How Tumblr is Changing Journalism. Earlier this week we looked at the remarkable growth of Tumblr, a blogging and curation service that now gets over 12 billion page views per month. Tumblr is mostly used as a consumer curation tool - it's an easy way for people to re-post articles, images and videos. But Tumblr can also be used to power a news website. That's exactly what ShortFormBlog does. Launched in January 2009 by Ernie Smith from Washington D.C., the site publishes about 30 news soundbites a day. ShortFormBlog is still a part-time project for Smith, who also works as a graphic designer at The Washington Post.
He's hoping to turn the site into a full-time business. The concept behind ShortFormBlog is very simple: to publish really short posts throughout the day. The site publishes over 200 posts per week, an average of about 30 per day (higher on weekdays). The audience reaction and feedback - mostly via Tumblr, but also other social media such as Twitter - is a key part of the site. How Tumblr is Being Used. Topsy Searches Twitter Better Than Twitter. DST’s Milner: Founders’ Exit Is Cue For Investors’ Exit - Venture Capital Dispatch. Web Content & Digital Curation. 4 Promising Curation Tools That Help Make Sense of the Web.
Steven Rosenbaum is a curator, author, filmmaker and entrepreneur. He is the CEO of Magnify.net, a real-time video curation engine for publishers, brands, and websites. His book Curation Nation is slated to be published this spring by McGrawHill Business. As the volume of content swirling around the web continues to grow, we're finding ourselves drowning in a deluge of data. Where is the relevant material? Where are the best columns and content offerings? How can we balance the need for timely, relevant information with reasonable limits of our ability to find, sort, fact check and validate information? The solution on the horizon is curation.
In the past 90 days alone, there has been an explosion of new software offerings that are the early leaders in the curation tools category. 1. Storify co-founder Burt Herman worked as a reporter for the Associated Press during a 12-year career, six of those in news management as a bureau chief and supervising correspondent. 2. 3. 4. Conclusion. The Best Alternatives to Delicious. Trunk.ly Adds Search and Curation to Social Bookmarking.
The wake of the Delicious debacle has been very fruitful for a few other services that occupy a similar Web curation space. One that popped up in the comments in our original post on Delicious was Trunk.ly, which sounded promising for not only offering to collect the links users share on social networks, but to make them searchable. Saving a bunch of links on "library school" is one thing, but being able to parse them out and subdivide them by search, that is where the beauty of data curation lies. Trunk.ly starts off by stating plainly that the nature of bookmarking is changing, that it's now a "rolling social rumble of retweets, likes, favorites, sharing, commenting and general discussion... whenever you show some interest in a link by taking a social action on it (liking it, tweeting it), Trunk.ly is actively monitoring and sucks that link into your Trunk.
" In a brief chat with CEO Tim Bull and CTO Alex Dong they described their vision for Trunk.ly as a "personal search engine. " Bit.ly Bundles Now Allow Hyper Personalized Wikis: Tech News « Bit.ly, the URL link-shortener, took a turn last month into content curation with Bundles, its tool for packaging and preserving multiple links. Today the company is opening up the tool for collaboration among users, allowing people to share and create collections of relevant information as people seek to sort through the crush of content online. Now people who create a bundle can add new editors, who can contribute toward a shared bundle. The bundles are like a more personal and lightweight versions of a Wikipedia page but with the same ability to be a lasting resource for others when shared.
At a simple level, it can be a list of links for recipes shared among friends or sports highlights built among fans of a particular team. Bit.ly said they’ve had tens of thousands of bundles created since they launched the feature last month. Bit.ly has found that the bundles are being used in some interesting ways. Related GigaOM Pro content (sub req’d): Steve Rosenbaum: MySpace is Reborn as Social Curation. First look at the New MySpace promises changes in design -- embraces community knowledge and passion. Today MySpace is reborn as a content centric discovery platform. It's a big shift, and it might just work. First, there's a new look. But pretty much everyone agrees that a new coat of paint isn't going to bring the site back from the wilderness. Far more interesting is the wholesale change underlying the editorial thinking of the site. There's one word that sums up the new MySpace says Music Chief Courtney Holt: "Curation.
" "When I look at the word curation I think what's interesting to me is that everybody can be a curator. " As Mike Jones, CEO of MySpace explains: "Myspace is unique in that it is powered by the passions of our users, who program the site by expressing interests, sharing tastes and knowledge around particular topics, and scouting out up-and-coming subcultures. " In the past, MySpace music's editorial process was much like many media companies. Why does it matter? Curation And The Human Web... Posted by Tom Foremski - November 16, 2010 There is no doubt in my mind that the topic of curation and the Internet, is an important one and that it will be a dominant topic in 2011.
Curation is important because we are reaching the limits of what can be achieved through algorithms and machines in organizing and navigating the Internet. Aggregation looks like curation but it's not. (Please see: Aggregation Is Not Curation - There Is A Big Difference - SVW) I define curation as a person, or a group of people, engaged in choosing and presenting a collection of things related to a specific topic and context. Aggregation employs software (algorithms) and machines (servers) to assemble a collection of things related to a specific topic and context. Aggregation tools can be employed by curators but the human act of curation adds a layer of value that aggregation alone cannot provide. A good example is Techmeme, the news aggregator run by Gabe Rivera. However, such approaches reach a natural limit. Why Social Media Curation Matters - Technorati Blogging.
Over the past few weeks I've raved about the current raft of social media curation start-ups. I've rambled on and on about all of the new features that are being added to sites like Curated.By, Storify and Keepstream. What I haven’t explained to my friends, family, Twitter followers and just about anybody I engage in tech conversation with for more than a couple of minutes, is why it all matters. With registered Twitter users numbering somewhere in the region of 150 million, their fire hose is pumping out tens of millions of tweets a day. Granted, not all of this data is worth capturing. So, how do you decide what’s worth keeping? How do you spot the difference between a gold-plated tweet (a seemingly important post that over time loses its shine), a fool's gold tweet (a spurious tweet that initially draws attention but quickly loses its value), and the solid gold tweet?
Craig Newmark on editors and news curation. Web 2.0 Expo NY: Clay Shirky (shirky.com) It's Not Information Overload. It's Filter Failure. Howard Rheingold on collaboration.