Power Tools for Content Aggregation and Curation

Maybe you don't have the resources to develop a lot of content, or maybe you're a professional association that wants to serve its members better by being super helpful. Add that there are many more content creators, inside and outside organizations, and you see how curating information as content strategy could be a very elegant option.

Noting the evolution on the World Wide Web quickly to show you a pattern that went in lockstep with use. You had forums and discussion boards, many still very active, Web sites, then journals, which evolved into blogs with RSS (real simple syndication) capability to package and read feeds, social bookmarking and networks, and then media sites to upload and view videos, photographs, etc.

Each set of tools building on the next, thriving when filling a specific need, and evolving or morphing into something else as appropriate. By now, like most people, you have linked to and shared information, photos, videos, quotes, posts, and stories on your Facebook profile wall, Twitter, blog posts, and other social networks.

Real time logs

I suppose I'm quite old fashioned to be still using a blogging platform in a blog format to publish content. Many publications that got a similar start have moved to more of a magazine format based upon blogging tools. Many blogs have moved to more real time publication tools.

Moving away from blogs and into easy-to-use real time publication and bookmarking tools, you now have a couple of solid options.

Tumblr is a re-envisioning of tumblelogging, a subset of blogging that uses quick, mixed-media posts. It hit 1.5 billion page views this past July and counts more than 18 new posts and 5 reblogs every second allows users to publish photos and images as well. Their strength is the bookmarklet. There is little to no learning curve involved in using it. Features are intuitive and quick to establish. Users simply sign up and begin posting in a minute. It's also possible to add DISQUS as a commenting platform.

Here's a complete guide to Tumblr, if you'd like to see what it can do.

Posterous is another tool that allows you to publish and bookmark very quickly. It’s a simple web publishing platform via email. Text and files can be uploaded to the site via email. Users are not required to create an account to use it. It embeds video, MP3s and other media into a player and turns images into image galleries.

Here's a guide to switch to Posterous from dying platforms.

Social magazines

Say all you want to do is collect and aggregate web links from your social circle and display them in a magazine format you can flip through. If you have an iPad, you'd want to use Flipboard. Launched this past July, this free app has already collected accolades.

You can customize it with sections created from your favorite people, lists and blogs on Twitter, and turn digital pages as in a magazine. The result is a very personalized publication with the links to your favorite stories of the day or week to savor in an attractive format.

Cool Hunting took the app for a spin, see what they say.

You probably saw them everywhere on Twitter. paper.li organizes links shared on Twitter into an easy to read newspaper-style format. Newspapers can be created for any Twitter user, list or #tag.

I confess that this one has me scratching my head, especially since I am seeing dozens and dozes being issued every day. What is their utility aside from aggregating links from Twitter under a tag?

Context building

The next iteration for aggregating and publishing are a generation of tools that allow you to build context around the information -- a hybrid of publishing and embedding links from sites to tell a more complete story.

The first one that caught my eye is Storify. It helps you collect the photos, video, Tweets and more and then to publish them as stories or threads that can be embedded anywhere. Say you go to a conference and want to aggregate the tweets, photos, videos in a certain order, this tools allows you to do that.

Is it the future of content creation? Interactivity and functionality exiting in the tweets, content, photos dragged into the stream is preserved. Here's a review from Mathew Ingram of how Storify wants to pull stories from the stream. Finding relevance in the noise is the name of the game.

It looks like start-ups are so resource-starved that they cannot even afford to use correct or full spelling in names. Qrait follows an already rich tradition with its name. It stands for curate, as in content curation, of course.

This is so new that now even Scoble has written about it, yet. According to the site, it's a real time curation platform designed to fulfill the needs of content curators and leverage what you already have. From the video, I gather functionality is similar to that of Storify. It will be interesting to see what the differences are.

So what?

While many of the tools above allow you to filter, organize, and publish content, that alone doesn't pay the bills. We've used email newsletters to convert prospects and cross sell to customers for quite a while now. They are still powerful. Would your content sell?

Many of my readers are involved in B2B organizations, so I thought I would add one tool that might just be what they're looking for -- Curata. According to the site, this is a powerful B2B online marketing and content curation solution that delivers easy content production and distribution for high quality leads and elevated market visibility.

This hosted solution reduces the effort of looking up content manually by using natural language processing that identifies, classifies and tags potential articles, automatically. There is a manual review process before posting. The tool also indexes the content for future reference. You will want to look into the lead data capture reports.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention SmartBrief, which produces high end newsletters and whose service I have used when on the corporate side. In addition to having been a client, I am also on the SmartBrief Social Media Advisory Board.

The service includes working with editors to integrate your content with news content researched for your list and purpose. The service comes with solid lead and intelligence reporting that allows you to adjust your approach from month to month.

Here's a sample newsletter for small business.

All in one

Of course I would be remiss if I didn't mention that the biggest play in the content aggregation and curation space is Facebook. You can use the wall to drive engagement, and social ads to drive people to your content. Custom tabs and apps help with campaigns and programs -- here's a tab for Dos Equis, and an app both developed for Disney's Epcot Center by StepChange, a Powered company (where I work).

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The tools are in the service of the curator, and this is just the beginning of an evolution that will allow you to filter, edit, and publish information to your networks of friends and customers. To that end, what would you like to see as added features that would benefit you? I'd like to see an automatic

[image from world's largest house of cards record]

 

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Comments

[Elizabeth Sosnow]

Thanks for the handy post, Valeria. I have to say, I share your perspective on Paper.li.

A client of mine wanted to do it and I had to ask "why." The answer? "It looks cool."

Not a good enough reason in my book. Why can't folks let content lead the way?

[Brian Driggs]

I'm still very much a forum participant. For every blog I read, I scan two forums. The organization of multiple threaded discussions set the standard for our online discussions today.

Consider the blog. How is it different from a forum beyond scope/depth? There is an original post followed by threaded discussion. Discussion forums are even common on Facebook.

What I would like to see is something like Google Buzz - only more useful. Truly portable content. I write a blog post, I can plug it into any number of platforms like a widget. Consider it a universal API of sorts.

Thanks for giving forums the credit they deserve, Valeria. They are still very viable social environments.

[Oliver Starr]

Valeria, hi. I'm the Chief Evangelist for Pearltrees.com. I read your article on content curation with great interest since Pearltrees is arguably the world's first and potentially most versatile collaborative curation platform.

I think it's important when discussing curation of digital content to discriminate between aggregation and curation as was done in this post: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/foremski/curation-versus-aggregation-represents-human-web-versus-machine-web/1569

And further to discriminate between platforms that curate only a limited source of data and those that simply curate a single stream (such as twitter) from those capable of curating the entire web.

Finally I think it is important to address the idea of context when it comes to curation.

When you do I humbly submit that Pearltrees (which has a very large user base and one that is currently growing at over 30% per month) is certainly worthy of inclusion in your list and also represents one of the most powerful and flexible of the new tools for the human organization of the web - which is, after all, one of the three key underlying principals that drove the original development of the Internet by Tim Berners-Lee and his associates at CERN.

Should you be interested in taking a closer look at our platform and/or would like a detailed demonstration of our most recent (and fully collaborative) release, please feel free to get in touch with me directly. It would be my pleasure to show you what Pearltrees can do.

Finally, for a great post on the third phase of the web (content curation) please check out this post by Pearltrees CEO, Patrice Lamothe: http://www.cratyle.net/en/2010/03/11/the-webs-third-frontier/ .

Regards,

Oliver Starr

[Valeria Maltoni]

@Elizabeth - the tools are just that, tools. Yet so many fall in love with them/use them because they fell hip and cool using them.

@Brian - and here's the thing, often the new stuff doesn't really replace what people are already doing, especially if they are connecting just fine there.

@Oliver - congratulations, I think this comment has more links that one of my posts. I took the liberty of cleaning it up a little (you get to submit one link to your site, not three). And, you managed to call me incompetent in my research while throwing a pitch at me. Not strange that I would have not heard of a tool, there are so many. You got your pitch already. Best.

[Eric Snyder]

Significant by its absence from the list is AMPLIFY.com. It's a very engaging place for conversations.

And, another useful tool not on the list is http://curated.by

Eric Snyder
Unofficial Amplify Evangelist
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[Valeria Maltoni]

Thank you for adding to the list, Eric.

[Gabriele Maidecchi]

Just spending a quick word on Flipboard, as I am using it since the very first day it came out on the appstore.
It's surprising how a very simple concept like Flipboard's can manage to stick in the mind of its users so strongly, but I believe this is one of those apps that marks a real change in content fruition, one of those changes that could potentially shape the way we read information.
With some more slight changes (like personalizing the info sources rather than choosing from pre-determined ones) it could really be the reference app for content reading on iOS devices.

[Sarah Arrow]

Hi Valeria
I love Paper.li I have a few of them set up. I use them as listening stations for my industry.

For example I have one set with the #courier hashtag (no, not the defunct Micrsoft tablet, but for delivery services). A quick scan shows me what my competition are sharing and what they are promoting. If it is appearing in two or three editions I follow up and see what is happening.

I use them to stay on top of other industry trends. As a transport company I also have an interest in Internet Marketing, but don't want to be following lots of internet marketers. A Paper.li for them allows me to keep an eye on what may be useful. I have one for what my real world friends are tweeting about and I use them to sort out the content I retweet.

I use the papers to curate content from lists and hashtags primarily.

It's certainly easier to read than google alerts :)

[David Somers]

Thanks for mentioning Qrait in your post :) I'm the guy working on it (there's just me, I don't have a team of evangelists). I don't know if you have an invite to Qrait yet? If not, then please send me a quick email and I'll hook you up with one so you can try it out yourself to see what you think!

Briefly, I think what is special about Qrait is that I would rather leverage what you already use to find content, rather than force you to use our own sub-standard Twitter/Flickr/whatever interface. That and the pages you curate are realtime, and I'm adding features really fast in response to feedback.