Buzzing with Social Curation Tools! Today, we are all facing information overload, and it is often difficult to find what we are looking for, especially if we are looking for updated collections of resources to support a topic, issue or idea.
Major search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo don't exactly do a great job in assisting either, which might also be partially due to the growing influence and spam of 'Search Engine Optimization (SEO)' gurus, engines and companies. It is amazing how much spam comments I get on this blog alone (10 - 20 spam comments a day!)
, thanks to SEO strategies. Amazingly annoying! As Yahoo is trying hard to kill (sell) off Delicious gently, it is perhaps time to find and explore other alternatives to sort out my management of juicy learning resources and discoveries (URLs). Power tools for content curation. Maybe you don't have the resources to develop a lot of content, or maybe you're a professional association that wants to serve its members better by being super helpful.
Add that there are many more content creators, inside and outside organizations, and you see how curating information as content strategy could be a very elegant option. Noting the evolution on the World Wide Web quickly to show you a pattern that went in lockstep with use. You had forums and discussion boards, many still very active, Web sites, then journals, which evolved into blogs with RSS (real simple syndication) capability to package and read feeds, social bookmarking and networks, and then media sites to upload and view videos, photographs, etc.
Each set of tools building on the next, thriving when filling a specific need, and evolving or morphing into something else as appropriate. Real time logs I suppose I'm quite old fashioned to be still using a blogging platform in a blog format to publish content. So what? The Case Against Links. Links - are they a net negative for readers online?
That's the idea being deliberately explored by a number of publishers, says writer Nicholas Carr today. The iconoclastic author says that he has grown sympathetic to the thinking of Steve Gillmor, the almost incomprehensibly future-bound sage tech journalist who has argued for years that "links are dead. " Links within articles are a distraction and imply that the reader ought to leave what they are reading to read something else, Carr says. Placing links at the end of articles is more respectful of a person's intentions and concentration. Do you think that's true? If you'll forgive me a block-quote, Carr explains it like this: "Links are great conveniences, as we all know (from clicking on them compulsively day in and day out). I think reading posts with links at the end does make my brain feel different, more relaxed.
Angels and Devils At the same time, links in text are the standard practice for a reason, right? World's Biggest Blogging Platform Adds Curation Feature. WordPress, the biggest blog software platform on the Web, has added a "reblogging" curation feature much like the smaller innovative service Tumblr has offered for years.
It's another chapter in the race to decrease friction in sharing your favorite Web content with friends. If the previous era of innovation on the Web was fundamentally characterized by the democratization of publishing and content creation, the next era may be based on finding solutions for building value on top of all that newly published data. Much of that value capture will be performed by machines, but tools for humans could be a game changer as well. As we wrote yesterday, Google VP Marissa Mayer says the average person uploaded 15 times more data in 2009 than they did just three years ago. Much of the innovation built on top of that explosion of data will be driven by machines, but not all of it.
Can Curation Catch On? Will curation truly become a substantial market, capable of sustaining itself? Curation Nation book. 8 Ways to Find Great Social Media Content. Do you want to know how to find the most valuable social media content?
Are you looking for great articles and videos to share with your friends and fans? Be sure to watch this edition of Social Media Examiner TV with our host Mari Smith. In this episode, Mari introduces you to the concept of curating content and how it can help your business. And Mari also reviews 8 content curation tools to help you find the best information for your business. Share your feedback, see the show notes and discover how you can be part of a future show below!
Here are the content curation tools Mari reviews on this video: #1: Google Alerts Use Google Alerts to get notifications of your important keywords. Set up Google Alerts for keywords relevant to your business. #2: Google Reader Subscribe to blogs in your Google Reader for better social media management. #3: Facebook Friend Lists for Better Facebook News Feeds Get more control over your Facebook news feed with Facebook Friend Lists. . #4: Twitter Lists #7: Alltop.