21 April 2013

4 Content Curation Tools

Filter your content using content curation tools
Content curation is described as the process of discovering, gathering and presenting online content based on keywords that describe a particular niche.  In the past you may have unknowingly curated content using RSS feeds from Google reader.  But Google has only just announced that Google Reader will be shut down on July 1st 2013.  So I thought this might be a good time to look at the more hip content curation sites.
But first why curate content at all?  Some say curating original content is what gets you noticed.  I have seen it described as the difference between being a social media leader  or a social media follower.  Which would you rather be?  Realistically put it allows you to show that you know what is going on in your field and it compliments your own content. 

I simply suggest clicking on the following links and try them out for yourself,  as they all achieve slightly different results.


Flipboard

is a new way to read news or content.  It is for smart phones only and very entertaining when you are
on the go.  The curated pages do literally flip from one to another just like with a real book. Besides creating your own specialised magazine you can connect your own twitter followers to this and read all your followers' tweets on a particular subject.  Its a great way to see qualitatively which tweets are worth retweeting. 
Flipboard came pre-installed on my Samsung S3 but I took no notice of it until I saw it mentioned in a recent blog post.  It was described as a cross between Pinterest and Tumblr.
Apparently Flipboard already has 6 billion pages flipped per month so its well worth a look.

Pulse 
looks like a cross between Pinterest and LinkedIn Today.  Not surprisingly LinkedIn just bought Pulse.  You must choose a minimum of three areas of interest.  It was designed to bring all your favourite websites together.  Personally I found the areas of interest too broad.
Once you find an article of interest, you can post it to Facebook, tweet it, email it or save it for later.

Prismatic

allows you to create a newsfeed based on your interests.
Prismatic seems to pull topics based on the websites that you most visit.  It features your areas of interest very precisely.  Prismatic users can like and comment on your curated posts. 

Scoop.it


is one of my favourites.  It displays blog posts on a specific topic.  These can be retweeted or sent to your LinkedIn  newsfeed.  There was a time when you could send curated articles to Linkedin with Twitterfeed.  As this service is now no longer available Scoop.it fills this gap. I've had authors thank me for scooping their content, as Scoop.it increases their reach.

As mentioned these tools all deliver different end results, so explore and see which you prefer.
If you are publishing curated content just remember to credit the original source and link to that source.

This list includes some of my favourite content curation tools but there are many more.  If you have a favourite please feel free to list it in the comments below.

2 comments:

  1. With hаvin so much writtеn contеnt ԁo уοu
    ever гun into any problеms of plagoriѕm оr copyright viоlаtiοn?
    My site has a lot of еxсlusivе content I've either authored myself or outsourced but it seems a lot of it is popping it up all over the web without my authorization. Do you know any ways to help stop content from being ripped off? I'd certainly appreсiate
    it.

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    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Anonymous,
    sure its a problem.
    Ideally people should first ask if they could publish your article on their site. But this doesn't seem to happen. If an article is copied the link to the original article with the authors name should be below the article. This happens sometimes.
    But the reason why I write original articles is that firstly I can do so and also enjoy it. Secondly Google knows when an article is copied and that person will get very little traffic to their site.
    You could use something like Google Alerts (or its replacements after 1st July 2013) to track where snippets of your content show up.
    Hope this helps.

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