"Publishing Platform to create online magazines."

Smart,'curation' is dropped, going mainstream.

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.

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.

Filtering and providing context are skills that are in great need in the world of digital information. As people try to get their heads around on the massive amount of digital information they are confronted with on a daily basis, they will look to curators to help them decipher what information can be trusted, what information is relevant to a subject and what information can really impact their lives.

I think a lot of the most important 21st-century information/education work…will come in the form of sophisticated curation. I also think we’ll come to appreciate good curators, who help make sense of chaos by identifying, attracting, connecting, and distributing information from many sources, as genuine leaders. We’ll think of many of them as “self-taught,” because they won’t have conventional credentials and the formal schooling it takes to acquire them.

Search results, including sponsored links and algorithmic search results, are generated in response to a query, and are marked based on frequency of clicks on the search results by members of social network who are within a predetermined degree of separation from the member who submitted the query. The markers are visual tags and comprise either a text string or an image.

The role of the information curator has been a contentious one, and not everyone has been on board with the concept.

Very interesting article. At a niche level, curation can bring so much value to the websites the curated content links to, brands in particular.

By Patricia Seybold Information over-supply and customers’ short attention spans have created the perfect storm of demand for a new genre of tools. Our customers are swimming in a sea of undifferentiated, unfiltered information. Every brand owner wants to provide authoritative information on the topics our customers care about. But our own internal experts now vie with third-party experts, passionate fans, uninformed bigots, and a cacophony of noise for customers’ scarce attention. It’s not enough to provide authoritative information on our Web sites. We also need our content to turn up everywhere our customers hang out. And we can’t rely...

Microsite

What is it? A dedicated microsite or section of a website populated primarily with curated content. For examples, see my blog post entitled “6 Content Curation Examples Illustrated”.

Pro’s: Microsites really create a full-fledged experience with curated content as the center piece and can easily because the hub for a specific topic or issue. Also, microsites also do well with respect to SEO because they have dozens, or even hundreds or thousands of subpages. If done well, microsites can also seamlessly juxtaposition original created content with curated content.

Con’s: Because the curated content is not tucked away in a widget and is instead front and center, you will need to pay a lot more attention to what you curate. Also, microsites can either be positioned as a section of existing corporate website, or positioned as a more independent vendor-neutral industry resource. If you choose the latter, then you have to think about branding and marketing that new resource.

Who should use it? Organizations that are looking to become an authoritative destination for a topic or issue to position themselves as a key resource or thought leader, or to drive traffic and visibility.

VS

Personalized Page

What is it? A personalized page is a lightweight, single page microsite filled with curated content. Delicious is a great example of a curated personalized page. Here’s an example of one user’s page. Similarly Microsoft’s new tool Montage, Netvibes Universe or Scoop.it let you create more visually appealing and branded pages, but lack curation controls.

Pro’s: Easy to get up and running and are indexed by search engines. Usually free.

Con’s: Only one page is indexed by search engines. Furthermore, they are often created as sub-domains or subdirectories on another service rather than on your own domain, which is often insufficient for brands.

Who should use it? Individuals or cost conscious non-profits who want to create an information resource.

I want to be able to learn and grow as a vegetarian just like I have as an Internet Marketer – sharing with people considering it, and with those who know more than me, just like I do here. I can monetize it with all sorts of cooking stuff, books, etc.

This is a great post, perfect example of what a user could use @shareist for.

Authoring and curation are even more fundamental skills. Curation has traditionally meant just making sure assets are safe, uncorrupted, and ready for use, but it has broadened (particularly in the keynote by Steve Rosenbaum) to include gathering information, filtering and tagging it, and generally understanding what's useful to different audiences. This has always been a publisher's role. In the age of abundant digital content, the gathering and filtering functions can dwarf the editorial side of publishing. Thus, although Thomson Reuters has enormous resources of their own, they also generate value by tracking the assets of many other organizations.

When working with other people's material, curation, authoring, and editing all start to merge. Perhaps organizing other people's work into a meaningful sequence is as valuable as authoring one's own. In short, curation adds value in ways that are different from authoring but increasingly valid.

I watched Steve Rosenbaum's talk on the live stream, and it was of course very compelling. I need to look for that to see if it's archived somewhere.

"Yes, that sounds mad. If we couldn't index 100,000 websites in 1996 by hand, how do we propose to do 234-million by hand today?

The answer, of course, is that we won't -- do them all by hand, that is. Instead, the re-rise of curation is partly about crowd curation -- not one people, but lots of people, whether consciously (lists, etc.) or unconsciously (tweets, etc) -- and partly about hand curation (JetSetter, etc.). We are going to increasingly see nichey services that sell curation as a primary feature, with the primary advantage of being mostly unsullied by content farms, SEO spam, and nonsensical Q&A sites intended to create low-rent versions of Borges' Library of Babylon. The result will be a subset of curated sites that will re-seed a new generation of algorithmic search sites, and the cycle will continue, over and over.

In short, curation is the new search. It's also the old search. And it's happening again, and again."