Serving “the best of” to a captive audience isn’t exactly new. That’s the goal of most bloggers, for example.
And if you’re sharing links via social media, aren’t you curating? One might also ask, aren’t these sites similar to Seth Godin’s popular Squidoo lenses? I certainly think so. Everything old is new again.
But admittedly, the look and feel is different now. There are many new-ish services competing to offer digital publishers a cooler looking site on which to curate niche news.
The energy is different from Squidoo in terms of reach, design, relevance, and presentation.