Two new content discovery features introduced by Scoop.it:
"Ever since we started working on Social Media - actually before we even thought of Scoop.it - we've realized how much content discovery and content publishing were really two sides of the same coin. Working on one is the way to enhance the other." 
Giuseppe Mauriello: today Keemix launched its complete curation solution for individuals & businesses to the public in a beta version. I received invitation as beta tester. It is promising.
From official website: "Keemix allows you to gather loved content from the web, mix it into your own custom-designed pages, and share it to inspire your friends and colleagues. Keemix makes curation fun and accessible to everybody.
***Gather content on the fly: just click on the bookmarklet, select the object you want to mix, add your thoughts and voila!
***Mix content into your own tailor-made magazines: become an editor-in-chief ! For each of your passions, create a dedicated page, design it as you want and showcase your favorite topics with editorialized content.
***Inspire your readers: mixes can be private or public, and administrated individually or collaboratively. Keemix is tightly integrated with all major social networks and broadcasts your content through feeds or newsletters."
From blog post:
Here are some features: - All pages are now public, publishers can share their mixes with anybody; - A brand new homepage displaying featured mixes and mixersCollaboration! - You can now add publishers to a mix and collaborate. You can even create private mixes to collaborate with friends/coworkers/teams..; - Edit your mix design and layout; - Receive notifications by mail; - “Vanity URLs”. Get your own profile URL; - New types of objects : we added a bunch of new supported platforms, and even new objects. For example, you can now capture any embed from soundcloud.com..."
Try out it here: http://keemix.com
Read blog post here: http://blog.keemix.com/news/its-alive-keemix-is-now-in-beta Via Giuseppe Mauriello 
An Excellent 5 Point "How To" from the Curation Nation author.
"If you're a curator looking for some boundaries in what feels like the Wild West, here are five best practices to consider."
Steve Rosenbaum - www.curationnation.org 
"Curation. That one word that everyone is increasingly talking about. It might even be considered the “it word” of this new year. But, beyond the buzzword, curation is a powerful means to become a trusted resource and open a meaningful dialogue with your users; the interest graph is the real social connection." 
"In an attention economy, a gap exists between an abundance of contents, signals, paths, and a very limited time to filter all these data. Some digital tools try to help us filter all these chaotic contents. But until now, curation was either a high-level skill (because it requires a strong knowledge + a lot of time to structure for example your Pearltrees), either very disappointing as automatic curation tools are sometimes very biased or partial. Curation as a concept is one of the keys for any business." 
A very good blog post by Felix Salmon on what technologists understand faster than journalists : the idea of "stack", the key to embrace the shift in media now :
"Technologists, on the other hand, intuitively understand the idea of “the stack”, which is the nerd version of “the platform” that all entrepreneurs and media gurus love to talk about incessantly. Essentially, they have spent their entire careers building things on other things. That happens in legacy media, too, sometimes: cable channels, for instance, live on a distribution platform owned by someone else. But print media in the US has historically been highly vertically integrated: the same company would create the content, edit it, print it, and distribute it directly to its customers’ front doors."
Mathew Ingram already warned media publishers with a similar thought: it's a data platform.
Now, when we think about these stacks, we feel they are not just creation + sharing. Yes, content creation is one stack and - as Dave Karp points out - it is synergetic with the sharing stack which amplifies it. But another stack is essential here: curation.
Curation is not just sharing but brings context and meaning. Isn't it the missing piece of the puzzle (or the missing stack) in social media thus far? Via axelletess While at LeWeb last week, I was interviewed by Michelle Chmielewski to discuss on curation with Jean-Marie Hulot, Fotopedia's founder, a great iPad App that lets you browse great curated collections of beautiful photos (try it if you haven't yet!).
We tried to come back on the need for curation but also where it's going as a trend and the business models behind it. Via gdecugis 
A major redesign and rebranding of StumbleUpon refreshes the site with a new look, more tailored content, and customized ways to explore what's on the Web. 
This a great blog post from Rian van der Merwe , describing the noise you can find on the web now, and especially content just created for SEO purposes or advertisers. As many, Rian is tired of it.
"I used to believe that if you write with passion and clarity about a topic you know well (or want to know more about), you will find and build an audience. I believed that maybe, if you’re smart about it, you could find a way for some part of that audience to pay you money to sustain whatever obsession drove you to self-publishing"
The Scoop.it team can't agree more with this vision... Via axelletess 
I think one should look at (i) the quality of one's curation work and (ii) how well this translates in building a qualified audience for you and (iii) how this converts into measurable benefits for your brand (NB: small or big, we all have a brand). 
Answer (1 of 35): Mysyndicaat.com has been my first love and I have been curating the news for MasterNewMedia.org with it since 2005. 
Good overview of the required steps to build a properly thought-out content curation strategy for a company.
From the article:
Step 1: Survey the Competitive Landscape
Step 3: Survey your audience interest
It’s easy though to get stuck on a topic that passes two of the tests but not all three.
Via Robin Good, Marc Lucas |
Excerpted from article: "To learn more about the importance of curation in today’s fashion industry, here are 3 emerging fashions startups in New York City and Los Angeles.
1) Material Wrld (http://materialwrld.com/) Material Wrld is a New York City fashion startup founded by eager entrepreneurs Jie Zheng and Rie Yano.
“In Manhattan, we all have really small closets so we see this as an option to refresh your wardrobe,”. Material Wrld focuses on fashion bloggers, creative professionals, and style enthusiasts spanning college students, young professionals and new moms. “The ideal Material Wrld user is already showing off their style online through their blog, Instagram, Twitter, and other sites/apps,” says Rie.
2) Of a Kind (http://www.ofakind.com/) This NYC fashion startup has been bringing high-end, exclusive fashion to the masses. Inspired by sites like 20×200, Of a Kind combines storytelling and exclusivity to launch 3 new items in limited editions each week.
When asked how the founders stay abreast of fashion trends, they cites 3 sources: The Business of Fashion newsletter, a daily roundup of everything happening in the fashion space; Uncommon Update, which curates news from the luxury, interactive, and media industries; and the EDITD blog, which pulls together a ton of data from the fashion industry.
3) Closet Rich (http://closetrich.com/) The super cool site Closet Rich features amazing curated vintage finds from the closet rich fortunates in Hollywood. The former fashion PR rep and Zoe Report staffer now goes into her Closet Rich clients’ homes — the majority of which work in the fashion and entertainment space as designers, editors, actresses, etc. — and digs through their racks for re-sellable items like dresses, shoes, bags and more.
“It’s very curated; I don’t want site visitors to have to shuffle through junk or nonsense,” says Elizabeth. “I love really interesting pieces, dresses or jackets with a wow factor but basics also sell really well.” The items that don’t end up on her site are donated to various charities...."
Read full article here: http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/05/12/crazy-about-curation-5-american-girls-3-fashion-startups/
Via Giuseppe Mauriello 
In today’s world, everything is mobile. Sharing photos, tweets, status updates and check-ins wouldn’t be half as fun if we couldn’t do it from anywhere our busy lives took us. Though long form content creation will remain difficult to mobilize,... 
Robin Good: Amber Naslund, at Brass Tack Thinking blog, has a great article touching on the importance of curation and on the danger of easily selling personal self-expression and serendipitous re-sharing of other people's content with true content curation.
And she is so damn right about this.
Here a few key highlights from her article:
" 1) To me – and by definition – curation requires conscious thought with the purpose of adding value, context, or perspective to a collection of things.
It’s deliberate work, gathering things together for a reason and lending a keen editing eye to those assets, whether it be pieces of art or pieces of writing.
...
2) Turning your Twitter feed into a clockwork-scheduled stream of all the stuff you find in your RSS feed is not curation, it’s distribution.
And since collecting and redistributing content is arguably easier than creating it, everyone does it.
Which serves to create a great deal of noise, and as we’ve lamented for some time now, it becomes increasingly difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff and home in on information resources that are consistently valuable, and favor mindful selection and sharing over optimizing a feed to populate a bunch of links and drive traffic or gain fans and followers.
3) Can curation be accomplished online? I think so.
But it’s rarely what we actually see happening when we immerse ourselves in social networks, and it’s not what we’re doing when we click the “share” button over and over again.
...
4) The business case for curating content has long been that you can become an expert resource for others, a trusted source of information or expertise that sets you apart.
But becoming a trusted source of information implies a willingness and ability to apply filters, to have exacting standards, to discern the good from the simply popular, the valuable from the gimmicked and hyped.
Which requires work. A lot of it.
Not just an app and the ability to put your collection and distribution on autopilot."
Thank you Amber, you are so damn right.
Insightful. 9/10
(Image credit: http://Streetfilms.org) Via Robin Good 
It seems in the space of just a few weeks Pinterest has risen from a little-known site to a front-of-mind social media platform. It’s certainly now considered one that should be in the tool box of any savvy social media pro. 
"As you know, we constantly want to improve the quality of Scoop.it and we\'ve introduced a few changes this morning as part of an update to the platform." 
This is an interesting article by Byron White, Founder of ideaLaunch. I excerpted from it:
We’ve all heard the expression Content is King. After all, content is the fuel behind the social media revolution currently sweeping the Web. Close examination of the art world, however, offers a solid case that curation, not content, may in fact be the ruler online.
When it comes to content marketing, developing a content strategy for your company starts by curating your existing content assets, along with researching the assets of the competition.
Through the content curation process, you learn how much content you need, how frequently you need to publish it and which channels of distribution (social especially) are required to capture organic market share. The skill and savvy of a Content Strategist is equally as important as your Director of Marketing these days. Getting the right content to the right prospects at the right time is the key to content marketing success.
Who will win the content curation war of the web? The race to transform to high-quality publishing is officially on. It’s time to gather ideas, develop stories and publish quality content that keeps readers (and customers) coming back for more.
But in the end, it’s not content that’s king. Instead, it’s the impact that the content has on us long after we pass it by. Great content is hard to create, curate, optimize and distribute. But when it all comes to together, it is THE catalyst that makes your business better. And better than that.
Curated by Giuseppe Mauriello [read full article http://j.mp/sPZqzu] Via Giuseppe Mauriello 
Pinterest is capturing the attention of women in droves. If you're a woman, you'll love it. If you're a marketer, you should be paying attention. For sure. by Noah Brier
"The idea of "buying media" always struck me as a bit odd. If anything, what brands have been doing is renting: Paying the media owner to borrow the audience's attention for a short period of time. In the pre-internet days, rental was pretty much the only game in town and that was just fine." 
Excerpt from article:
Blog readers have a myriad of reading options for almost every topic you can think of. In fact, within your niche, potential customers may be enjoying blog posts written by your competitors while they ignore your blog like the plague.
There are 12 ways for your blog to survive and thrive.
1. Be the best teacher in your niche... (content curation strategy) 2. Be more personal than the others... 3. Be funnier than the others... 4. Say what everyone else thinks... 5. Be the expert on a specific sub-niche... (content curation strategy) 6. Have a bigger vision... 7. Be more extreme than the others... 8. Be more creative than the rest... 9. Cross-pollinate better than the others...
10. Be the best curator of meaningful content: Find the best information that others have written and posted online—the best articles, charts, tables, infographics, videos, or pictures. Collect it in a logical, easy-to-use navigational structure on your blog.
11. Be the news source for your industry... (content curation strategy) 12. Work harder than the rest...
[read full article http://j.mp/tgsQ0N] Via Giuseppe Mauriello 
Answer (1 of 2): I'll promote our stuff (but somehow you seemed to ask for it ;-): Scoop.it is used by a growing number of SMB's and startups. 
In a world where content reigns supreme this is a tool that needs to be taken seriously, curated content presented correctly offers the opportunity to provide added value within existing digital channels, to promote expertise and knowledge in a specific field and to take ownership of a subject. Via Marc Lucas 
What is Content Curation? Content curation is the process of sorting through the vast amounts of content on the web and presenting it in a meaningful and organized way around a specific theme. The work involves sifting, sorting, arranging, and publishing information. A content curator cherry picks the best content that is important and relevant to share with their community. It isn’t unlike what a museum curator does to produce an exhibition: They identify the theme, they provide the context, they decide which paintings to hang on the wall, how they should be annotated, and how they should be displayed for the public.
Moreover Beth Kanter explains other interesting points into her article about the process of curation and some curation tools.... [read full article http://j.mp/pDHNrP] Via Giuseppe Mauriello |
