There is too much information online, too many pages filled with stock images and no context. Search engines provide significant utility, but we still have to exert energy to find what we need after results are algorithmically surfaced. The new crop of social media companies help discovery come online and threaten traditional search. With these new tools, users are able to clip and collect the bits of the web that they are most interested in and, in the process, disregard the rest as noise.

"Publishing Platform to create online magazines."

Smart,'curation' is dropped, going mainstream.

While many are busy trying to prove the ROI of social media, it seems that we may be better off focusing our attention on more ‘traditional’ areas of online marketing. A recent survey has shown that for both b2b and b2c leads, SEO has the biggest impact on lead generation. While the study does claim to cover both b2b and b2c lead generation, over two thirds of the 500 respondents were from b2b industries, so I think it’s slightly misleading to claim that SEO universally beats PPC and socia...

Very interesting article.

[Editor's Note: If you didn't see this post earlier in the year, we thought we'd share it again. It's still relevant and provides some really useful, tangible tips] With every news publisher jumping on the topic page bandwagon, it’s become a race to the bottom in terms of quality. News readers are now inundated with too many topic pages that offer too little value. Not only are they starting to look the same, a lot of these pages are optimized for the GoogleBot (for SEO reasons) rather than human readers. In a quest to increase eyeballs and pageviews, we’ve forgotten the basic premise and goal of the topic pages: to provide readers with more context. So here are some tangible ideas to help your company create topic pages that stand out from the crowd, add value to the lives of your readers and still allow you to address your SEO and monetization goals.

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

Hypothes.is will be a distributed, open-source platform for the collaborative evaluation of information. It will enable sentence-level critique of written words combined with a sophisticated yet easy-to-use model of community peer-review. It will work as an overlay on top of any stable content, including news, blogs, scientific articles, books, terms of service, ballot initiatives, legislation and regulations, software code and more-without requiring participation of the underlying site. It is based on a new draft standard for annotating digital documents currently being developed by the Open Annotation Collaboration, a consortium that includes the Internet Archive, NISO (National Information Standards Organization), O'Reilly Books, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and a number of academic institutions.

Content curation tools that allow for both curation and original content, however, are imperative for the SEO success formula. Content Marketing Institute Editor Gary Kim puts it in basic terms. “You won’t be successful if all you do is produce your own content,” he says. “No matter how many talented people write for you, there are many other writers out there publishing great content elsewhere. Why wouldn’t you want to produce a product that includes all the best content by all the best writers?”

"The notion of curating is now used beyond the art world", explains Obrist. "Blogs are being curated, websites, conferences, concept stores, all sorts of things. We live in a digital age characterized by an exponential growth in information. The way we navigate through this huge amount of information and transform it into knowledge is a curatorial issue."

The analogy of the curator as DJ, prevalent in the 1990s and based on both professions taking something crafted by someone else and presenting it to audiences in a new way, doesn't resonate with Obrist. "It isn't about reworking or remixing materials. It's about talking to the artist, listening to them and learning from them. JG Ballard once told me that for him, curation is a form of junction-making."

• Monitor Unique Topics of Interest
• In Real-Time
• Independent from sources
• Human-Centered
• Eliminate the Noise
• Display Emerging Patterns

You may not be able to tweet interesting or bizarre links every few seconds like Kawasaki, but if you know your niche it’s possible to deliver good, trustworthy references to a growing captive audience.

• Providing multiple sources of content on a topic for objectivity and balance
• Clearly identifying each source of information in journalistic fashion
• Adding a bit of curatorial commentary to each content resource to explain its value or reason for inclusion
• Including a link to the full article or piece of information

This content, presented in an editorial or curatorial manner, has the power to amplify and support the value proposition of the website; to engage niche audiences who are curious and hungry for just such content; and to enlighten searchers who are seeking hard-to-find or valuable information they need in order to make wise buying decisions.

1. Tumblr
2. Google Reader
3. Twitter
4. Delicious
5. Instapaper/Read It Later

• Think very carefully about using automated sharing programs like Tribrr. I’m part of a Tribrr group, but it’s a carefully chosen, small group of bloggers whose posts I would already share. Sharing irrelevant or low-quality posts will harm your credibility, so any positive aspects of the “tribe” mentality will be cancelled out.
• Don’t use content sharing as your only means of building relationships. Starting a conversation with fellow bloggers can go much further than sharing every post they write.
• Share what YOU like, not what everyone else likes. Trust your instincts. Just because a post has been retweeted by everyone on your list doesn’t mean you have to share it, too!
• Set yourself up as an expert. If you like to save money, share articles about clipping coupons. If you love fashion, share your favorite outfits or new collections. Sharing topical, relevant content consistency will help you build your expertise.
• Seek out great content. Set up news alerts about your chosen topic or a Twitter list with your favorite authors/publications. Share what’s interesting to you and add your own commentary.

Here are the suggested strategies:

1. Really get to know your readers: that is an interesting aspect, where you should consider creating 'buckets' of users you can target seprately
2. Allow readers to customize their feeds: meaning that you need to allow RSS feed for a specific keyword, or tag or list, etc...
3. Focus on recency: share fresh/new articles. Although i have to say, sharing popular (older) posts can be useful.
4. Consider archival relevancy: search results or archives should be based on popularity and relevancy at the time being.
5. Consistency still a virtue: post regularely
6. Research competitive blogs: keep you enemies closer, you will learn things you did not know.
7. Extend your network: find different perspectives from others
8. Let the clouds in
9. Don’t over-automate: can't agree more, be selective
10. Be selective: my point above.
11. Don’t be afraid of the competition
12. Give credit where credit is due: very important and it just makes sense.
13. Provide insight & analysis on the articles you’re sharing: everybody will have a different opinion about a topic, provide your own

These basic tips are all what you need to get started:

Tip #1 – Set-up Google Alerts on certain keywords.

Tip #2 – Set up a Google RSS Reader & start monitoring relevant blogs & news sites

Tip #3 – Start updating your Linkedin status with links to top notch content.

Officially 20 years old this fall, the World Wide Web remains a tenaciously chaotic place—a bottomless pool of electronic information, presented in a linked-together, more-is-better format. Anarchy, in motion, without end. Sometimes it’s fun. Sometimes it induces a kind of information vertigo. The web’s intrinsic chaos is cultivated by the medium’s three signature characteristics: its interactivity, its accessibility, and its effectually infinite size. Every individual web user is at any moment, instantly, a potential web contributor; there are few if any gatekeepers to block the way; and there’s no space to run out of. (Most efforts to organize physical space arise, after all, in response to space constraints.)

B2B marketers are moving away from traditional marketing tactics and toward online content marketing. In fact, 82 percent of respondents now use content marketing in their programs, which makes it more popular than search marketing (70 percent), events (68 percent) and public relations (64 percent) and over two times more popular than print, TV or radio advertising (32 percent). So says HiveFire Inc., an online content marketing company that surveyed more than 365 marketers from organizations of all sizes and across a variety of sectors.

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 way around a specific theme.

This post is probably the most up to date overview of what curation is and what it consists of.

Very interesting concept, well built.

This is a guest post by Jack Humphrey from JackHumphrey.com Traditional blogging is hard work. From creating content on a regular schedule and social networking and link building, to doing things like product fulfillment and replying to comments, blogging the traditional way is not an easy job. This is precisely why the vast majority of new blogs end up abandoned. The sad thing is, no one ever said that we must be traditional bloggers. Nor that we even should call ourselves bloggers just because we publish content on our sites with blog software. It is assumed by most of the...