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Curated by Beth Kanter
John Hadyon has a post about content curation as part of your Facebook Page Content Strategy. While I think the word "Lazy" does a disservice - becauase it can easily encourage people to lapse into mindless consumption and sharing.
The point is that you way not need to feed your content channels more than once a day ... so before you feel the need to share, share, share -- think carefully about the quality of content you are sharing.
And, be sure that you select the best, provide context, and annotation.
With that said, broadly searching (manually) on social media sites may not bring you best stuff - and may actually be more time consuming! That is unless you get to know your sources.
He suggests looking forgaging for content on these sites:
Pinterest: You can get a lot of noise if you use use the broad categories, you need to spend a little bit of time upfront looking at people's collections and only follow the relevant ones.
Twitter: Keywords on Twitter don't work if they are too general. Best to know your sources, and create Twitter lists of the people who tweet primarily on your topic of choice. Sometimes particular hashtags have a high signal to noise ratio and may be worth folling.
For news, that's a big - it depends.
Robin Good has a great map of a couple of news sites - it is important to pick the one that is likely to have news that of interest to your community. It might be on LinkedIn http://www.mindmeister.com/134760952/news-content-discovery-tools-2012-by-robin-good
Finally, I think the advice about pulling content from other pages is a must do idea. You can log in as your page and look at the feed. If you're short on time, you might create a culled list of pages that consistently post great content and check thoses. Remember, that if you find stuff from other pages to tag them and give them credit.
If you're lazy, perhaps you should be a content curator - it does take some work - but it doesn't have to overwhelming or time consuming. It is a matter of slowing and having thoughtful consumption while sharpening your critical filtering skills.
Content and Curation for Nonprofits
This is my basic curated list for beginners. I've annotated links on the why, what, practice, tips, and tools. It is a cross disciplinary view on content curation, with links from thought leaders in nonprofits, business, scholarly, education, and journalism. 
Steven Rosenbaum has an interesting article on Fast Company, outlining the reasons why curation is here to stay and the importance that curators will play in your information consumption diet.
He writes: "...So anyone who steps up and volunteers to curate in their area of knowledge and passion is taking on a Herculean task.
They're going to stand between the web and their readers, using all of the tools at their disposal to "listen" to the web, and then pull out of the data stream nuggets of wisdom, breaking news, important new voices, and other salient details.
It's real work, and requires a tireless commitment to being engaged and ready to rebroadcast timely material.
While there may be an economic benefit for being a "thought leader" and "trusted curator," it's not going to happen overnight.
Which is to say, being a superhero is often a thankless job.
The growth in content, both in terms of pure volume and the speed of publishing, has raised some questions about what best practices are in the curation space."
He also has some pretty straightforward advice on what, as a curator, you should never do:
"1. If you don't add context, or opinion, or voice and simply lift content, it's stealing.
2. If you don't provide attribution, and a link back to the source, it's stealing.
3. If you take a large portion of the original content, it's stealing.
4. If someone asks you not to curate their material, and you don't respect that request, it's stealing.
5. Respect published rights. If images don't allow creative commons use, reach out to the image creator--don't just grab it and ask questions later."
And he definitely has a point on all of these.
Recommended. 7/10
Read the full article: http://www.fastcompany.com/1834177/content-curators-are-the-new-superheros-of-the-web?partner=rss Via Robin Good 
Gdecugis found this great piece and wrote this:
"The creator of Brain Pickings on how to think outside the corporate box."
An interview with Maria Popova : fascinating to see how her routine works for her. Unsurprisingly, it involves a huge amount of reading.
It's also interesting to see the criteria she uses for what she'll just tweet vs what she'll pick up for her blog.
From Beth Kanter (http://www.bethkanter.org). This made me curious about exactly what those criteria were. Here's the bit:
What I pick for my blog and what I pick for Twitter are different things. One thing that is true for both, by and large, is that it has to feel like something that leaves you with more than just a moment of gawking. There are really cool or funny videos, or visually stunning photos, and that's fine, but none of them really give you more when you close that tab, you know? I try to find stuff that a little bit, in a tiny way changes how you see something about the world. With Brain Pickings, especially, whenever I look at a piece of content. I think "Can I add something to it? Can I add some depth and context and background to really make it worth featuring?" Or do I just do what Jeff Jarvis calls "do-what-you-do-best-and-link-to-the-rest," and just tweet it instead? That's always the litmus test. Is there something that I can say. If I can pull in pieces of older content or something else that connects different disciplines or different ideologies, then I will write an article about it.
I do the same, except if I pick something for my blog is might be compilation of what I tweet.
Via gdecugis 
This piece was written by Chris McConnell for his blog. I thought this article had great information but there's so much it needs to be curated:-)
Excerpt:
There’s so much information online just begging to be curated: news, social media, images, video, websites… the list goes on. Reading great content from my favorite blogs and websites is one of my favorite things but you have to be able to harness it so you have what you need at your fingertips.
Here are some highlights:
**Content gathering and personalized newsfeeds
**trapit **paper.li **curatedby **kurat **scoopit
**iPad Curation
**Flipboard (one of my favorites) **Pulse **News360 **Taptu
**Social Media Curation
**storify **The Tweeted Times **Keepstream **TweetMag **Newsme
**Website Bookmarking and Collection tools
**utopic **zootool **BagTheWeb **Pinboard
Topic Pages
**Alltop **Wavli **In-A-Gist
Curated by Jan Gordon covering "Content Curation, Social Business and Beyond"
Read full article here: [http://bit.ly/xxsN7M] Via janlgordon 
Robin Good curated this article and provided the following summary and commentary:
: Maria Popova has just launched a classy and laudable initiative, focused on increasing awareness and in highlighting the importance of honoring always where or via who you have got to a certain article, report, video or image.
Credit and attribution are not just a "formal" way to comply with rules, laws and authors but an incredibly powerful emebddable mechanism to augment findability, discovery, sinergy and collaboration among human being interested in the same topic.
She writes: "In an age of information overload, information discovery — the service of bringing to the public’s attention that which is interesting, meaningful, important, and otherwise worthy of our time and thought — is a form of creative and intellectual labor, and one of increasing importance and urgency.
A form of authorship, if you will.
Yet we don’t have a standardized system for honoring discovery the way we honor other forms of authorship and other modalities of creative and intellectual investment, from literary citations to Creative Commons image rights."
For this purpose Curator's Code was created.
Curator's Code is first of all "a movement to honor and standardize attribution of discovery across the web" as well as a web site where you can learn about the two key types of attribution that we should be using:
Each one has now a peculiar characterizing icon that Curator's Code suggests to integrate in your news and content publication policies.
Additionally and to make it easy for anyone to integrate these new attribution icons in their work, Curator's Code has created a free bokkmarklet which makes using proper attribution a matter of one clic.
Hat tip to Maria Popova and Curator's Code for launching this initiative.
Whether or not you will sign Curator's Code pledge, become an official web site supporting it, or adopt its bookmarklet instantly is not as important as the key idea behind it: by providing credit and attribution to pieces of content you find elsewhere, you not only honestly reward who has spent time to create that content, but you significantly boost the opportunity for thousands of others to connect, link up to, discover and make greater sense of their search for meaning.
Read Maria Popova introductory article to Curator's Code: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/03/09/curators-code/
How to use the Curator's bookmarklet: http://vimeo.com/38243275
Healthy. Inspiring. 9/10
Curator's Code official web site: http://curatorscode.org/
N.B.: Too bad that the Curator's Code bookmarklet doesn't work with Scoop.it, as the one excludes the other. But you could save the two codes for the special attribution characters in a text note and copy and paste whicever you need. Given the need for simplicity and integration this is not an ideal solution but I am sure that between Maria and Guillaume at Scoop.it they will find a way to make this work easily for all. Maria and Guillaume: what do you say?
Note from Beth Kanter: I originally discovered this post ᔥ Barbara Bray but traced it back to the original source Robin Good to rescoop it because I think it is important to give credit to the curator who discovered it. To do this takes a little bit of extra time but it slows me down so I read the post, understand it, and give credit to the curator and source.
What about you? Do you rescoop it from the collection where your found it or do you look for the original curator who discovered it and give credit there?
Via Robin Good
Curated by Beth Kanter John Hadyon has a post about content curation as part of your Facebook Page Content Strategy. While I think the word "Lazy" does a disservice - becauase it can easily encourage people to lapse into mindless consumption and sharing. The point is that you way not need to feed your content channels more than once a day ... so before you feel the need to share, share, share -- think carefully about the quality of content you are sharing. And, be sure that you select the best, provide context, and annotation. With that said, broadly searching (manually) on social media sites may not bring you best stuff - and may actually be more time consuming! That is unless you get to know your sources. He suggests looking forgaging for content on these sites: Pinterest: You can get a lot of noise if you use use the broad categories, you need to spend a little bit of time upfront looking at people's collections and only follow the relevant ones. Twitter: Keywords on Twitter don't work if they are too general. Best to know your sources, and create Twitter lists of the people who tweet primarily on your topic of choice. Sometimes particular hashtags have a high signal to noise ratio and may be worth folling. For news, that's a big - it depends. Robin Good has a great map of a couple of news sites - it is important to pick the one that is likely to have news that of interest to your community. It might be on LinkedIn http://www.mindmeister.com/134760952/news-content-discovery-tools-2012-by-robin-good Finally, I think the advice about pulling content from other pages is a must do idea. You can log in as your page and look at the feed. If you're short on time, you might create a culled list of pages that consistently post great content and check thoses. Remember, that if you find stuff from other pages to tag them and give them credit. If you're lazy, perhaps you should be a content curator - it does take some work - but it doesn't have to overwhelming or time consuming. It is a matter of slowing and having thoughtful consumption while sharpening your critical filtering skills. This is hilarious! Worth a few minutes to listen and laugh. Tx to Noland Hishino for sharing it. Curated by Beth Kanter I discovered this slide show, "Data-Driven Journalism" from another scoop.it collection on the digital newspaper by Johane Dorval. The process described is content curation, plus visualization plus storytelling. Content curators use these same skills. 
Curated by Beth Kanter I have been exploring Pinterest as a curation tool. I did a search on "curator" and found this visual, but wondered whether it really encapsulates the definition today? The visual is inspired by Rohit's thoughts on curation from 2011: The Five Models of Content Curation http://www.rohitbhargava.com/2011/03/the-5-models-of-content-curation.html Here is how Rohit's thinking has evolved on content curation - a post from 2010 for Robin Good, plus a link back to his 2009 post. One thing I discovered (by subjective observation) is that many users are not really curating. They are aggregating lots of images. There is a "repin" button - like the Twitter RT button. There seems to be a lot of user behavior that people just repin the visuals into collections but do not provide context or conversation. The interface design does automatically document where the original image/visual was found. I did find one collection that was from educator that was looking at curation tools and even here I noticed some entries not well citied or contextualized. http://pinterest.com/web20education/curation-web20education-by-http-xeeme-com-ecurator/ This has made me feel strongly that my focus of my talk for the socialmedia for nonprofits conference in NYC in two weeks should be on the practice of curation. 
My roundup of pinterest for nonprofits A Storify plugin for self-hosted WordPress blogs should prove attractive to those nonprofits keen to publish their content in a wider context of other views and resources.
Robin Good curated these videos on how to use scoop.it. Good to have a resource if you're doing workshops on curation, participants can use for self-paced tutorials.
Robin's notes:
Learn all of the basics of Scoop.it and discover all of its key features and options.
This new set of nine video tutorials provides all of the information you need to familiarize yourself with Scoop.it content curation functionalities.
3) Connect your Social Media accounts
4) Analytics
5) Look & Feel Customization Part 1
6) Look & Feel Customization Part 2
7) Co-curate - Collaborative Curation
9) Host Scoop.it on your website domain
Or watch them all back-to-back (about 9 mins) from this playlist I have created for you: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLECAC8F2BEDB81424
Via Robin Good 
This great piece was written by Tim Kastelle - it is one of the best articles on curation, the observations and insights take this to a whole new level. So much to digest, lots to ponder about the possibilities that await us in 2012 and beyond.
Here are some of the highlights:
**"We create economic value out of information when we figure out an effective strategy that includes aggregating, filtering and connecting."
**"Filtering is what helps us deal with the vast amount of information available to us."
"...the real question is, how do we design filters that let us find our way through this particular abundance of information?
****And, you know, my answer to that question has been: the only group that can catalog everything is everybody." (Clay Shirky)
**We try to filter information so that we end up with something that is relevant to us – it helps us learn something, it helps us solve a problem, it helps us develop a new hypothesis about the world around us.
**These are all connections – and this is what really drives value creation.
**However, we can’t connect without some filtering going on. So filtering is important, and it’s a term that includes several different sub-types. I can think of at least five forms of filtering.
...we can use these ideas about filtering to help with business model innovation by changing where it takes place in the value network.
**One of Shirky’s points is that since Gutenberg, the economic logic of publishing required publishers (of books, music, movies) to act as filters in order to maximise their investment.
**As publishing and filtering has shifted out to human networks, publishers no longer need to fill this role.
**Someone (or some network) needs to, and since that creates value, it’s something that can perhaps be monetised.
This piece was curated by Robin Good brief commentary by Jan Gordon
Check this video: http://vimeo.com/8748509
Read the full article by Tim Kastelle: http://timkastelle.org/blog/2010/04/five-forms-of-filtering Via Robin Good, janlgordon |
Robin Good: Surfmark is a new content curation service introducing some innovative and forward-looking features.
Surfmark in fact provides not only standard capabilities to easily capture, collect and organize content from any web page, but it adds intelligently alternative display formats to allow the exploration of such collections in multiple ways.
Another key innovative feature of Surfmark is its ability to generate bibliographies and summaries of content collections.
Surfmark allows social collaborative curation, history of all edits made, and the ability to share publicly or keep a collection private.
Collections can be downloaded in PDF or text formats and all pages saved in a collection are fully preserved with all the formatting and links intact so that you can refer back to exactly what you saw.
Free to use.
FAQ: http://blog.surfmark.net/surfmark-help/
Try out and more info: http://www.surfmark.com/
(thanks to Ana Cristina Pratas for discovering this) Via Robin Good 
Online chat with Idealware and NTEN about content curation strategy research results and discussion about content curation for nonprofits. This is an online conteste to encourage content curators. They are asked to share their content curation philsophy, collections, and ideas. However, it is a "vote for me contest" - wouldn't it be better to have judges curate and select the best one? 
Much of Buddhist philosophy centers around this same idea, this balance between what’s being phrased as “intention” and “attention” – our intentional curiosity about knowledge and growth, and our choice of where to focus our awareness, what to pay attention to. So that, I think, is the role of information curators: They are our curiosity sherpas, who lead us to things we didn’t know we were interested in until we, well, until we are. Until we pay attention to them — because someone whose taste and opinion we trust points us to them, and we integrate them with our existing pool of resources, and they become a part of our networked knowledge and another LEGO piece in our combinatorial creativity. So if information discovery plays such a central role in how we fuel our creativity and thus in our creative output, then information discovery is a form of creative labor in and of itself. An absolute must read, from Maria Popova, master curator. Curation is not only a necessity to make sense of the web, it is the path to explore your own creativity : How we choose to pay attention, and relate to information and each other shapes who we become, shapes our creative destiny Truly inspiring. Via axelletess 
From Beth Kanter: I found these visual notes from the SXSW panel called "The Curators and the Curated" via ᔥ Guillaume Decugis http://bit.ly/AjmU3T scoop.it summary in storify. Most important resource shared (and I scooped an excellent summary from Robin Good) is The Curator's Code - a simple way to attribute discovery as a form of creation. There's a lot to digest in these drawings and tweets, makes me wish I was in the room to hear it live or that there was a live stream or video (couldn't fine one) A standout quotes for me: "Good curators are looking to grow themselves through their own curosity." "When you don't have to worry about traffic, you can spend time researching the obscure." - Popova "The tyranny of the new" Here's another scoop by Guiallaume Decugis that includes the PPT slides by Margot Bloomstein and GD's notes. Observations from Beth: I need to reserarch how GD embedded the slideshare and storify into his scoop.it ...
From Beth: I'm so excited about this feature and really grateful for Jan for pointing it out. Really good for us curators.
---------------
Jan Gordon: This is a post after my own heart, brought to my attention by gdecugis, thanks Guillaume, you know I love Scoopit, glad to spread the word about this winning duo, Pinterest and Scoopit.
Feel free to visit my other topic, Pinterest Watch to learn more about this social network
Here's my commentary based on my experience of using Scoopit and Pinterest
To me, Pinterest and Scoopit go hand and hand. They are both visual and it's important to consider if you're on Scoopit already or thinking about it, expressing yourself on both platforms, (if it makes sense for your business) because it can be very powerful.
Here are some of the reasons it can help your business:
Scoopit is a platform that showcases your expertise, share your hobbies and other interests through content in a beautiful format. It is part of your online personna and it's a vibrant community I have met some wonderful people here.
Pinterest is also a community with some of the same people from Scoopit and many others, (new people are joining everyday). Linking your posts from Scoopit to your pins on Pinterest not only drives traffic to your scoopit site and visa versa but those people can see another side of you that you can't express there.
Pinterest is like a delicious menu of visuals that captivate and attract people to you. I have put all my business boards at the top and my interest boards underneath them.
Pinterest gives people the ability to see who you are beyond your posts. If you're a brand, this is where you can create an online story of text and visuals that gives consumers points of entry through common interests. It's a brilliant way to do business.
I could go on and on but I'll let you see for yourself how I've combined Scoopit and Pinterest together which continues to produce unbelievable results, increase in traffic and brand new relationships from both sites.
Commentary by Jan Gordon covering "Pinterest Watch"
See my pinterest site here: [http://pinterest.com/jangordon/] - Click on the images and they lead you right back to my Scoopit topics.
Read post here: [http://blog.scoop.it/en/2012/02/24/you-can-now-share-your-scoops-on-pinterest/] Via janlgordon, Robin Good I'm teaching workshops on social media to ngos in the Middle East in a few weeks. Need to remix some of my metaphors for content curation - can't really use Wine Sommelier because they don't drink wine. What are some other metaphors you use for content curation? Interview by Howard Rheingold with Henry Lowood about curation Robin Good curated the video and you can read his thoughts here 
Curated by Beth Kanter Robin Good did this interview my friend Micah Sifry, co-founder of the Personal Democracy Forum. Micah's take on why it is important: fighting the filter bubble created by Google - and it encourages data literacy or content curators skills. This is similar view of Clay Johnson, author of Information Diet http://www.bethkanter.org/info-diet/ Quote from the transcript: The problem is is that a lot of people just want superficial information. They are not intense news followers. The ones who are, the Internet is this wondrous blessing. I watch my son, who's almost 18, and he will just spend hours on Wikipedia. He's very happy jumping from reading article to article, and he's filling his head with information. He's not just reading the two paragraphs. Developing that taste for deep knowledge is a different problem. We're not going to solve it simply because we have the world's best library at our fingertips. That taste has to be inculcated I think much earlier in how we educate our children, and the challenge is to make our children learn how to search well, and how to pull information together well, as oppose to memorize. Too much of education is memorization and regurgitation, instead of analysis, think for yourself, ask questions, and then know how to find the answers. Link: http://www.masternewmedia.org/online-curation-the-what-why-and-how-an-interview-with-micah-sifry/#ixzz1kQboZmK1
Pinterest is a virtual pinboard where you can organize and share images and videos you discover on the web. This my curated list of how-tos for Pinterest and nonprofits. Starts you with the basics, why, examples, ideas for content, tips, and going deeper. Spend an hour reading these posts and you'll be up to speed quickly! 
Another great find from Robin Good I dug deeper into the report that the video summarized: The report is dense and it is written for coporations looking at selecting vendors for internal social collaboration platforms. So, alot of isn't relevant for nonprofits. The video, however, as Robin notes, is useful for the big picture. But, on page 12, I found an interesting conceptual idea about the importance of social context creation that help overcome information overload. It talks about the social graph. It resonated with some early work of Rashmi Simha about social software design in the early days (see deck slides 22-30) http://www.slideshare.net/rashmi/designing-for-social-sharing-3569 In the early stages of social (think 200 3-2006), we socialized around object collection. We found other people through our interests. For me this happened by using delicious - I connected with people by looking at their collections and following them when there a common interest. I also used this strategy with Flickr. Next phase was the "Social Graph" - that connected to idea/info through our friends. This phase happened when Facebook opened the gates. We discovered stuff through our friends -- or the "social graph" - a term that started being used around 2007. (http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/2007/09/how-to-avoid-so.html) - and discussion about open social graphs (http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/opensocial/) In the report, on page 12, here is how the social graph is explained in the context of an Enteprise collaobration model Divergent Phase: Social information appears but it is siloed Convergent Phase: Information is more accessible but difficult to search Navigational Phase: Information in graph form becomes integrated and navigable. Key idea: Context creates relevance. Refers to this post in TechCrunch - http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/03/the-age-of-relevance Several of the newest social platforms create "interest graphs" a map for navigating to subjects and people of interest. The Interest graph is a superset of the social graph, a people map. The interest graph includes people, things, and their linkages and it helps users navigate the information thicket. How: Interest graph will consists of relationships between people and between business issues/workflow and people. Self-managed by these to find what's relevant. The addition of social layer and the ability to strucutre that information along other information a "graph form" are what provide the additiona context. With this additional context, organizations can confront and reduce information overload. Insight: This has been my approach to curating for years -- creating collections based on: (1) What is the best way to understand the topic (2) Who are the leading thinkers (3) What are the best blog posts, web sites, articles and books To this, I'm adding visuals ..... How do you change the organization's behavior so that people are becoming curators of interest graphs? Robin's Notes:
In issue 3 of PwC’s Tech Forecast there is a great video illustrating what is going to change in the near future when it comes to finding the right information.
"The Navigational phase of online information is just now emerging.
Within three to five years, finding more of the information we need--not to mention opportunities for more effective collaboration--will become possible. Social tools will help."
The animated video explains how making network and interest-based connections more visible will allow easier and more effective filtering and navigation of information spaces in the near future.
Insightful. 8/10
Via Robin Good 
Curated by Beth Kanter Stowe Boyd reacts to a post by Jeremiah Owyang about the end of the golden age of technology bloggers. http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2011/12/27/end-of-an-era-the-golden-age-of-tech-blogging-is-over/ Stowe says it's about time we've entered a new era of web media and points to three big trends, including curation. Here's what he says: Social learning, innovation, and curation — Our level of social connection has grown to the point where new ideas can travel much more quickly and economically. The best ideas — and their originators — will rise to the top more quickly, and as a result, Pagel maintains that we have a lessened need for innovators, and at the same time we are learning more quickly than before. I believe that this is the complementary trend allied to the increased perceived need for good curators: the value of discernment — which ideas are more useful — has gone up, while the value of creating new ideas has gone down. He also quotes Brian Solis point that we are content creators, curators, or consumers. Stowe suggests that everyone is a curator. After all, every person is curating for at least one person, themselves — so I consider it a cardinality distinction: curating for one is not appreciably different than curating for two or ten. All curators — of whatever degree of discernment — started by curating for themselves. But is everyone a good curator? |
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Excellent Beth thanks. Hope you are going to enter our Content Curation Contest. Details on Scoop.it http://www.scoop.it/t/content-curation-contest and here is where the form lives: http://www.atlanticbt.com/contentcurationcontest
Great scoop and hope you enter. Thanks, Marty