This is an interesting piece highlighting the dangers of relying solely on Content Curation and giving up Content Creation for Content Marketers.

As I told him in the comments, I disagree with Frank Dale's title though (which doesn't reflect his conclusion but I also like provocative headlines ;-) that content curation is usually bad. It is usually good but usually not enough. For the following reasons:

1. Curation is often a good starting point. Content Marketing takes time and the ROI is not instantaneous and can be slow to measure. Content Curation helps you get started more easily, particularly if you're a SMB.

2. Content Curation helps you identify where you should invest in Content Marketing creation: spotting these messages that will set you apart, these areas that not many people cover.

3. Content Curation is also an expression means: don't stop at sharing links on Twitter but use the full opportunities given by content curation platforms like Scoop.it (and others like Storify for instance) to add your point of view. That is a form of creation which, we've found, is much more accessible than full-blown content creation and that nicely completes it.

As a matter of fact, I will actually curate this great piece myself. Before I move on to uploading my latestcreated presentation on SlideShare...

Deanna Dahlsad designed this simple decision-tree to help differentiate between different Content Curation platforms and which one you should use as a business user.

I found this interesting as it's one of the first ones I see that made this obvious and simple differentiation between the different platforms out there. I'm not sure I would describe Scoop.it as article-based (we obviously have large pictures, infographics, videos or SlideShare presentations that are not articles) but I can see where she's coming from and her intention: if the content you curate is not 100% image, "image-based eye-candy" is not enough.  

This is an interesting though worrying follow-up to the German issue Chuck also kindly suggested to me. Luckily, when reading the original news, it seems this initiative doesn't have much substance. I'd be surprised to see that go through as the Right to Quote is an essential element of European copyright law and pretty much equivalent to Fair Use here in the US. 

Where the problem becomes more complex is that that none of the Internet Content giants - Google in the first place but also Amazon or Apple - end up paying any serious taxes in Europe which makes a lot of people angry. Advertising revenue on Google Search doesn't bring much to any European countries. Amazon Kindle eBook sales? Apple's iTunes songs? No VAT for France nor Germany. 

As US Internet giants use loopholes of the EU to avoid paying any significant taxes while they generate significant revenue from European consumers, some lawmakers could be tempted to consider these dangerous remedies that would hurt freedom of speech and the Internet model.

Apparently, the Quora user who asked this question was looking for a Web service where he could hire a personnal Web assistant - a human being, he wouldn't trus an algorithm - to be that person. 

"So why don't you try to be that person?" started my answer.

"Nobody knows your interests better than you do and no one can make a judgement on what is relevant to them better.

Lack of time, right?"

Rest is on Quora but the short story is that I felt the new topic-centric model of social media, combined with Curation (like we have on Scoop.it), is precisely serving that goal: highly personalized information, curated by informed, expert and relevant human beings on a given topic.

Not sure if I agree with everything but Anil makes an interesting case for streams vs pages. He also makes a point when he says that blog feeds are limited because "you can't choose to follow just the music-related posts on my blog, ignoring the ones about technology."

That's another reason why don't need just streams to go faster, we also need to have them personalized according to our interests in a topic-centric model.

"If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery the founders of Pinterest must be blushing their asses off."

This is an interesting post by Erin Griffith on Pandodaily. Not just because she lists a number of interesting companies using a Pinterest-like design.

She makes a great point: just like Twitter and RSS (or is it email?) gave a stream-like design which spread to many apps, the column-based design (that Scoop.it also has - though in a larger format and actually before we had any idea of a site called Pinterest - there I said it!) is a great fit for content consumption.

This is something we've observed from our early days of developing content apps: Goojet - the previous mobile product that our team worked on before Scoop.it - had a stream-based design. We weren't happy with it and as we moved to the Web, we looked for a format that would help users quickly scan for the content they wanted on a curated page. The magazine format we came out with (kudos to our designer Thierry!) actually built on something very natural: what the human eye has been taught to read in decades of press magazine.

More fundamentally, it tells us Curation is not just a matter of substance: the format is important too. Museums show us that by the way they neatly layout paintings, highlight them beautifully and often are beautifully architectured themselves.

Image is a screenshot of http://pinteresti.st by http://www.roblord.org who had the idea of doing a Pinterest-like site of Pinterest-like sites ;-)

Digital Publishing Software Uberflip released today an infographic on Curation and Content Marketing that has some interesting data on what Content Marketers see as their key challenges and what their main objectives are when considering Content Curation.

This data is supported by other similar observations that show Content Marketers are now clearly identifying Content Curation as a way to establish thought leadership and increase brand visiblity while saving time compared to a Content Marketing strategy that would solely rely on Content Creation.

"We’re rethinking publishing and building a new platform from scratch. This is a preview." 

Interesting to see how Twitter co-founders' (Evan Williams & Biz Stone) new initiative - Medium - will develop into.

From what I could read - for instance on This Happened to Me - it seems to be a way to mix contributions from several authors on some editorialized collections. I set up a title, you can contribute.

A way for new bloggers/authors to find their voice by mixing it alongside famous ones?