Content Curation Software

I’ve been playing with Scoop.it lately.  Some would say I’ve been sleeping with the enemy, but in truth, Scoop.it and CurationSoft play really nicely together.

While getting to know the interface and features, I saw a perfect opportunity for the two to work together through RSS.  Every Scoop.it curation page has an RSS feed (the little green RSS icon shows under the title of each page as seen below).

While Scoop.it allows you to publish “scoops” to your blog, it is in a one-off fashion and also not very SEO friendly.  It uses javascript to embed content, so you lose any SEO juice that would come from the curated portion of your post.

Of course, I want to be able to drag and drop any and all curated pieces right into the editor that I need, not just one.  And I want credit from Google on the content I include.

The new RSS feature of CurationSoft solves this problem nicely.  Below are some things I was able to drag into this post through CurationSoft from the  RSS feed on my Scoop.it page.

 Content Marketing News

Forty-one percent of companies struggle to create content for lead generation

The Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs recently collaborated on a survey that named producing content likely to convert prospects as marketers’ top content marketing challenge.

So you’ve got the greatest product to hit the market in a long time…now what? How do you get people to find out about, let alone buy it? That’s where marketing comes in. You’ve got to make sure you’re selling your products or services in…

Defying conventional wisdom, a quartet of print titles is being launched by GSG World Media, distributed in store and electronically by Office Depot. Naturally, the magazines focus on social media’s big dogs: FB & Business (Facebook), Tweeting & Business (Twitter), LI & Business (LinkedIn) and The Big G & Business (Google).

Some other notes on the resulting curated content above.

I was able to edit the look and resulting content so that it looks the way I want for this particular post and blog setup.  You don’t want to leave that to an outside party to determine.  Some of the links and meta data were able to be deleted to reduce clutter and maintain focus on the news and source curated.

The bottom line:  CurationSoft’s RSS module feature, just added in the latest version (1.0.7), gives you unlimited sources to curate from while giving you the ability to drag-drop and tweak the look and feel of the resulting curated pieces to your desire.

With rich RSS feeds that include images, you also get the benefit of livening up your curation with imagery that goes along with the pieces you curate.

Yet another use for curation:  reporting the under reported news.

Sometimes it’s easy to think that since there are massive news curation sites like HuffPo on the web, everything newsworthy is being covered.  They have a huge writing staff and aggregate content from everywhere.

The fact is, lots of news is left on the cutting room floor each and every day.  Decisions about what’s newsworthy are made in split seconds as the giant sites jockey to be “first” with the news they think will get the most views.

Nothing inherently wrong with that, except that what some call a strong news day, others call guilt by omission.

Image via Wikipedia

It’s not possible, even for the biggest sites on the web, to cover everything that could or should be covered.  The web needs more reporters, curators, and people who dig through wasted opportunities to post things like good news (for a change) or news that is otherwise purposely or accidentally missed by news networks and online hubs.

There is a tremendous opportunity for web reporters who curate “missing” news to fill many voids and dark spots in the information we consume every day.  The embarrassment of riches that large organizations enjoy means they are passing on more news than they can handle in a 24/7 news cycle.

Yet, it is being reported.  Small sites break stories as well, but they don’t have the reach to get wide distribution.  That means there’s a whole lot of news that people would otherwise consume and enjoy if only it could were curated, shared, and bubbled up to wider audiences.

A massive layer of “unused news” just fades away daily as if it never happened.  Curation can change that.  Curation is beginning to change that.  But we have a lot more work and education to do before we ever come close to saturating the web with premium curated content sources.  There is great a opportunity to provide readers, watchers, and listeners with more valuable choices in curators to follow, around the topics in which they are most interested.

This spells huge opportunity for those who take up the challenge to profitably curate on a wide variety of topics.

As “curation” picks up steam in search and on blogs across the web as a very popular topic, I thought I’d fire up CurationSoft and see what the term “curating the news” would bring up.

Below you will find the best of what I found with this amazing software.  If I can deliver you the best information on curation, it stands to reason you could be delivering the same “goods” to your readers on their favorite topics!

Blog Content: Original and Curated 

Well, the Huffington Post is, at its core, a curated or content aggregating site. Huffington and her staff sift through articles on the topics they choose to cover (top news stories), and select the ones they like best. Then staff writers …

What exactly is news curation, and does it have any value?

I think curation is going to become evermore important as the volume of available content increases far more rapidly than our ability to assimilate it. Newspapers are going to need to become better at going – ‘hey we don’t …

Five curation tools all journalists

I use it from some months; you can check out my site, it is a good topic as example about content curation with filtered news, articles, tools. Best regards,. Giuseppe. # 25 August 2011 at 11:24 am. Sarah Marshall (author) said: …

How Curation Is Shaping The News You Consume

Content curation is one of the biggest themes online at the moment and it is set to define how we consume media going forward.

Nieman Reports | Curation, Community and the Future of News

Curation, Community and the Future of News. ‘People are clearly overwhelmed by the growing volume and weight of digital content and messaging that they feel compelled to process.’ By Steven Rosenbaum. Thinking back, I’ve always …

Curation News Tweets Today

By proaudiogeeks at 09/02/2011 17:11

By KBucketeer at 09/02/2011 17:13

By MaritScha at 08/31/2011 13:42

By BlingCat at 08/31/2011 13:27

Latest News Curation Videos

Ushahidi leads way to crisis news curation systems

Hours after the Haiti earthquake happened Patrick Meier and a group of friends developed www.ushahidi.com to help people and organizations to figure out where to send resources in Haiti. They crowd-sourced information about where problem areas were u…

Craig Newmark on editors and news curation

Future Of News: The Importance Of News Curation And Distribution – Gerd Leonhard

www.MasterNewMedia.org – Media futurist Gerd Leonhard analyzes why newspapers and publishers have to become news curators, and not just producers, if they want to provide real value to their readers.

Interview With Robert Scoble About Real-Time News Curation – LeWeb 10

Le Web 10 Interview with Robert Scoble about real-time news curation and automated filtering of the real-time streams.

Content Curation And The Future Of Search: The Curator Workflow

What are the basic steps a curator should follow when curating content? In this short video excerpt Robin Good summarizes his personal workflow as a news curator for MasterNewMedia.

As you can see, there are a lot of players flocking to different kinds of curation tools, methods, and specialties.  What it all means is there is certainly convergence happening in the market.

The results above are hand-picked by me from thousands of results.  Someone else might pick a completely different set of tweets, videos, and articles to feature.  That’s the beauty of content curation.  One person can have a style and an angle readers like more than another person’s, and that’s just fine.

In the end, we’re all a part of the curation game now.  Whether you are the curator or you are the consumer, the entire web  is permeated with curation from our news sites to entertainment, gadgets, and everything in between.