This news note comes from&BI Intelligence,&Business Insider's research and and analysis service. The&charts and data featured here are available for download in the&BI&Intelligence&library.&Please sign up up for a free trial here. Pinterest is emerging as an early star&in social media-powered commerce.& In fact, Pinterest sent more traffic to e-commerce websites in 2013's first quarter than it did in the final holiday shopping quarter of 2012, according to&Monetate's quarterly e-commerce report.&Pinterest drove twice as much e-commerce traffic as Twitter, and had&the highest average order value among social media referrers, at $80.54.&

Source: businessinsider.com → | ∞ Permalink

Get awesome projects delivered to your inbox each week. Newsletters are sent out once a week and feature projects we love!

Source: kickstarter.com → | ∞ Permalink

As everyone in the world knows by now, Apple bumped the iPad's screen to retina-display density, quadrupling the number of pixels to a whopping 3.1 million. That's fantastic news for iPad owners—the display will be gorgeous—but it also means more headaches for designers and a potential blight on your bandwidth bill and download speed.&In bandwidth terms, pixels are heavy, and four times the pixels means four times the image size for bitmap images, give or take. If you want to take advantage of this gorgeous screen, every image you push down the wire is about to put on a ton of weight. That has implications in lots of places.

Source: globalmoxie.com → | ∞ Permalink

Big news: Posterous has been acquired by Twitter!

No shit. Great news!

Source: blog.posterous.com → | ∞ Permalink

We talk frequently about testing subject lines in email marketing to determine which is the best performing. We talk about doing multivariate testing to determine which creative is the best performing.

Setting up Google Analytics is nothing easy, and many times publisers' goals are not necessarily monetization, but simple metrics like improving click through rate, time on site/page, user or newsletter signups.

This article focuses on the subject line, because this is what decides someone to click the link from the newsletter you sent, but what happens next, does your content convert to whatever key metrics are important to you.

Source: whatcounts.com → | ∞ Permalink

This analysis about the Amazon Prime member service is really interesting, here are the stats:

Pros:

• Increase their purchases on Amazon from $400 a year to $900 a year after they join. (source)
• Spend 130% more than regular Amazon customers. (source)
• May be responsible for as much as 20% of Amazon's overall sales in the U.S. (source)
• 82% of Prime members buy on Amazon even if the item is less expensive somewhere else (source)
• 92% of Prime members plan to renew their membership. (source)

Cons:

• The Prime promotion grew Amazon’s shipping costs 55% to $4 billion last year, which is well over the $1.55 billion Amazon gets in shipping fees from customers. (source)
• Amazon spends more than $90 a year for each Prime customer, losing $11 annually for each subscriber. Of the $90, $55 comes from shipping costs and $35 comes from acquiring digital video content. (source)

Source: lukew.com → | ∞ Permalink

Six months ago my company hadn’t even launched. Last week we found ourselves being talked about everywhere in Britain — a full page story in The Sun, the country’s biggest newspaper, columns in most of the other nationals (both online and offline) and pickup in literally hundreds of regional newspapers, radio stations, trade publications and blogs. How? Simple: We used our strengths — the data we live and breathe every day — and released a survey of the best and worst cities to find a job in the U.K.

Some really good tips. Credibility is probably the most important to me here, without you can kill every chance you may have.

Source: gigaom.com → | ∞ Permalink

Pretty amazing iPad app. Forget everything else, make it easy to publish content online. No doubt 22 of the top 25 news companies are using Storify, including the White House and presidential candidates this year.

Source: scobleizer.com → | ∞ Permalink

2. Snip from your Mobile device by Email

To:&Your_Unique_Email@snip.it

Subject:&Facebook picks fight with Google over who is more evil

Body:

http://money.cnn.com/2012/01/23/technology/
google_plus_facebook/index.htm

@Tech News

Will be interesting to see how this skirmish turns out.

3. Use the Magic URL

snip.it/http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/09/technology/personaltech/is-this-living-room-big-enough-for-my-tv.html

Source: snip.it → | ∞ Permalink

Specializing in Affordable Short-Run Newspapers! Stop paying for the high cost of newsletters, leaflets or flyers! Be more professional and have more space with a newspaper! One local church profits on their newspaper—the very first day! Just one of the many benefits of a church newspaper. (less than 7 cents per paper) Teach your students not only about writing, communication, graphic arts and more, but raise much needed funds, too! (less than 10 cents per paper) Stop paying for the high cost of Menus! And stop paying for new ones when your costs go up. Turn your menu into a Newspaper!

That is going to take a lot of marketing to take off... but good concept. You could essentially curate the news and make a newspapers out of it that peope could get every Sunday morning. I would read the tech news of the week.

Source: makemynewspaper.com → | ∞ Permalink

Created by&Rand from Moz&and&Dharmesh from HubSpot. Should be interesting to watch.

Source: inbound.org → | ∞ Permalink

Glam Media launched this foodie.com which is bad news for any recipe site out there because, well it adds to the competition and Glam Media is a big fish with lots of money and quite a publisher base.

They paid $100k back in 2011 for the domain.

Source: foodie.com → | ∞ Permalink

Publishzer is a tool to create magazines out of content that inspires you.&&Billions of content pieces are created everyday on the internet and no way can I browse through all of them. So we asked to ourselves, wouldn’t it be nice to have a tool to organize and share most of this content. A place to save all the amazing articles, photos and videos that inspires you online. Beside now you do not have to be sticked on feeds to keep up with the news.

Read their story here.

Source: publishzer.com → | ∞ Permalink

Great insights on this video. Robin's been ahead of the curve for years.

Source: youtube.com → | ∞ Permalink

Best analysis i have found so far about the success Pinterest is dealing with. Note that they are still as of today, in private beta.

The goal is a simple one, you ideally want your users to be able to browse through hundreds or even thousands of images with relative ease.

One important step in this battle was “masonry” style layout, a fairly recent trend in web development named after the&jQuery Masonry&plugin. Pinterest uses its own scripts for this, but the concept is the same.

Websites&love&pagination because it increases their page views (more views = more money), but as a user it sucks [...]&To solve this problem, the Pinterest team looked to infinite scrolling [...]

It’s interesting to note that the Facebook News Feed, the epitome of website addiction, uses infinite scrolling.

Pinterest on the other hand, has actually found an audience largely with females.

[...]&in order to get people to actually use your digital content collection service, you have to make the act of collecting and sharing content a nearly effortless task. [...]&This creates a system where collection is super easy and encourages lots and lots of pinning.

Source: designshack.net → | ∞ Permalink

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is looking to develop a Web app that can continuously monitor social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace, as well as various news feeds. The organization’s goal is to improve its real-time intelligence when it comes to current and emerging security threats.

They even provided specifications for the web app!

[...] the 12-page Request for Information document (PDF, half the pages are oddly blank) reveals in detail what the organization is interested in.

Are you ready to get your social media activity monitored by the FBI?

Source: zdnet.com → | ∞ Permalink

1. The severity of need addressed by your product or service.

2. The number of people who have that need.

ideal...

The best—and often the most successful—ideas service a huge need for a huge number of people. These are highly profitable as Internet treasures. They practically sell themselves—and grow customers organically. They're viral because everyone who encounters them tells everyone else about this great new thing that makes your life better. The cost to acquire users can often be very low.

risky...

The next-best sort of start-up ideas service a huge need for a smaller number of people. These types of ideas can be highly profitable as enterprise businesses. [...]&"There's no software priced between $1,000 and $75,000. [...] The minute you charge more than $1,000, you need to get serious corporate sign-offs. You need a line item in their budget. You need purchasing managers and CEO approval and competitive bids and paperwork. [..] the cost of making one successful sale is going to average about $50,000. If you're sending salespeople out to customers and charging less than $75,000, you're losing money."

manageable...

The next-best ideas service a smaller need, but serve a huge number of people. These are profitable, and will likely throw off enough cash to be an awesome lifestyle business. Since they're less essential to customers, though, it can be tougher to make money running one.

not good...

The yet next-best ideas service a small need for a small number of people. Not to bear the bad news, but there just isn't enough firewood around to light this kind of blaze.

change your plan...

The worst ideas are the ones that don't solve a problem, or create more problems than they solve. People neither want it nor need it. Zero times zero equals zero. Many arrive on this path when they've focused too much on capabilities (i.e. "wouldn't it be cool if?") or what they want (i.e. to be rich, admired, successful), rather than what other people actually need or want.&Change the problem you're solving. Address a different, bigger need that more people have.

So there you go - where does your idea fit?

Source: inc.com → | ∞ Permalink

Twitter will unveil a series of new tools in the next few months, including sophisticated analytical tools, according to Erica Anderson, Twitter's manager for news and journalism.

Anderson said the analytical tools will better help publishers track the reach of tweets sent through the microblogging service. She made her comments Saturday at Columbia University's social media weekend in New York....

Anderson mentioned the new tools in passing when asked by an audience member about what was next. As described, the tools sound similar to analytical services provided by third-party firms likeHootSuite&and&SocialFlow.

She did not make it clear if the new analytical tools will include some features aimed at spotting trends.

This is a pretty big deal, something to watch closely.

Source: readwriteweb.com → | ∞ Permalink

This is a must read post, reading into the future of curation, newsjacking and business models...

Reblogging, on Tumblr, is so easy that the vast majority of Tumblr sites actually create little or no original content: they just republish content from other people. That’s a wonderful thing, for two reasons.

Firstly, it takes people who are shy about (or just not very good at) creating their own content, and gives them a great way to express themselves online.

And secondly, it acts as a natural amplifier for the people who do create original content — the average post on Tumblr gets reblogged nine times, and therefore reaches vastly more people than if it just sat on its original site waiting to be discovered by people visiting it directly.

...images nearly always do much better than words.

HuffPo is built on the idea that when stories are shared on Twitter or Facebook, that will drive traffic back to huffingtonpost.com, where it can then monetize that traffic by selling it to advertisers. But in future, the most viral stories are going to have a life of their own, being shared across many different platforms and being read by people who will never visit the original site on which they were published.

Source: cjr.org → | ∞ Permalink

What is Newsjacking?

It works like this: a news story breaks. Journalists are under pressure to update that story for the next edition or broadcast. So while the core of the story (the first paragraph) doesn’t change all that much, the second paragraph does, with additional details or insights or related quotes. That’s your chance to swoop in with something a reporter can use that’s related — but not necessarily essential — to the main story to freshen it up. Then your part of the story gets repeated as other media outlets pick up the story.

How to do it?

To make this work for you, you have to be fast.

Yes, it is a race for media attention.

Source: nonprofitmarketingguide.com → | ∞ Permalink

ICE wraps changes and user-generated inserts and deletes inline in the DOM and stores a sufficient amount of data about each change in node attributes.

We went with the “inline” approach because other implementations, which use placeholders and store data (really metadata about a change or the content of deleted text) outside of the editor or in a reserved DOM element, had nasty bugs. With all of the data packed into each node, we used ranges, position markers in the DOM, to examine the change nodes and get an understanding of the current context — for example, are we in an insert or delete, and is it by the same user? — before adding more changes.

Where can ICE be used?

ICE can be initialized to listen for events and track changes on any HTML element that is content-editable. Since it is not a text editor itself, ICE has to be plugged into other text editors that provide the core text editing functionality. So far, we have developed plugins for TinyMCE and WordPress. Over the last several months, with great success, we have been piloting the TinyMCE plugin in our newsroom.

demo: http://nytd.github.com/ice/demo/

Source: github.com → | ∞ Permalink

SwiftRiver is a platform that helps people make sense of a lot of information in a short amount of time.

Key points:

• In practice, SwiftRiver enables the filtering and verification of real-time data from channels like Twitter, SMS, Email and RSS feeds.
• helps you curate real-time data and analysis on any topic or interest relevant to you or your organization.
• setup streams that search for mentions of your brand or product online and manage social media campaigns (e.g. Twitter, SMS, email) from one dashboard.
• adds context to content using semantic analysis. Auto-categorize and classify email, twitter, text messages or news articles based on keywords.

Source: ushahidi.com → | ∞ Permalink

Project Argo is collection of tools and best practices for building topic-focused sites in WordPress.

The code and tutorials that you find on this site were designed to enable a pilot group of 12 NPR member stations to curate and report on news about specific topics of local interest.

The 12 sites the Argo suite was built for encompassed a range of topics, from climate change to local music. Overall, the sites share several key characteristics: frequent publishing, often with several posts a day; robust use of images; and a mix of curatorial and original material. Any topic-focused site that matches these criteria might benefit from our methods, themes or plugins.

Even with the right tools, it's not obvious how to reach a robust audience for a topic. In this section, we share what we've learned during Project Argo, and what we recommend to anyone taking on a topical blogging project.

Source: argoproject.org → | ∞ Permalink

Scoopinion is an effortless community-based news recommendation and spreading service. It has two parts: the&Scoopinion website&and theScoopinion Browser App, which works on Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.

Our algorithm interprets the little gestures of the way the article is read and points are given accordingly. Then the weight of the points are reduced in function of time to keep the content fresh. You read, you rate.

Very neat. I love the aspect of the reading analysis they do. Though it is kind of creepy, that means they know what you read and where you go...

Source: scoopinion.com → | ∞ Permalink

Ha. Smart move by News.me after the announcement that Twiiter not only bough Summify but closed it down, that should grow their user base by a couple thousands!

&

Source: blog.news.me → | ∞ Permalink

A lot of tech writers are currently going bananas about something they thought they heard Google CEO Larry Page say on the company's year-end earnings call: that Google Plus, just six months after its launch, has 54 million daily users. That may or may not be what Page hoped they would hear, but it's not actually what he said, and it's probably nowhere close to true.

Of course this did not go by a lot of tech news writers, and really what Page said was:

So 60% of the 90 million people who have created Google Plus profiles engage with some Google product every day, but that product could be Gmail, Google Documents, Google Calendar or even just Google Search.

Big difference!

Half of Facebook’s 800 million-plus users use Facebook every day. Sixty percent of Google Plus’s 90 million users use some Google product every day.

Source: forbes.com → | ∞ Permalink

U.S. advertisers spend nearly $40 billion a year for online advertisements, but 31% of their ads are never seen. That means $12.4 billion will be wasted on U.S. online ads this year. That's the average across all sites; on some sites, only 7% of the ads were "in-view," meaning 93% of them went unseen. That sounds ominous for the health of Web content. But ad spending is up by over 20% this year. Online ad spending will exceed print magazine and newspaper ads for the first time this year. So, put another way, online ads in the U.S. are still...

Crazy numbers. What a waste of money.

Source: readwriteweb.com → | ∞ Permalink

Summify, a startup that uses social data to create a personalized news digest, just announced that it has been acquired by Twitter. This sounds like a talent acquisition on Twitter's part — in other words, the main purpose of the acquisition was probably hiring the Summify team. Some of Summify's feature have been immediately disabled, it's no longer accepting new users, and in a few weeks, Summify says it will shut down the current product entirely. Meanwhile, the startup will be moving from Vancouver to San Francisco to work out of the Twitter office.

Great service. Smart guys behind it. Twitter bought brains more than code.

Source: techcrunch.com → | ∞ Permalink

Skillshare is a platform for instructor-led, in-person classes. Teaching on Skillshare can help sustain your livelihood. Here's how.

Skillshare is one of those platforms that i think will be there for a long time. Basically it allows you, with your own knowledge, to teach others about what you know. Simple no? Genius i say.

Teach what you know

The issue is that, this tool will work great if you already are an audience. It's like everything else, if you have au audience and launch a new service, website or blog, you know you will get instant traffic.

So how do you fill up your classes?

Skillshare helps you by 'promoting' the classes you teach. People can search the site to find your classes, but that is not enough.

You need to keep your students engaged and sell them the next classes.

In order to fill up the next class, you need to either find new students or teach the students you taught a class to already, something new.

A platform like Shareist is perfect for this. Keep your audience (ie:students) interested in the topic of the classes you taught by curating articles, posts, news relevant to each class. Between classes, or as a follow up, teachers (you) can keep students engaged, listen to their feedback to come up with topics for next courses, and communicate with them directly or indirectly.

Skillshare is a great app, and I can see Shareist fitting perfectly in the mix to help you stay in touch with your students, keep them interested and discover new topics, engage easily with your students by sharing interesting information where they are (twitter, facebook, Google plus, via newsletter), and grow your audience, and your income, even more.

Source: mashable.com → | ∞ Permalink

US photography firm Eastman Kodak, the 133-year old company that invented the hand-held camera, files for bankruptcy protection.

It's sad to read news like this, Kodak was at one point THE camera company. But is a good reminder that you never should assume nothing can happen to your business when you lead a market, things can turn around very fast for the best, or for the worse.&

Source: bbc.co.uk → | ∞ Permalink

My takes - must-read:

Go to where your audience is. Another, equally important rule:&create strong and engaging content.

Consider the fact that nearly half of Americans get their news from as many as six media platforms on a typical day.

Good content is the cornerstone&– knowing how to curate it in this day and age? Well that’s when the magic can happen.

Source: verdepr.com → | ∞ Permalink

This is the best article to data on curation, what is curation and what is not.

I am not a good curator. I can find great content to share, but when it comes to specific aspect of the curation process, i am not so good.

Curation is the wrong answer when the question is:

“How can I fill our sales funnel with cheap content, quicker than quick?”

And it’s the right answer when the question is:

“How can I give people a deeper understanding of what I know and love?”

That’s what I’m thinking every time I suggest content curation.

Yes. This is so right on. Sharing a link is not enough, you need to commit to explain why you are sharing that link pricely, what is so important or valuable that you felt like you HAD to share it.

I will try to apply these curation principles - because i love sharing about what i love doing.

• 1. Keep it 50/50: For every time you curate one story, you should create and publish another. That means your email newsletter would be 50% own content and 50% others’ content (with attribution, of course).
• 2. More than a link: This is the era of frictionless sharing, goddammit. Friction is a demonstration of care. Anyone can send a link. If you’re going to curate and share, add something. Some insight. Commentary. But no more than necessary.
• 3. Slap asses: If you’re going to curate someone’s content, you owe it to yourself and to them to be open about it. Preferably, it’s someone you follow and share comments with. And be sure to give them credit.
• 4. As narrow as possible: If you’re one guy with one hour a week, you can’t curate a good newsletter about cloud technology. The less resources you have at your disposal, the narrower should be your topic, your focus and your audience.
• 5. Give away the reins: To whatever extent possible, allow the people you’re curating for, to influence contents in the future. The likes of Reddit have made this idea their raison d’etre. There’s a reason for that.
• 6. If you doubt, don’t: We’re all overloaded with content. If you have even a moment’s doubt about sharing a piece of content, don’t do it. Better to wait for the right one than more or less spam someone.

&

Source: velocitypartners.co.uk → | ∞ Permalink

In the wake of a recent controversy surrounding Google's decision to feature Google+ content in its search results, the company will face scrutiny of its social networking service from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission as part of an antitrust probe, a new report claims.

Two people familiar with the situation&have alerted&Bloomberg&to the federal agency's plan to include Google+ in the investigation. At issue is the possibility that Google violated antitrust laws if it gave preference to its own services on its search engine, the sources said.

Source: appleinsider.com → | ∞ Permalink

Part of the genesis of Aggregage was my experience with "curators" who would take my content, put it on a page with no link or a link that had an anchor tag that said "link" or something similar.& They would change the title and URL for my post on their site.& The goal of that person was to get SEO value from my content.& They also allowed commenting on their sites.& The reason I would write the post is for people to find me and my content and to engage with me in conversation.& These types of curators were definitely taking away from that. Aggregage takes a very different approach.& Our goal is to be THE launching point out to all the great content getting created on particular topics.& We specifically do not have pages that compete with the original source.& We only show snippets.& We provide full links with the original title.& We don't have commenting on our site.& Basically, we are doing everything we can to get readers to go to the original source and engage with the content.& Many of the participating bloggers find that we become the second biggest referral source behind Google search.

But is it not what most large media news site do? They find content, reqrite it, amplifying it and giving credit back to the source. Is that really bad or fair content publishing practice?

Source: inboundsales.net → | ∞ Permalink

• Sign Up For a Newsletter – As pictured above, you can simply sign up for an advertiser’s newsletter right in the search result, without ever going to a landing page.
• Request a Call – These allow a visitor to input their number and request a call from the advertiser.
• Request an Email – Similarly, by clicking on a plus box in an ad, the searcher can request an email from the advertiser.

Source: wordstream.com → | ∞ Permalink

• Curating news that the media isn’t covering can lead to media coverage.
• Identify opportunity
• Select curators
• Monitor conversation
• Select and comment on the best content
• Announce and promote the collection

Simply producing a collection isn’t going to get it noticed, particularly if an organization is suspected of an ulterior, self-serving motive. Using the same techniques it would use to draw attention to anything else. Direct contact with reporters and influencers, a press release, a blog post and some tweets can all get people to give the collection a look.

Promoting a collection is something important as part of the process.

Source: holtz.com → | ∞ Permalink

1. Program Strategy
2. Day-to-Day Content Curation Services
3. Content Development
4. Promotion and Awareness
5. Social and Search Programs

I agree 10% with the following statement:

Curation is not simply about the content that lives on a website. How people find and engage with it is also critical.

Social media, newsletter, maybe offline marketing are part of the engagement strategy.

Source: blog.commpro.biz → | ∞ Permalink

1. Catch the viewers attention
2. Tells a narrative that makes sense to the viewer (e.g., one would not hang a Picasso painting next to seals from Mohenjo Daro)
3. Gives a sense of the bigger scheme of things
4. Makes it easy for viewers to "jump" to the sections that interest them
5. Have enough metadata for viewers to understand the context

Source: idreflections.blogspot.com → | ∞ Permalink

Techcrunch announced today that Ben Huh (Cheezburger.com) and&Matt Galligan (Socialthing, SimpleGeo both sold) joined forces to create Circa (circnews.com).

My question is: do we already know what it will look like? Is this Circa?

&

Source: circanews.com → | ∞ Permalink

For the last year, much of the focus has been on curating content from the social web and effectively contextualizing disparate pieces of information to form singular stories.

In 2012, there will be even more emphasis not only on curating that content, but also on amplifying it through increasingly effective distribution mechanisms.

Because anyone can publish content today and report information from a breaking news event, the role journalists can play in amplifying — and verifying —&that content becomes ever more important.

Source: niemanlab.org → | ∞ Permalink

The content which appears on top of your Facebook News Feed was not there by chance. Find out how Facebook ranks your content, what kind of content matter, etc...

Source: slideshare.net → | ∞ Permalink

Google finally released Currents, it's (delayed) reader app that it decided to make after it failed to acquire Flipboard.

Currents is all about curated the best content on the web and bringing it to you in a stylish, easy to read format.

The result with Currents is a cleaner product that always guarantees you're keeping up with the latest news you're interested in.

It's pretty obvious they borrowed a lot from Flipboard, but the app is still gorgeous.

The other major component to Currents is the Trending section. Here you can choose topics you want to read about and Currents pulls in the top five stories in each category.

Currents also does a great job at adapting to the size of your screen.

Conclusion: Currents is all about curated content and finding you the best stuff on the web to read. Flipboard is mostly about pulling in links and articles your friends are sharing on various social networks or from your RSS.

Source: businessinsider.com → | ∞ Permalink

Faveeo.com is a news-oriented web service that follows users interests, tastes and opinions about specific topics, and connects them automatically to other related users that then act as a human "curation" network.

By leveraging the collective intelligence hidden in social networks, Faveeo is able to enhance the process of information and network management for news addicts, and businesses alike by suggesting quality and interesting content.

Source: faveeo.com → | ∞ Permalink

Because curated sites draw search engine traffic, they aid SEO strategies.

Some marketers start curating content to enable regular, valuable communication with customers, delivered through the customers’ preferred channels.

Marketers who are good at tracking how web visitors move through the pipeline can track leads and revenue that originate from the audience of a curated site or newsletter.

Source: mktg2bizexecs.wordpress.com → | ∞ Permalink

Ebook sales are expected to generate $9.7 billion worldwide in 2016, more than three times the $3.2 billion the category is expected to generate this year, according to one forecaster.

Nearly 30% of all ebooks in 2016 will be downloaded to tablets.

• Everybody is going become a publisher of some sort.
• New platforms, more and more, will allow self-expression (by creating or sharing content) and make it a simple process.
• Content delivery formats are going to radically change for magazine/newspaper/ebook formats more and more, it's inevitable and innovating there will go a long way.

There is an opportunity to:

• help anyone to become a publisher by making content creation accessible and simple
• let publishers publish their content in diverse formats: web, mobile, ebooks, pdf

Also read the bookmark i featured below about self-publishing.

Source: mashable.com → | ∞ Permalink

This post was originally written by Randy Murray and this is a must-read.

There are times when our use of language shifts and the meaning of words is altered. I typically don’t fight against it. But this current hijacking of the word “curation” to mean “a list of things on other web sites

I have come to think the same way about it: what most people do when they refer to "curation", which is essentially sharing interesting content they find online: posts, articles, media, products, etc... is not curation.

They are "reporting" on something, like Boing Boing, Buzzfeed, HuffPost, Mashable, etc...

Be honest. Providing links and commentary is a valuable service. It is an art form, but it is not curation. Some of my favorite daily reads do just that: sites like Boing Boing, Fark, and MinimalMac are terrific. But they’re not museums or libraries or zoos. They exercise no care or control over the things that they link to. They spread the word, but they preserve nothing.

There’s another, better term that is more accurate, a better fit. It doesn’t sound as highfalutin’, though.

It’s called “reporting.” All of these sites are doing journalism. It’s news, not a museum.

People are reporters/editors, citizen journalists not curators. And that is okay, it's just time to recognize what they really do and call it the right way. Understanding what they do enables service providers to build the tools they need in a format that makes sense for the users.

I think Ben Huh has been right for a while, blogging platforms will shape into reporting/newspaper type of platforms, allowing people to share interesting things they find online (since that is what most do) and not label their efforts as curation. This is what's fun, to feel like you are cresting a newspaper or magazine about topics/subjects you like.

One thing: design will be essential to carry this to the users.

Companies, small or big, bloggers, or individuals will find a platform that fits their needs, not to curate, but to report/share things that matters to or interests them.

Source: http://whowritesforyou.com/2011/11/28/the-case-against-curation/

EDITED:

Others suggest using "editorializing" over "reporting" which i guess makes sense.

Source: bumpzee.com → | ∞ Permalink

1. Use Google Alerts and similar tools to see who’s publishing what on the web about the main topics and keywords related to your business.
2. Sign up for RSS feeds from websites in your field, such as trade associations, conference sponsors, competitors and industry media.
3. Subscribe to the top blogs in your industry to hear what the most influential voices are saying.
4. Follow key industry leaders and commentators on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube.
5. Sign up for email news briefs from news media specific to your industry to know the latest news and research.
6. Follow reporters at major news outlets, such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg, who write articles related to your business.
7. Apply your knowledge of your industry to separate the news wheat from the chaff. Focus on information that offers meaningful insights, a new perspective or new findings on a key topic.
8. Look for patterns that could indicate potential trends. Follow top researchers and share findings that could indicate a shift in your industry or your market.
9. Filter out content that’s obviously self-promotional or “research” that’s self-serving or otherwise suspect.
10. Add your point of view so people know why you’ve selected content to share. Include comments such as “A great demonstration of…,” “Helpful tips about…,” “Important news…,” “A can’t-miss conference,” etc.

Source: lifehealthpro.com → | ∞ Permalink

Tip #1:

-Stay in tune with the latest trends in your industry -Understand which topics are irresistible to your target audience -You can stumble upon a great discovery or breaking news that will make you a pioneer in your field. It is a great credibility booster to build a reputation as being the first to publish important news in your industry -Filtering topics to find ones that are in line with your branding and SEO objectives -Identify untapped areas or scarce information that can add real value to your readers

Tip #2:

1. Find a hot or controversial topic in your field
2. Instead of taking the easy route of sharing the topic with your audience, write a blog post to “build on” it. You can build on a topic in different ways:
3. Beg to differ politely
4. Provide additional tips and insights
5. Ask clarifying question(s)
6. Use Twitter @Mentions to grab the author’s attention and invite him/her to comment on your post

Tip #3: - Having a neatly designed blog that helps visitors find your own “goodies” easily - Your own content must be outstanding if you want visitors to browse and not bounce!

Source: lauraleewalker.com → | ∞ Permalink

Great Article from Molly Wood from Cnet.

Points i take out from this article:

• I'm afraid to click any links on Facebook these days...

• it's because the slow spread of Facebook's Open Graph scheme is totally ruining sharing.

• Facebook is putting up a barrier to entry on items your friends want you to see--that is, they're creating friction.

• And hurting sharing is a disaster for a social network. Sharing is the key to social networking.

• Sharing and recommendation shouldn't be passive. It should be conscious, thoughtful, and amusing...

• And if it doesn't... there's always Google Plus.

I hate the new Facebook, meaning since the last big upgrade they did. I enjoyed going on Facebook before, I feel like it's a waste of my time now. Will Facebook turn things back to where they were? I say we can surely expect some kind of roll back soon, yes.

When it comes to Google Plus, i think Google has a good chance at capturing users from Facebook's mistakes, but I don't think it will every be able to dethrone Facebook as "the" social network.

Source [CNET]

Source: bumpzee.com → | ∞ Permalink