In the early days of the internet you were expected to browse around web sites that interest us by finding them in internet directories (like Yahoo used to be).  Then we progressed to finding the content ourselves with ever more focussed search engines.

A Twitter tweet

Image via Wikipedia

Next we could actually create and post our own content on sites like flickr, youtube and wordpress and tell the world and our friends about what we had been up to by updating our status on twitter and facebook with links to our newly created content.  So what’s next?

It is being purported that content curation is the new sharing. Curation is sharing content from sources other than your own although you can of course include your own.  The theory is that you are more likely to read content from sources you are connected to before content from search results. This is why the search engines like  Google and Bing are surfacing items recommended, liked or +1 from your friends. So how is this happening?

Individual Item Sharing

Gathering together news items that interest you in an RSS Reader such as Google Reader – see my Google Reader shared items -  is great for increasing your knowledge of a subject. It also can be a great platform for sharing what you have learnt and hence increase your internet cred. It is easy to share what you have learnt by including a link to the item in your blog post, tweet or facebook update.

Reading your twitter feed or your facebook allows you to acquire knowledge from that which your friends are sharing.  You can then re-tweet a tweet or re-share a friend’s facebook update.

But these are all ways of sharing an individual item. What happens when you want to gather all your items of interest together in one post?

Early attempts at sharing groups of items

In the early days of social networking, bookmark sharing was a common way of sharing what you were interested in.  Delicious was particularly good at this because you could share round a theme or subject using tags.

Take a look at my list of delicious bookmarks on the subject of LinkedData

The latest curation tools

Nowadays we have a few more tools that can produce much better results that are easier on the eye and look much more professional with very little effort on our part.  A few examples of such tools are paper.li and

The Writing Centers Daily

Image by tengrrl via Flickr

Scoop.it

Paper.li takes the content of the links from tweets from those you are following twitter and your twitter stream to automatically create a newspaper style layout. You can select content from up to 5 of the following

  • Single twitter user
  • Me & the people I follow
  • Twitter List
  • Twitter #tag
  • Keywords on Twitter
  • Keywords on Facebook

Once set up it creates itself. All you need to do is to press the update button and hey presto you have created a professional looking paper on the subject that you think would interest your potential audience.

The only stats you get is a running total of the number of views.

Examples of paper.li

For your own consumption Postpo.st your twitter stream or PostPost for you Facebook stream

Scoop.it

Paper.li is pretty automatic selection from tweets. An alternative that allows you to select individual items to share is http://scoop.it Its in beta at the moment so you will need to request access.

With Scoop.it you can select any number of sources from which you select items to “scoop”.  Most of my sources are RSS feeds from my Google Reader with some results from Twitter search, Google search and Digg search.

Whenever you opt to “Curate” your are presented with the list of  the latest items from your sources which you can then “discard it” or “scoop it”. So this is much more your hand picked content and hence possibly much more valuable than just an auto selection.

With the stats you get to see not just the number of views but the number of unique visitors and who has subscribed to you scoop.

Examples of Scoop.it

Some related content

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June 3, 2011

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