Last month I shared 40+ networks that you could consider depending on your niche or interests. As part of my commitment to this community, I shared that I will expand on this list throughout 2012. So here is the first addition to that build! The topic- Curation!
I thought I would focus on curation because a) I have a favorite site and b) there has been a lot of “press” on Pinterest as a curation tool and as a result I thought the timing was right. However before I list the sites let’s talk curation.
What is social media curation?
Today, with the exponential growth of social networks and blogs, it can be overwhelming searching for information on the internet. As a result, the act of filtering, selecting, reviewing and providing commentary with a perspective on an article, or collection of articles, have become increasingly important. This is known as social media curation. Recently, I had posed the question : What is a social media curator” on Linkedin . I was intrigued on the variety of responses I received. There is definitely different interpretations on what it really is. The response that I agreed with read: “A good media curator is someone who reads extensively, then can pull content and organize it in a logical way for the benefit of others. Web 2.0+ has an immense amount of information. Curators sort through it, find the wheat in the chaff, and present it in a friendly manner” . I would agree with this definition however would also add that a curator would also share their perspective and perhaps alternative ( or supporting) viewpoint using the posts that they have selected.
Why curate?
Curation provides another offering for your on-line audience. It also helps reduce the noise of the plethora of information on the internet. Curation also provides a stream of fresh posts for your site or blog.
Curation sites
The number of curation sites and tools have grown dramatically. Furthermore, more recently the profile of curation has been elevated as more organizations and entrepreneurs are looking at ways to augment their blogs or content. I personally use Scoop.it. I really enjoy the tool because 1) it has an automatic component of crawling the web to make suggestions to supplement your topic and 2) you have the option of selection and providing that commentary to add value to your audience and 3) Scoop.it then bundles it in a very attractive on-line magazine. I would like to share 3 Master Curators on Scoop.it namely Robin Good and Giuseppe Mauriello. For the third, I would also like to mention Martin Gysler who introduced me to the field and tool. I must admit in addition to curating, I have used the tool as a depository (Scoop.it SocialMediaPearls) for key articles for my blog that you can reference at any given time. So not strictly curating- however one can say my blog posts are a result of personal experience and research whereyou can find the associated posts on my Social Media Pearls Scoop.it magazine. In addition to Scoop.it, I have used Paper.il, Pinterest and Themeefy.
Changing gears a little bit, I would like to share that I am intrigued by Bookriff which is very new site and start-up. I learned about this site at a recent conference in Canada. Very exciting site that brings curation to another level. Bookriff allows you to select chapters from an assortment of books, add your own commentary and then publish it as a commercial book. Each time a Riff is distributed, all content owners get paid. BookRiff’s technology manages the authoring, bundling, licensing, attribution, and payment details for each of these custom compilations. Brilliant! How exciting. Love it! Potentially turning the publishing sector upside down.The mastermind and CEO behind Bookriff is Rochelle Grayson. It was a total pleasure to hear her speak on this innovation.
Now it is time to share that list. Below, I have listed 40 curation sites for your perusal. Enjoy!
- Aggregage– a new site with a content marketing focus.Agregage creates online “curated” communities by centralizing content from quality blogs, whitepapers, social networks around particular topics and then it is displayed on a new site dedicated to that given topic.
- Amplify– “The easiest way to clip, share and discuss things that interest you.” Add the Amplify web clipper to your browser to clip and share things you find on the web.(Mar 7 2012: Amplify is closing down its site)
- BagTheweb– BagTheWeb helps users curate Web content. For any topic, you can create a “bag” to collect, publish, and share any content from the Web.
- Blekko – “Provides a differentiated editorial voice in search.”
- BlogBridge– BlogBridge is for true info-junkies who want a better way to wrangle all their RSS feeds from blogs and news into one pretty cool organizer.
- Bookriff – . Riffs are remixes of published books, essays, magazine articles, and your own content.
- Bundlr– Create topic pages with photos, videos, tweets and documents. Share them with everyone
- CIThread– This has a content marketing focus.Simplifies content marketing production, distribution, measurement & optimization across multiple initiatives & social channels
- Clipboard – Helps organize content, facilitates collaboration and sharing with others.
- Curata– Curata helps marketers maximize their content curation efforts with web-based tools to easily find, organize and share online content.
- Curated.by– let’s you collect & organize topic based content (media, links, tweets) into bundles.
- Curation Station – allows users to gather information, select the items that fit their goals, and then distribute them . A paid service targeting marketers.
- Eqentia “From your context, let us find you content. From that content, let us find you people. You take action.” Aggregate, curate, and re-publish content what matters.
- Evri – automatically and constantly indexes millions of topic-specific streams from thousands of different sources to filter through the web and delivers customized news experiences.
- Factiva-a business intelligence platform- with a unique combination of authoritative business news and Information, plus sophisticated tools, Factiva helps you easily find, monitor, interpret and share the essential information your organization commands.
- Feedly– a simple and elegant way to read and share the content of your favorite sites.
- Flockler– Drawing from social media and the web, publishing videos, photos and text, and personal commentary and editorial, Flockler lets you curate for a particular subject, event, person or business..
- iFlow– a real-time, online information exchange that brings together everything you want. You can organize, combine, filter, curate or remix your flows to get a different view on your content and/or to share.
- kbucket– KBucket is a user indexed search site. A place where experts “content curators” organize, comment, tag and publish their research
- Keepstream a social media curation tool that helps organize tweets, into shareable, embeddable collection pages.
- Kurat helps you to discover relevant content on specific topics. Within Kurat you can easily curate this information and publish it. Kurat can be used as content discovery and publishing tool behind company social media efforts and as a personal newsreader.
- Loud3r– a real-time content discovery, curation and publishing platform that delivers the best news, blogs, photos, videos and social media about any topic.
- My6sense -Read and share your relevant content from your RSS and social streams.
- Mlkshk– Save, Share and Discover.Use browser extensions to save with a simple right-click.Pick a topic (Shake) and Invite other MLKSHKers in to post and curate their submissions with one click.
- Mysinydicaat– a personalized agregator built on the idea that it should be easy to collect, filter, share web content that is important to you.
- Paper.il-Paper il crawls the web linked to your topic. Once set up the curation is updated automatically.
- Pearltrees – collects, organize and share everything you like on the web.
- Pinterest– a Virtual Pinboard that lets you organize and share all the things you find on the web.
- PostPost – PostPost is the Twitter strip search tool. It strips out the noise by delivering search results from the people on Twitter you value the most.
- Qrait– A realtime curation platform designed to fulfill the needs of content curators.Qrait lets you combine real-time filtering and your own personal touch to create something of value.
- Redux is a new kind of TV—hundreds of channels of entertaining, and-picked video, all from a community of curators.
- Scoop.it– Create a topic of interest, Scoop.it crawls the web for related content that you can select and curate for your online magazine.
- Shareist – Lets you create your own custom curation website. discover, create, organize, and share content that matters to your audience.
- Snip.it– create collections of links (we call them snips), add your thoughts & discover others with relevant opinions on issues you care about.
- Story Crawler– intelligently searches and gathers information across multiple online platforms—whether it be social media, news articles, blogs, RSS feeds, video sites forums and user generated content—to bring users the most relevant real-time data..
- Storyfy– Lets you curate social networks to build social stories, bringing together media scattered across the Web into a coherent narrative.
- Storyful– Storyful was founded by journalists who wanted to separate the news from the noise of the real-time web. Storyful is used to curate “stories” via social media tools, images and videos.
- Summify– recently purchased by Twitter, Summify Creates a beautiful daily summary of the most relevant news from your social networks.
- Themeefy– discover, curate, compile and publish your knowledge from the web to personal Theme magazine(s).
- Yourversion “The best way to discover new content that’s relevant to you.” YourVersion brings you the latest news, blogs, tweets, and videos on your chosen topics in one place.YourVersion automatically organizes the bookmarks by topic for you.
Now that is quite the list. Now, as you consider curation and select a tool, please share your experience here! Or perhaps you already curate- do share your tips. Would love to hear from you.
As always thank you for visiting and supporting this blog. Iif you enjoyed this post- do share with your network.
Cheers,
Shirley 🙂
Post script note: Please see Robin Goods’s comment and feedback below. He provides additional, valuable details around the categories related to the list above. Definitely worth keeping this in mind as you consider this list.
Related articles
- 5 Great Social Media Sites for Curating Content (socialtimes.com)
- Social Media Listmania with Curated Resources & Lists (toprankblog.com)
- 30+ Content Curation Tools for Personal and Professional Use (WebAdvantage)
- 12 Social Media Trends Australian Companies Should Look Out For This Year (prwarrior.typepad.com)
- Rip, Mix, Burn – “BookRiff Aims To Do For Content What Apple Did For Music”
- Scoop.it – Content Curation Tool, Building Authority (iblogzone.com)
- 8 Ways To Find Great Social Media Content (Mari Smith)- YouTube
Social Media Pearls 
Hi Shirley,
This is a fantastic list you have put together. I am following your topic on
Scoop.it and had to re-scoop you. Anyway I have a sharing program to really
boost overall exposure of great content like this. I would be happy to tell you about it.
Again nice post!
Posted by Tom George (@netbillboards) | January 22, 2012, 6:13 amTom
Thank you so much for visiting and sharing your feedback.
I am always up to learning more about sharing my posts, so I look forward to getting additional information.
Posted by Shirley Williams | January 22, 2012, 10:04 pmAs Usual, AWESOME INFORMATION! Thanks again Shirley!
Posted by successisyou | January 28, 2012, 10:03 amThank you Henry! Always happy to see your support and kind words
Posted by Shirley Williams | January 28, 2012, 10:31 amWow! What a list! Anyways, I’ve been using scoop.it for a while. Glad you shared this list – definitely will have a closer look at some of other resources. Thank you, Shirley
Posted by Alex Zmushka (@azmushko) | January 30, 2012, 10:17 pmThank you so much Alex!!
Posted by Shirley Williams | January 31, 2012, 12:04 amHi Shirley, thank you for sharing this valuable resources.
I would like to contribute to it, by providing a few additional info that can be helpful for your readers:
a) The tools listed here belong to at least two different categories:
1) tools that allow you to curate and publish a stream, channel, newsradar or web magazine online
2) tools that allow you to find, discover, and gather news and sources for your content curation work
b) Some the tools listed here are built exclusively for large companies with lots of money – they do not even offer a free trial to see what they actual have built:
– Aggregage – examples yes but no possibility to try (costs upward of $3-4K/year)
– CIThread – can you tell from the site what do they offer?
– Loud3r – you need to write them an email to get an idea of what they have
c) These below are the news discovery tools listed here – they allow you to read and discover, and to share on your social networks, but they do not create topic specific newsradars of your curation work, nor they allow you to pick and choose specific stories to be published:
– Evri
– Feedly
– Factiva
– My6sense
– Mlkshk
– Paper.li
– PostPost
– Story Crawler
– Summify
– Yourversion
– Storyful
d) Mysyndicaat is no longer available to the public
e) StoryCrawler does not seem to be offering a service
Thank you for this opportunity to clarify a bit these not so immediately evident differences.
Find out more about curation tools here: http://www.mindmeister.com/maps/show/55395228
Posted by Robin Good (@RobinGood) | January 22, 2012, 8:32 amThank you Robin for your additional informations and clarifications!
Posted by martingysler | January 22, 2012, 10:05 amRobin,
Thank you so much for visiting and providing this valuable feedback. I certainly appreciate it and and I know my readers will too.
Cheers
Shirley
Posted by Shirley Williams | January 22, 2012, 10:17 amSummify should be removed, too, because its current service is shutting down soon. From the Summify FAQ:
“We will be disabling new account registrations immediately and we will also be removing some features. We will keep the email summaries for a few more weeks, but at some point we will shut down the current Summify product. In the meantime, if you’re a user of Summify you’ll still receive your summaries, just like before.”
YourVersion should probably be removed as well — its blog hasn’t been updated in almost a year.
I recommend replacing YourVersion with Trapit (http://trap.it), which is similar, but still under very active development. Like YourVersion, Trapit constantly searches for news relevant to your query. You can check in on your Trapit stream any time, or just receive daily or weekly digests of the very best content.
Disclosure: I work at Trapit.
Posted by colemanf | February 17, 2012, 7:09 pmThanks so much for sharing and keeping us current!! so much appreciated.
Posted by Shirley Williams | February 17, 2012, 7:45 pmHi Shirley, an interesting and useful post, thank you for your great job… I’ll share it on my various sm. Thank you too for the mention, I’m very proud about… 🙂 Cheers! Martin
Posted by martingysler | January 22, 2012, 10:06 amMartin,
As always, thank you for stopping by. As I shared in the post, your introduction to this field has been very valuable.
Cheers
Shirley
Posted by Shirley Williams | January 22, 2012, 10:19 amHi Shirley, thank you for mention and your interesting list.
Great Robin as usual for his additional info!
Posted by Giuseppe Mauriello (@pinomauriello) | January 22, 2012, 12:26 pmThanks for popping by and leaving feedback. Always appreciated ! 🙂
Posted by Shirley Williams | January 22, 2012, 3:08 pmReblogged this on txwikinger's blog and commented:
Wonderful article bny Shirley Williams. Well worth the time to read!
Posted by txwikinger | January 22, 2012, 1:06 pmI am thrilled that you found a few social pearls and that you have shared it with your readers.
Posted by Shirley Williams | January 22, 2012, 3:10 pmReblogged this on michellegilstrap and commented:
Social Media Curation Sites and Tools is an excellent article for anyone using social media. Many business owners are needing the tools that are addressed in this article
Posted by michellegilstrap | January 22, 2012, 1:29 pmThank you so much for this endorsement and that you are sharing it with your readers.
Posted by Shirley Williams | January 22, 2012, 3:11 pmInformation overload attacks us from every angle. This post I will keep in a safe accessible place. Thanks for sharing.
Posted by Daniele | January 22, 2012, 2:08 pmHi Daniele
Thank you for visiting and sharing. I think we all are trying to find efficient and effective ways to manage the huge amount of information we have to deal with today. So if you have found one or two social pearls in this list that you may consider later- I am thrilled! Thanks again for the support. Cheers 🙂
Posted by Shirley Williams | January 22, 2012, 3:14 pmgood list you have there
Posted by Swapnil | January 24, 2012, 3:56 amThank you!
Posted by Shirley Williams | January 24, 2012, 10:11 amGreat Article. It is interesting that the comments complemented the article. Very Good.
Posted by Renato Xavier | January 24, 2012, 6:13 pmThank you Renato! The comments have been great indeed. It is lovely to get this engagement 🙂
Posted by Shirley Williams | January 24, 2012, 7:02 pmHi Shirley,
Let me suggest you a new service for collaborative content curation: searcheeze.com. I’m the CEO.
Thanks,
Stefano
Posted by Stefano Passatordi | February 3, 2012, 4:22 pmGreat list..i was searching for it..Thanks a lot for share 🙂
Posted by Govind@LatestOnNet | February 5, 2012, 1:03 pmThank you!! For searching and now leaving feedback. Very much appreciated.
Posted by Shirley Williams | February 5, 2012, 3:20 pmThanks for a comprehensive list. We’ll be sure to check out some of these sites to explore and find some great curated content.
Posted by Anthony @ Culture-ist Magazine | February 16, 2012, 11:10 amThanks so much for visiting and taking the time to leave feedback Anthony! Very much appreciated
Posted by Shirley Williams | February 16, 2012, 11:20 amHi Shirley, thanks for sharing these 40 sites. I’ll go ahead and have look at each of them. I’ve been looking for this kind of sites for a while now, thanks for helping out. Once again, great share! 😀
Posted by Mark @ Buy Followers on Twitter | February 21, 2012, 10:01 pmThank you Mark!
Posted by Shirley Williams | February 21, 2012, 10:23 pmThis is a great article, Shirley! Thank you for taking the type to compile all these resources! There a couple I didn’t know, so I am going to try them out.
Posted by Cendrine Marrouat | February 23, 2012, 12:55 pmYou are very welcome Cendrine! It is good to know you found a few pearls 🙂
Really good to see you here.
Posted by Shirley Williams | February 23, 2012, 1:15 pmleave a remark.
Posted by clashofclans.hackxtool.com | December 6, 2015, 10:03 pmLeawo ist ein professioneller Anbieter für multimediale Lösungen, spezialisiert sowohl auf das Aufbereiten und Verteilen von Medien über das Internet als auch für den Alltag.
Posted by alltägliches essen | February 27, 2016, 7:14 amGreat article
Posted by Janis Bohac | November 5, 2016, 9:25 amI really appreciate this!
Posted by Tonda Haessler | November 10, 2016, 6:31 amWow, thanks for the information.
Posted by Enriqueta Chapelle | November 11, 2016, 5:33 am