At Loku, we make it fun and easy to tap into the local scene. Catch the latest buzz and stories, discover new things to do, and get the inside tips on restaurants and bars around town. If you're a local expert-on anything from food trailers to art galleries-you can rate your favorite local spots for others to enjoy.

Unlike social feeds, iFlow is about following ideas. It’s not about who is saying it, but what is being said. Flows are based on topics that matter to you — any topic — pulled from any number of sources and filtered on your specific interests. (e.g., salmon recipes, brown riding boots, children’s allergies, latest economic news, etc.) The result is more of what you care about and less time, energy and effort wasted on sifting through everything else.

Hand Roll It is a news and information destination along with a tool for creating rolls. A roll is a collection of text, social and rich media that you create or find anywhere on the web. A roll can be viewed here, embedded in your favorite blog/website, and shared via email or social networks.

There we go, now we just have to wait for Google to launch theirs as well.

During its year in private beta, the startup says it has built up to 2 million visits per month, growing at 35% per month. The service will have a paid-for premium option, allowing branded topics, integration with existing websites on custom domains, analytics and other features optimized for businesses.

$79/mth

Pearltrees is launching a dedicated iPad app today to allow users to cultivate and share their interests from the web on the tablet device. For background, Pearltrees is a visual social bookmarking service that allows users to organize, discover and share everything they like on the web.

Interesting.

I use Diigo to curate content, share it, and to find content. In Google Reader, as I read articles from the blogs to which I’ve subscribed, I will tag articles, sites, videos of interest, etc. using Diigo. These saved resources are available online and accessible from any Internet connected device. I can easily share specific resources. For example, I had a teacher ask about free screen capture tools. I sent her a link to all the items I had tagged with screencapture in my Diigo account. F...

With a Web full of stuff, discovery is a hard problem. Search engines were the first tools on the scene, but their rankings still have a hard time identifying relevance the same way a human user would. These days, social networks are the substitute for content discovery, and even the major search engines are using your social signals to determine what's relevant for you. But the obvious problem with social search is that if your friends haven't discovered it yet, it's not on your radar.

A Locker gives people ownership over their personal data and clear control over how it's protected and shared. Providing flexible APIs for access to that data, Lockers are a powerful way for developers to build applications that leverage rich personal data.

The Locker Project is an open source development effort, licensed under the three-clause BSD License, and sponsored by Singly. The core team working on the Locker Project is composed of passionate individuals who spend much of their waking (and sleeping) time thinking about personal data, identity, and the future of communication online and off.

The code base of the Locker Project is primarily developed using node.js, with a bit of Python to facilitate some integration points. We use npm to help manage internal system dependencies, and we try to follow TDD/BDD as enthusiastically as our time will allow. Hopefully, these things will make it easy and exciting for interested developers to jump in, grok the system and start coding!

Yahoo is betting the farm on Facebook with the launch of a completely new and social way to consume news.

You can build topics with multiple keywords, curate content by ‘favorite’-ing or removing articles, posts, and specific sources, filter by Twitter stream, and more. Users can also share their Thoora searches to their social networks, including Facebook and Twitters. So what took Thoora so long to launch its product to the public? The startup says that there’s been an explosion of social media and content since 2009 and Thoora was working on integrating this into the application. The startup was also working on its proprietary technology that curates and aggregates news.

Your brand clients pay $10,000 to $20,000 in licensing fees a month. We’ve used the money from our brand licensing deals to fund the company. We have not taken any venture capital up to this point. So having a business model for us was a pretty natural thing. At the end of the day the product that the brands and media companies are using is the exact same product the consumers are using.

Breaking news and opinion

This is a very cool tool. I'd love to see sports!

Best tip:

Set aside time each day or week and commit to reading the news you want to read and learn from.

Paper.li this morning announced new curation and management capabilities for its publishing platform, which basically allows individuals and publishers like HBO create personalized online newspapers by incorporating Twitter and Facebook streams into a familiar newspaper layout. Paper.li earlier this year raised $2.1 million for its social news curation platform, and is today also announcing a welcome addition to its advisory board: former Huffington Post CEO and venture capitalist Eric Hippeau is joining Guy Kawasaki as an advisor to the company.

LiveBinders is your 3-ring binder for the web.

LiveWorld Curator enables brands to aggregate the social web, then select or “curate” content relevant to their customers. This provides their customers a one-stop location to see user generated content about the brand and themes of interest to those customers. Powerful curation, moderation, and insight tools, combined with LiveWorld human moderation services, ensure the content is curated for customer relevance, moderated to be spam free, and tagged for actionable insight.