceter Pills and individual media items can be easily shared on social media networks and are directly integrated with Facebook comments under each page.

Etceter also provides intelligible SEO-friendly URLs and personal profile pages, all relevant traits of a good curation tool.

My comment: Though Etceter looks still in early development (FAQ and other pages are still in Spanish + the Clipboard import feature does not work yet - no bookmarklet) the features and curation approach offered is interesting. In particular the nesting of media items into Pills and Boxes is quite valuable and the possibility to arrange individual items in any way desired is very useful. Video collections work particularly well as well as multimedia info pages on specific topics.

Free to use.

More info: http://www.etceter.com/en/

Promo video: http://vimeo.com/64688269

Zeef is a new web service which allows you to create top link lists on any topic and to group them into useful resources pages. 

Each Zeef page contains multiple link blocks, which you can edit and customize to cover different set of resources for your selected topic. Not only you can simply add a URL and have it instantly added to a link block, but you can also search Google inline, see all the relevant results, and flag all the relevant ones for instant import into any link block.

Link items can be easily dragged and dropped in different positions, and link blogs can be also be easily repositioned on the page in your preferred order.

Text blocks can also be created, to create information modules in which you provide textual information only.

These link lists can then be shared and embedded on other sites, and have been designed to behave in a fashion similar to Google AdSense ad blocks. More specifically: link block content would be triggered by the page context and link blocks can carry affiliate or commercial links.

Finally, a supercool feature allows you to import any web site site structure into Zeef, and to have it auto-organized into link blocks, which you can further edit and arrange as you wish. Powerful.

My comment: Useful tools need not be very complicated. Zeef is a very simple but extremely useful tool as it leverages true experts in competition among themselves (there can be more than one page and more than expert for any topic) and crowdsourced metrics (what people click on) to provide highly curated selections of the best resources on any possible topic.

Zeef is excellent for:

a) experts wanting to share and showcase their competence in specific sectors while providing a useful service 

b) bloggers wanting to enrich the value of their content by providing contextually relevant top-ten link lists

c) companies / advertisers desiring to leverage this tool to provide a highly effective access map to their best content, offers, info and services. See: http://apple.zeef.com  

d) affiliate marketers and affiliate networks desiring to select categories / lists of links rated by experts and wanting to place them on their pages

I highly recommend using Zeef to rapidly organize the best resources on any topic in an effective, useful fashion.

The only addition I'd make to Zeef, would be an optional description-opinion one-liner that an expert can associate to each link he provides. This short info, even within 144 characters, could provide a lot of additional value to the already useful link blocks.

I sincerely hope that the commercial / revenue-making component of Zeef doesn't corrupt on otherwise very promising tool.

Free to use.

Find out more / try it out now: http://zeef.org/  

FAQ: http://zeef.org/faq/ 

Benefits: http://zeef.org/benefits/

Vision: http://zeef.org/vision/

Review: http://startupbeat.com/2013/09/19/featured-startup-pitch-zeef-id3454/ 

My first Zeef page on Content Curation Tools (in progress): https://contentcuration.zeef.com/robin.good