The 21st Century Curator

Curation has become the next buzzword after social business. With content coming at us with the force of a tsunami and the fury of a tornado, curators seem to have become our saviours—our sense making guide. One post out of five I have been reading in the past few months seem to be associated with curation or its close cousins—aggregation and filtering. Even as I read, I was tempted to apply some of the curation strategies and put together this post.  I like to build some context around the links because—who knows—in the Internet world, a working link today can be a dead link tomorrow.

Curation today takes on a new meaning in the context of technological affordance, information abundance, diminishing attention, hunger for contextual and timely information, and constantly shifting, globally linked landscape. In this complex and chaotic world, making sense can only be a constant endeavour, pattern matching a crucial need. And this is what today’s curators do—aided and inspired by technology.

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Storify – Create engaging social stories.

Storify lets you curate social networks to build social stories, bringing together media scattered across the Web into a coherent narrative. We are building the story layer above social networks, to amplify the voices that matter and create a new media format that is interactive, dynamic and social.

In the Storify editor, you can search social media networks to find media elements about the topic you want to Storify. Look through Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Instagram and more to gather material for your stories.

Drag and drop status updates, photos or videos to bring together the social media elements that will best illustrate your story. You can always reorder elements in your story, or delete them if you find something better. And you can always add more items later on. Your story is always editable, so you can pull in the latest from the social web.

A Storify story is more than just a collection of elements from social media. It’s also your opportunity to make sense of what you’ve pulled together. You can write a headline, introduction and insert text anywhere inside your story. You can add headers, hyperlinks and styled text. Build a narrative and give context to your readers.

Storify stories can be embedded anywhere on the Web by simply pasting an embed code, just like embedding a video. You can also connect Storify to your WordPress or Drupal blog, publish to Tumblr or Posterous, or send an email newsletter through Mailchimp.

Storify isn’t just about pulling media from social networks, it’s about spreading stories too. Storify helps your story go viral by making it easy to notify all the people quoted in your story, so they will know they are now part of something larger. These links are highly likely to be shared further on social networks and draw a response.

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30+ Cool Content Curation Tools for Personal & Professional Use

As the web becomes more and more inundated with blogs, videos, tweets, status updates, news, articles, and countless other forms of content, “information overload” is something we all seem to suffer. It is becoming more difficult to weed through all the “stuff” out there and pluck out the best, most share-worthy tidbits of information, especially if your topic is niche. Let’s face it, Google definitely has its shortcomings when it comes to content curation and the more it tries to cater to all audiences, the less useful it becomes.

The demand for timely, relevant content that is specific to our unique interests and perspectives has given rise to a new generation of tools that aim to help individuals and companies curate content from the web and deliver it in a meaningful way. These new tools range from simple, application-specific types such as social media aggregators and discovery engines, to more complex, full-blown publishing solutions for organizations.

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The Seven Needs of Real-Time Curators

I keep hearing people throw around the word “curation” at various conferences, most recently at SXSW. The thing is most of the time when I dig into what they are saying they usually have no clue about what curation really is or how it could be applied to the real-time world.

So, over the past few months I’ve been talking to tons of entrepreneurs about the tools that curators actually need and I’ve identified seven things. First, who does curation? Bloggers, of course, but blogging is curation for Web 1.0. Look at this post here, I can link to Tweets, and point out good ones, right? That’s curation. Or I can order my links in a particular order. That’s curation. Or I can add my thoughts to those links, just like Techcrunch or VentureBeat do. That’s curation. Or I can do a video like Leo Laporte does and talk about those links. That’s curation. Or I can forward those links to you via email. That’s curation. The editor who sits in a big building at New York Times or your local newspaper that chooses what content you’ll see in your newspaper is a curator. So is the page designer who decides what story is at the top of the page.

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