![Curating Information and Data Sense-Making Is The Key Skill for the Future [Research] | Content Curation World | Scoop.it](http://img.scoop.it/KrkxRVnH-00QDsqHCUKTTTl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVaiQDB_Rd1H6kmuBWtceBJ)
Robin Good: The Institute for the Future and the University of Phoenix have teamed up to produce, this past spring, an interesting report entitled Future Work Skills 2020.
By looking at the set of emerging skills that this research identifies as vital for future workers, I can't avoid but recognize the very skillset needed by any professional curator or newsmaster.
It should only come as a limited surprise to realize that in an information economy, the most valuable skills are those that can harness that primary resource, "information", in new, and immediately useful ways.
And being the nature of information like water, which can adapt and flow depending on context, the task of the curator is one of seeing beyond the water,
to the unique rare fish swimming through it.
The curator's key talent being the one of recognizing that depending on who you are fishing for, the kind of fish you and other curators could see within the same water pool, may be very different.
Here the skills that information-fishermen of the future will need the most:
1) Sense-making:
ability to determine the deeper meaning or significance of what is being expressed
2) Social intelligence:
ability to connect to others in a deep and direct way, to sense and stimulate reactions and desired interactions
3) Novel and adaptive thinking:
proficiency at thinking and coming up with solutions and responses beyond that which is rote or rule-based
4) Cross-cultural competency:
ability to operate in different cultural settings
5) Computational thinking:
ability to translate vast amounts of data into abstract concepts and to understand data-based reasoning
6) New media literacy:
ability to critically assess and develop content that uses new media forms, and to leverage these media for persuasive communication
7) Transdisciplinarity:
literacy in and ability to understand concepts across multiple disciplines
8) Design mindset:
ability to represent and develop tasks and work processes for desired outcomes
9) Cognitive load management:
ability to discriminate and filter information for importance, and to understand how to maximize cognitive functioning using a variety of tools and techniques
10) Virtual collaboration:
ability to work productively, drive engagement, and demonstrate presence as a member of a virtual team
Critical to understand the future ahead. 9/10
Executive Summary of the Report: https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapolloresearchinstitute.com%2Fsites%2Fdefault%2Ffiles%2Ffuture-work-skills-executive-summary.pdf
Download a PDF copy of Future Work Skills 2020: https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapolloresearchinstitute.com%2Fsites%2Fdefault%2Ffiles%2Ffuture-skills-2020-research-report.pdf
Content Curation World
Robin Good: Here's a great visualization of how different can be the traits of content re-use. In the left column you can see what would appear to be the ideal traits of a professional curator, while on the right you can immediately recognize the ones of scrapers, republishers, cheap aggregators and other "thin" publishers as Google would call them. I think it can serve as an excellent reference, when in doubt about whether you are still doing the right thing or not, when it comes to re-using and republishing other people content. The table is part of an excellent presentation entitled "Link Building by Imitation" and authored by link building expert Ross Hudgens. Heiko Idensen reports in his curated newsradar "Online Curating & Social Learning Tools and Applications": "Learnist is a new pinboard where users can organize their learning materials. It resembles Pinterest except that Learnist is just for sharing learning resources. The website is still in beta but looks really very promising for both teachers and students. Here is a set of the main features that Learnist offers to its users :
Free to use. Try it out: http://learni.st 
Excerpted from the original article on GigaOM: "Qwiki, the start-up known for creating automated multimedia presentations, is launching a new media format that allows publishers, bloggers, web personalities and others to create 60-second video stories that are embedded with other videos, images, maps and links.
It’s like an interactive video slideshow that lets users click on other content throughout a narrated story, so they can choose how deep they want to experience the content.
The service goes into private testing today with some early users and is expected to open to the public in a couple of weeks.
Users can put together a Qwiki by arranging images, videos and maps and other content into six frames.
Each frame can be further edited with a caption and embedded with more images, Tweets, maps and links taken from sources such as YouTube, Flickr, Google Maps and other sources including their personal content.
When the media content is laid down, a user records a 60-second narration for the story with the option of appearing in a small window throughout the Qwiki. The creator decides when to advance each frame.
Imbruce, Founder and CEO, said: "...there are many more features to be added that could make Qwiki even more attractive to its creators and users.
Right now, creators can only tell a 60-second story. But with the ability to add more content, it could really be the starting point for a bigger story. I think over time, Qwiki might be better served by allowing people the option to make videos a little longer.
New online tools, such as Pinterest, are already showing us that self-expression and curation are now very popular. I think it’s logical that a simple tool for mixing video, images and online content could also attract an audience..."
Read the full article:
Check out it: http://www.qwiki.com Via Giuseppe Mauriello Robin Good: I feel that curated selections of "apps" by a trusted source is definitely an area where people will be willing to pay to get good advice while saving time and money to choose what tools to use on their new iPad.
The new interesting aspect is that the availability of different apps and software has increased so much that the ability for someone to provide reliable advice and selection of what is really useful and effective becomes by itself a valuable and monetizable service.
"AppStart is the first app to download on your iPad: An app starter kit with all the essential apps you'll ever need.
Find out more: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/appstart-for-ipad-2012-edition/id408984648?mt=8 Via Ana Cristina Pratas 
Robin Good: Steve Buttry has published a good article on his blog providing very specific suggestions and tips to those needing to aggregate, republish and curate news content for their organization. Key topics covered: -> Linking -> Attributing -> Attribution checks -> Adding value -> Original reporting -> Data analysis -> Commentary -> Filtering -> Supplementing -> Adding related stories -> Rounding up Valuable advice. 8/10 Full article: http://stevebuttry.wordpress.com/2012/05/16/aggregation-guidelines-link-attribute-add-value/ 
Robin Good: Curate.me is a customizable personal news briefing service that allows you to define up to ten specific interests/topics you want to monitor, and to schedule which days and what time your news brief is to be delivered. The generated custom news brief are delivered to you via email (each email includes 10-12 links from the topics you've selected) and can be read also in your preferred browser or iPhone. For each one of the up to ten topics selected you can specify the degree of importance to you. As a user you can create as many custom news briefs as you like, each one with a specific set of topics and delivery schedule.
Try it out now: http://curate.me/ 
Robin Good: As the gathering and discovery of news and stories leverages increasingly the adoption of technology tools that scan, search, find and monitor specific topics or geolocations in real-time, it seems only natural that a new breed of real-time photo/image search engines are beginning to appear. From the article intro: "Thanks to services like Twitter and Instagram, and the global 'smartphone saturation' phenomenon, live reporting from big events has never been easier. No longer do we have to rely on professionals delivering content and images from these events, we have our extended social networks doing this for us. And, because so many of these updates get fired into the 'public' timeline, virtually any update from anywhere can be found and shared in a matter of seconds. ... With the London Olympics on our doorstep, expect to see 'real-time photo curation' explode into popularity and we've got some tools to help you be at the forefront of this revolution." Useful. Resorceful. 8/10 Full article: http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/1CJlJN/www.commscorner.com/2012/05/tick-tock-10-real-time-photo-search.html 
Robin Good: This article (no author name) on Curata raises a very important questions for those responsible to select and publish content for a medium to large organization. The issue is: do you address all of the possible customer tribes, in additional to existing and potential clients, or do you curate and select content for a specific tribe? While the article overall answer acknowledges that only big brands have the power to do so and that it is more than OK not to specialize too much, my feeling is that it will be impossible for those companies who will not be able to curate content that is highly specific to their unique relevant tribes, to compete with those that will do so. Given the size and present communication strategy of many large companies, this is not something that will happen overnight, but in my view it is certain that companies which are not able to "curate" and communicate on th exact wavelength of their customers will have an increasingly hard and competitive future ahead, even when pitched against much smaller competitors. 
Robin Good: Keemix is a web publishing service which allows anyone to create their own web magazine by easily capturing and editing content already available on the web. You can create multiple channels/topics covering different topics/interests, share items on social networks and have a personalized Keemix web site with your custom look. From the official site: "Keemix allows you to gather loved content from the web, mix it into your own custom-designed pages, and share it to inspire your friends and colleagues. Mixes can be private or public, and administrated individually or collaboratively.
A bookmarklet makes it easy to grab any site, article, video, image or text you may run into on the web. (Thanks to Giuseppe Mauriello for discovering this) 
Robin Good: the Content Strategy Generator Tool (CSGT) by Daniel Butler of SEOgadget is a Google Docs-based spreadsheet that allows you to input a specificic keyword or search-phrase and to find rapidli trending news articles from a number of relevant sources. These include:
"That’s not all, though—the Source and Place tab will tell you how to find the top Twitter experts, bloggers, and editors in your niche. Use this to figure out who you can follow—and start new relationships with." Highly recommended. useful. 8/10 Review from ProBlogger: http://www.problogger.net/archives/2012/05/12/the-must-have-blog-post-topic-generation-tool/ https://seogadget.co.uk/using-google-docs-to-generate-hot-content-strategies/ CSGT Tool: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Aj4U6wmYE1X6dDB5S1lDUXFzaTUxME5IRmJqZ2ozZGc (Thanks to Alessandro Murra for discovering it) 
Robin Good: If you are just about to start testing how effective a content curation tool like Scoop.it can be for building your own reputation and visibility in a specific interest area, this 10-step guide by Shirley Williams does provide some important information on how to start with the proper foot.
The guide is illustrated with many screenshots and it pinpoints the key items you need to be paying attention to when starting to curate a dedicated channel.
Informative. Useful for novices. 7/10
Full mini-guide: http://socialmediapearls.com/10-steps-to-curate-your-social-media-content-with-scoop-it-for-increased-value Via Shirley Williams (XeeMe.com/ShirleyWilliams) Useful presentation from Shel Holz that shows actual examples of curation for internal communications.
Needless to say, there is a ton of useful, practical information in this presentation. It is an hour long ( including Q&A) but it's definitely worth it.
Original video: http://vimeo.com/30168580 ;
Via Alison Harrison 
Excerpted from the Marketwire article review:
"GageIn, the first stop for all enterprise data on the Web, launched News Portals today. Professionals can now publish curated business content, on an on-going basis, to share insightful information about their marketplace, customers, and competitors, leading to improved business performance.
GageIn brings curation to the enterprise, allowing internal teams, marketers, and other professionals to utilize it for business purposes," said Dr. Luosheng Peng, CEO of GageIn.
Who can use News Portals?
- Marketers: Curate stories about your industry, market trends, and educational articles for your audience
- Corporate Communication/Competitive Intelligence Professionals: Curate stories about your top competitors, clients, and industry for managers and co-workers
- Sales: Curate stories about clients and prospects for your selling team
Users can create their personal Portals by saving and tagging any content they find on GageIn.
Portals can be shared internally with coworkers and teams, or with outside networks on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Per GageIn's integration with Salesforce Chatter and Yammer, users will also be able to share Portals with teams on those platforms as well...."
Tutorial - How to create a News Portal: http://www.gagein.com/blog/2012/04/tutorial-how-to-create-a-news-portal/
Read the full review by Marketwire: http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/gagein-launches-business-content-curation-for-professionals-1652155.htm
Try it out now: http://www.gagein.com/publisher
Via Giuseppe Mauriello |
Robin Good: Readlists is a simple web app which allows you to easily create curated lists of web resources, articles and links and bundle them to a downloadable eBook. To create a "Readlist" you simply click on the Create a Readlist button and add one url at a time. The system gently grabs metadata info like title and author and elegatly lays it out in an ebook formatted reading index ready to be published. The service is free to use. Try it out now: http://readlists.com/ Robin Good: Sgarf.it is a simple clipping and archiving app which allows you to clip any text or image you find on the web and to archive it, tag it and easily share it on your favorite social networks. Sgarf.it works as a Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer extension which works invisibly in the background. Once you find something interesting on any web page you need only to select it as you have always done it, and by right-clicking on your selection you will be offered to "sgarf" your clipping. Once clipped any content can be easily tagged and shared on your preferred social networks. Free to use. FAQ: http://www.sgarf.it/sgarf/support Find out more: http://www.sgarf.it/ Robin Good: StyleBook is a fashion and glamour curation platform allowing you to easily create rich illustrated stylebooks. StyleBook looks on the surface like most other visual boards, allowing you to easily follow other users, and to select and repin images to your stylebooks. From Techcrunch: "To use StyleSaint in its current form, log in with Facebook or Twitter and create an account, once logged on, you can choose from over 55K “tear sheet” images from which to create your own Stylebook, once you’ve got more than ten tear sheets loaded, you can hit the “Create Stylebooks” link in the top right and StyleSaint will automatically import, then publish, the last ten sheets you’ve torn. Alternatively you can drag-and-drop the tears to create a custom stylebook. Click on “Create” to publish to the site.
In addition the resulting books are Facebookable, tweetable and embeddable, the embeddable stylebooks function as an overlay on embedded sites, preventing traffic re-direction.
The most compelling thing about StyleSaint is that co-founders Brian Garrett and Allison Beal eventually want to use the collective data from the style booking activity to come up with its own line of clothing. “StyleSaint is the only company editorializing the phenomenon of image discovery and curation and combining it with a manufacturing, vertical eTailer ecommerce model...” (Source: http://j.mp/Mj5m1o) Free to use. About: http://www.stylesaint.com/about Try it out now: http://www.stylesaint.com 
Robin Good: Kapsul is a web-based platform for the collaborative creation and editing of contemporary art images, and other art-oriented, visual artworks. Kapsul allows you to easily add any image, text, PDF, video or artist information to any Kapsul, either manually or via a dedicated bookmarklet. From the official site: "Kapsul is a platform for collaboratively creating collections of images, videos, and texts online. Kapsul aims to help contemporary art curators, artists, educators, and enthusiasts find, organize, and share elements of visual culture in collaborative units called Kapsuls. Kapsuls can be used for planning exhibitions, organizing research, making presentations, or publishing soft exhibitions online. Kapsul is a project of the Kadist Art Foundation, a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco and Paris..." Kapsul collections can be made "private" or "public". A special "share link" can be used to invite other people who you want to contribute to your collections. Free to use. More info: http://www.kapsul.org/ Robin Good: FlashIssue is a web app which allows you to easily assemble a professional-looking newsletter, by bringing together your best content as well as any article available online. You can search for any topic via an integrated Google Search or provide the URL of a specific web page you want to integrate. N.B.: A Google Chrome plugin also allows you to easily clip and grab any content directly from any web page and easily integrate it inside your curated newsletter. See how it works: http://www.flashissue.com/gmail-newsletters/ Read more about it: http://www.flashissue.com/curated-newsletters-flashissue-launches-for-mailchimp-gmail Chrome plugin: http://www.flashissue.com/gmail-newsletters/ Try it out: http://www.flashissue.com/ 
Robin Good: If your company is looking into how to curate their own news stream while creating extra value for readers, this article can help you out in identifying the process and the key steps to take. From the article intro: "Curating news that the media isn't covering can lead to media coverage. And, by extension, it can improve and expand on stories the media are covering. ... There's plenty of evidence that business is adopting content curation, but the practice hasn't been around long enough for organizations to innovate more targeted, results-focused uses." Here some of the key steps involved: a) Identify Opportunity b) Select Curators c) Monitor Conversations d) Select and Comment e) Announce and Promote Useful. 7/10 
From the official site: "Geofeedia's powerful tools, easy-to-use interface, and patent-pending technology allow you to perform precision location-based searches to monitor social media. Journalists use Geofeedia to quickly find and curate social media from locations where breaking news is happening. Geofeedia delivers a one-of-a-kind, aggregated search experience for user-generated content by using the powerful API’s of Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Flickr, and Picasa. Geofeedia is not endorsed or certified by any of the preceding service providers. Newsrooms and reporters can uncover verified sources for follow-on interviews and find unique photos for use in online properties. ...use Geofeedia to geo-fence your location to see what people are actually saying while on premises.
Businesses use Geofeedia to learn what’s happening in any location by finding tweets and pictures – whether it’s an area as large as a city or small as a building. Curation: Create social media collections to share across your organization. Once you’ve located great social media with Geofeedia, put it in a Geofeedia Collection that can be shared and leveraged by your entire organization and your agency. Integrate social media for use in your own applications with Geofeedia’s advanced API which supports ATOM/RSS, JSON and GeoRSS response formats." Full review on Poynter.org: http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/top-stories/173764/geofeedia-helps-journalists-locate-real-time-photos-tweets-where-news-breaks/ More info: http://geofeedia.com/ 
Excerpted from article: "To learn more about the importance of curation in today’s fashion industry, here are three emerging fashion startups in New York City and Los Angeles.
1) Material Wrld (http://materialwrld.com/) Material Wrld is a New York City fashion startup founded by eager entrepreneurs Jie Zheng and Rie Yano.
“In Manhattan, we all have really small closets so we see this as an option to refresh your wardrobe...”. Material Wrld focuses on fashion bloggers, creative professionals, and style enthusiasts spanning college students, young professionals and new moms. “The ideal Material Wrld user is already showing off their style online through their blog, Instagram, Twitter, and other sites/apps,” says Rie.
2) Of a Kind (http://www.ofakind.com/) This NYC fashion startup has been bringing high-end, exclusive fashion to the masses. Inspired by sites like 20×200, Of a Kind combines storytelling and exclusivity to launch 3 new items in limited editions each week.
When asked how the founders stay abreast of fashion trends, they cites 3 sources: The Business of Fashion newsletter, a daily roundup of everything happening in the fashion space; Uncommon Update, which curates news from the luxury, interactive, and media industries; and the EDITD blog, which pulls together a ton of data from the fashion industry.
3) Closet Rich (http://closetrich.com/) The super cool site Closet Rich features amazing curated vintage finds from the closet rich fortunates in Hollywood. The former fashion PR rep and Zoe Report staffer now goes into her Closet Rich clients’ homes — the majority of which work in the fashion and entertainment space as designers, editors, actresses, etc. — and digs through their racks for re-sellable items like dresses, shoes, bags and more.
“It’s very curated; I don’t want site visitors to have to shuffle through junk or nonsense,” says Elizabeth. “I love really interesting pieces, dresses or jackets with a wow factor but basics also sell really well.” The items that don’t end up on her site are donated to various charities...."
Read the full article here: http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/05/12/crazy-about-curation-5-american-girls-3-fashion-startups/
Via Giuseppe Mauriello 
Robin Good: Piccsy has relaunched its web service and it now provides a visual curation board, allowing you to create your own "galleries" and to populate them with images you upload or find on the web. Piccsy is free to use, and offers like most curation tools a bookmarklet that makes it easy to capture any image from any web site and place it inside anyone of your Piccsy galleries. Individual images or entire galleries can be easily shared on Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr. Try it out: http://piccsy.com/ 
Robin Good: Thanks to Louis Gray who has helped me discover that Google has released a Share Bookmarklet which can be used to capture and post any kind of web content on your Google+ stream. The Google+ Share Bookmarklet captures instantly title, description and images present on any web page while allowing you to select which image to use (or to drop it altogether) and providing a "comment" box. The title and original description cannot be edited. The bookmarklet is free to use. Get it here: https://developers.google.com/+/plugins/share/#sharelink-bookmarklet 
Robin Good: YouTube auto-generated channels are channels that are automatically created by dedicated algorithms to collect trending and popular videos by topic. "Auto generated channels act like user channels in that you can subscribe to them and stay updated on new videos. In addition, auto generated channels provide: -> The ability to subscribe and get regular updates about this topic on YouTube on your feed -> A way to find other channels related to this topic -> More context about this topic from Wikipedia or other sources YouTube algorithmically determines the central topics in a video and then uses that information to develop great collections of videos for any topic of interest. These channels do not convey any editorial opinion. Example: http://www.youtube.com/topic/1ww-xJuh0ew/digital-curation More info: http://support.google.com/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2579942 (Thanks to Alex Briscese for pointing me to this) 
Robin Good: Amit Agarwal of Digital Inspiration has done a wonderful job in bringing together, in one page, all of the syntax queries you need to create an RSS feed for just about anything. Particularly useful are the syntax queries to create "persistent searches" on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, Flickr, Instagram, Picasa, Tumblr where you can easily specify a user, a tag/hastag or specific search terms. Useful. 8/10 |
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |  |
38 |
|
Next |
Hi Robin,
Great information!