Content Curation World

Echostudio is a powerful new web app which allows you to aggregate, filter and combine social signals, streams, images, statistical and map data on any topic or tag you specify and to publish them online.

The new web app is particularly powerful in its ability to let you collect and mashup into one web page different kind of data and sources according to your needs without sacrificing ease of use and design elegance.

Several filtering and moderation options provide the curator with all of the tools needed to precisely control the quantity and quality of content being published.

The service generates beautiful dynamic pages, which are fully responsive and that can be published online or embedded inside your own website. 

Echostudio is an ideal solution for a number of different applications including:

• real-time live coverage of an event
• branded social hub
• information hub on a specific topic 
• social news aggregator

I have been impressed by Echostudio powerful backend, ease of use, and beautiful output as well as by swiss-watch precision with which you can control almost anything in it. 

Kudos to Chris Saad and his team for having given birth to a such a wonderful discovery, curation and social publishing tool. 

Free plan available. 

Try it out now: http://www.echostudio.co/ 

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Video tutorials: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wffg745EhsY 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ih_UG03j4z4 

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCENi0CamnugWhSiVrBfmqw 

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Examples: 

http://echo-official.echostudio.co/projects/#!4zkmrn5wfx 

http://echo-official.echostudio.co/projects/#!zmaggn6ra5 

http://echo-official.echostudio.co/projects/#!snbrdmd181 

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Vyer Films is a unique online film subscription service which scouts, curates and streams unique, rare author films, impossible to get to outside of international film festivals.

Vyer unique talent is in creating context around each new feature film it decides to showcase by providing interviews, collateral material and other stuff that can help the viewer get a deeper and broader understanding of what the film and its authors are about. 

Josh Johnson, a filmmaker, head of acquisitions at Vyer, doesn't go to festivals but leverages the immense quantity of information already available online to find new interesting films to feature. 

For just $20 per month, you gain access to Vyer Films' entire catalogue, along with each new release, and every feature. Should you choose to unsubscribe, you will still be able to watch any film released over the course of your subscription.

A great, time-saving quality resource for non-commercial film lovers looking not to waste their time browsing a huge catalogue of titles but to find someone who can help them discover and appreciate new film gems. 

Find out more about it: http://www.vyerfilms.com/ 

Check this interview with found KC McLeod by NoFilmSchool: http://nofilmschool.com/2014/08/vyer-films-gives-glimpse-future-curation-indies/ 

Sign-up: http://www.vyerfilms.com/sign-up.php 

Catalogue: http://www.vyerfilms.com/catalogue.php 

HackDesign is a great example of content curation at work. The team of design curators behind this site, targeted at people interested in digital/web design, has curated the very best articles into a series of lessons and the top tools into a well-categorized toolkit.

Each lesson is per se a collection of annotated pointers to existing quality articles on the topic, and the tools are individually reviewed and organized across different application areas.

The official intro: "We've asked some of the world's best designers to help us curate the best and most useful blogs, books, games, videos, and tutorials that helped them learn critical elements of design. We're organizing them all into a digestible and iterative lesson plan so you can apply this knowledge to your own projects."

A model for anyone interested in creating a learning hub on any topic by curating the best content already available online.

Must-see. 9/10

Free to use.

Check it out now: https://hackdesign.org/ 

The curators: https://hackdesign.org/curators 

Blinkist offers non-fictions book summaries that allow you to get key insights from any book in less than 15 minutes. 
 

"Blinks are powerful bites of insight from outstanding nonfiction. You can read a blink in less than two minutes..."

Each book summary is made up of about eight blinks. These

are intended as a beginning of a self-driven path toward learning, rather than a replacement for reading full books.

Blinks are all manually handwritten and can be easily accessed and read on any type of device and screen size. 

A great example of how skilled curation of existing content can not only provide a useful and in-demand service, but make it sustainable too.

Free 3-day trial available here: https://www.blinkist.com/en/signup/ 

Find out more: https://www.blinkist.com/en/ 

iOS app: http://www.blinkist.com/applink/ 

Justin Fowler, co-founder of AudioPress, offers valuable insight into what the future of search and curation may be, by providing a relevant and sound pattern to look at: music.

He writes on TheNextWeb:

"Context is key for music, and that is where services like Songza and Beats Music are picking up tips from FM radio. These services are essentially using algorithms to help people discover new playlists, instead of discovering new songs. This allows for a marriage of both technology and human curation."

Accordingly, as time goes by, I expect to see search engines increasingly highlight and direct searchers to quality curators, hubs and on-topic collections and specialized resources, rather than to individual, one-topic-only pages.

Search engines will increasingly be gateways to curators and content collections rather than to individual tracks and pages.

This will be particularly true especially when you will query a topic, a theme or interest, or better yet, a musical genre.

In all of these situations, where you want to dive, discover and learn more about a topic, it is much better to be offered a selection of playlists, compilations, collections or hubs covering that theme rather than a specific song, product or artist.

That is, search and discoverability of content will rely more and more on intermediaries that will take on the load to make sense and organize in the best possible way, a specific realm of information (it can be a music genre, or the analysis of a biological topic) rather than  - as it happens today - provide a linear list of individual web pages that is supposed to cover that topic.

If the music industry, is, like other times before, an early indicator of how things will work out in the future, it makes a lot of sense to expect that the future of content discovery and search will be increasingly in the hands of curators, greatly helped and supported by sophisticated, but hackable and adjustable algorithms.

What do you think?

Rightful. Indicative of things to come. 8/10

Full article: http://trove.com/me/content/Cc1qT

Reading time: 4':20"

Martin Smith, Chief Revenue Officer at Noodle, has written an interesting article highlighting how the future of universities is about to be completely transformed, and how, similarly to what is happening in the music industry, curators, or those organization acting in such role, will play a dramatically important role in the future of higher education.

Key factors that will make this a reality are:

• The price of content will freefall over the next seven years.
  
  
• The supply of learning content will swell.
  
  
• Education will increasingly be personalized.
   

"Universities will be masters of curation, working as talent agencies. They’ll draw royalties and license fees from the content professors create and curate.

In many ways, the role of the best universities will become even more focused on identifying, investing in, and harvesting the returns from great talent."

Insightful. Right-on-the-mark. Must-read. 9/10

Full article: http://qz.com/223771/universities-are-the-record-labels-of-education/ 

See also: http://www.masternewmedia.org/curation-for-education-and-learning/ 

Pawan Deshpande of Curata offers a very good guide for content marketers fascinated by content curation opportunities but doubtful about the risks deriving from duplicating existing content or copying excerpts or titles from published articles.

The article provides good advice relative to SEO, general approach and strategy, managing Google search and G+ and titling by outlining the major DOs and DON'Ts of content curation for marketing.

Key recommendations to avoid problems include:

• No reposting of full text articles
• Curate from a varied pool of sources
• Don't re-use full size images
• Using no-follow tags
• Using sub-domains

 In the author own words: "Annotate curated content with your own insights, change titles, link to credible articles, publish from a variety of sources and ALWAYS give more than you take when it comes to third-party content."

Good advice for content marketers.  7/10

Full article: https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140702165024-1132213-panda-4-0-has-arrived-but-you-can-still-curate-content-here-s-how 

UsefulScience is a curated collection of useful science info summaries delivered in 5-second bytes.

UScience contains one paragraph long citations or excerpts from research papers, magazine articles or other relevant scientific sources to which it links directly to. 

Useful information  bytes are organized into 12 different categories ranging from creativity to sleep, with fitness, health, education, persuasion and productivity in between.

A great example of content curation at work, it shows in an immediately tangible way, how the time consuming work of gathering, vetting and presenting information in a simple and digestible format can give life to highly valuable information / educational resources.

Well organized, legible, easy to navigate and full of useful gems this is certainly a great inspirational model for how to best use a content curation approach to create high value from existing content and resources.

Free to use.

Try it out now: http://usefulscience.org/ 

More info: http://usefulscience.org/about 

Added to Great Examples of Content Curation at Work Pinterest collection.

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/ 

Guillaume De Cugis, co-founder of Scoop.it, hits the nail right on the head for content marketers with a good article on the Business2Community.com site, where he highlights the declining benefits of social media marketing efforts on Facebook and correctly identifies:

a) quality and
b) engagement

as key content variables that do make a difference in remaining visible online.

He writes: "...if you’re just tweeting links, you’re missing out.

Why?

Because:

• Your content is short-lived (the lifetime of a tweet is in minutes; a few hours at best).
• You have no or limited opportunity to provide context.
• You drive your audience away from you; not to your own site.
• No opportunity to convert.
• No opportunity to show related content.
• No traffic from search.

Read more at http://www.business2community.com/social-media/death-social-media-publishing-know-0920508 

See the slide deck: http://www.slideshare.net/Scoopit/content-is-king-easy-simple-ways-to-curate-relevant-content 

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.

If you need to monitor and track content updates from many different web sources, while being able to manage and easily update such sets of content sources, you may want to look into dynamic OPML reading lists.

In this in-depth article, Marjolein Hoekstra explores, reports and illustrates the power of OPML files and their abilities when paired with specific tools. 

Specifically (though not in this same exact order):

• What are OPML reading lists
• OPML examples on the web
• OPML history and Dave Winer
• FeedShare OPML exchange site
• Limitations of OPML reading lists
• InoReader and dynamic OPML reading lists
• How to create RSS feeds from your own reading lists
• How to generate OPML reading lists from your RSS reader
• OPML tools and resources
• Create a Google custom search engine with an OPML file

The article is a treasure trove of useful information especially for any journalist or researcher in need to continuously and update its news discovery and monitoring abilities. 

N.B.: Organization of the content sections in this article is a bit rough, but if you are not in a rush and dig through it, you can easily make sense of it all-

Informative. Insightful. 8/10

Full article: http://cleverclogs.org/2014/05/rss-reader-inoreader-to-support-dynamic-opml-subscriptions.html

Reading time: 11'

The new Google Bookmark Manager got me impressed. You may call it the Pinterest for Bookmarks or the new Pearltrees

for browser favorites, but notwithstanding your preference this is a true valuable curation tool to take note of.

The new release from Google is not just a great visual bookmarking tool for anyone using the Chrome browser, but it doubles up also as a great content curation publishing tool and under a hood of simplicity it packs lots of great, immediately useful features.

The browser integrated bookmarking manager makes it in fact possible to create visual link collections by adding URLs or by using the associated browser extension while on any site. These can be easily searched, nested, sorted and organized according to your preferences.

Each new bookmark allows you to pick an associated image, is editable in its title, description and URL and can be easily dragged, moved or copied over to different collections.

Bookmark collections from other browsers can be easily imported and a feature auto-generates a set of link collections based on common subjects. In addition, if you are logged into Chrome, your collections are synced across all of your computers. 

To curate and publish link collections, you only need to create a folder inside the Bookmark Manager and when it is ready for prime time, click the Share button to make it a fully public page.

N.B.: The new Bookmark Manager is not yet integrated with the Google Bookmarks service - https://www.google.com/bookmarks/ - keeping, for now, your browser bookmarks and the ones stored in the Google cloud two separate entities.

Excellent. A must have tool. 


Chrome extension:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bookmark-manager/gmlllbghnfkpflemihljekbapjopfjik  

More info: https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95714?hl=en 

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 

Ibrar Bhatt, shares some of the insights he has been been able to discover in his research work for his forthcoming PhD thesis ("A sociomaterial account of assignment writing in Further Education classrooms") for the University of Leeds.

In his short blog analysis he first comprehensively defines the new emerging content curation space, and then he highlights 

the relevance this may have, once it is validated and acknowledged, in allowing students to explore the creation of reports and the development of new work assignments in a new light.

Here a few brief excerpts:

"These processes are, ... about anthologising older content to produce new content and creating a new experience for readers, by giving a new life (or new ‘reality’) to an older text.

This is curation as a digital literacy practice."

"...prolific Web users have often made themselves effective digital curators by searching and locating information, then creating a new experience by re-contextualising it."

"...Digital curation therefore is not just about finding relevant material, although that is a significant part of it, but is also about creating a specific and unique experience by utilising the resulting materials which then become contextualised within a new space.

A curator, therefore, whether she is a journalist-by-proxy such as Popova or a student completing an assignment in a classroom, not only collects and interprets, but also creates a new experience with it. 

In this respect, curation is a process of problem solving, re-assembling, re-creating, and stewardship of other people’s writing."

Insightful. Resourceful. Informative. 8/10

Full article: http://ibrarspace.net/2014/05/21/curation-as-a-digital-literacy-practice/ 

Reading time: 11'

Really Good Emails offers a curated selection of the best email newsletter designs picked, organized and curated by Matthew Smith and his team.

The site presents over 20 thematic sections, from Alerts to Survey and Welcome emails to Email Digest, Newsletter and Promotions. All sections showcase miniatures of the email collected which can be viewed in detail, both as a desktop and mobile screenshots, with just one click.

A valuable and growing design reference for email marketers and designers of all kinds. (A great match for brand sponsor Mailchimp.)

Free to use.

Try it out now: http://reallygoodemails.com/ 

Archives: http://reallygoodemails.com/archive/ 

About/Team: http://reallygoodemails.com/about/ 

Added to Great Examples of Content Curation at Work.

Startupery is a new online resource which organizes and curates best-practices, strategy advice, tips and methods for business startups.

The present library currently comprises over 500 hundred resources organized under 372 topics by 12 selected "experts", which include, among others, Fred Wilson (Vevnture Capitalist), Eric Ries (The Lean Startup), Chris Dixon (Investor) and Brad Feld (Early Stage Investor / Entrepreneur). 

For each expert you will find a page outlining his profile and presenting, in a categorized fashion, a selected number of sources suggested by him.

"For years, and now more than ever, startup founders, investors and operators have been sharing advice on how to succeed in business. From personal blogs to up-and-coming publications, this advice has been scattered and often hard to find when you need it most. Startup{ery is a library for this advice, giving each resource and the important topics that they cover a home on the internet."

An excellent and well-organized resource hub for startups, Simple, easy to navigate and staffed by a highly reputable set of subject-matter-experts / curators.

A great example of the value that content curation can bring to just about any field, where there is lot of precious information scattered around and which can greatly benefit from competent and trusted "organizers". 

Free to use.

Startupery: http://startupery.com/ 

Added to Content Curation Examples board.

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.

Picsho is a free web app which allows you to create embeddable photo galleries from your favorite hashtag pics gathered from Instagram, Flickr, Twitter, Tumblr and other social networks.

Picso which I have reviewed before in 2012, has completely revamped its interface and released a new much simpler and more intuitive new version. 

To use it, you simply enter a hashtag or keyword, you select up to five visual sources (Flickr, Instagram, etc.) and then you wait for your gallery to load up. Once displayed you can manually curate which pictures to keep and which ones to exclude.

Once done, you assign a name and you can save and publish the gallery. If you are logged in, you can also re-edit and update your gallery anytime.

The only limitation, is that you cannot re-arrange or reposition images in a gallery.

For the rest, Picsho is one of the best and easiest tools I have found to rapidly curate a social images based collection and to be able to publish it on any site.

Free to use.  

Try it out now: http://picsho.com/ 

FAQ: http://picsho.com/faq/