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Alt Wire is an real-time socially curated newsmagazine from Utne Reader. They selected a group of twenty "core influencers" to help do the curating of the content that makes it to the site. Seems like a good model for brands looking to get into some sort of branded entertainment (Makeup.com comes to mind).

The more I read about the idea of content curators, the more I think it may currently be called "trendspotter." 

People can now follow these user-generated magazines they like, just as they can follow other content on Flipboards. When people interact with their magazines, the magazine creator will get notifications. Flipboard will also highlight these user magazines in its content guide of topics that it curates.

"While at least Life-magazine-killer TV has served as a platform for the creation of some great artworks (HBO's "The Wire," created by newspaperman-turned-TV-auteur David Simon, comes to mind) and inspired the creation of new art forms (see the upcoming Smithsonian retrospective of the work of "father of video art" Nam June Paik), it's hard to imagine what of lasting value hot web-native media brands like Gawker and BuzzFeed are contributing to visual culture and art history. Which brings me to an email I got last Wednesday from Gawker promoting its "top story" of Dec. 5., titled "The 13 Most Powerful Images of Naked Celebrities of 2012," which quickly racked up more than a million page views. It was a sequel to a Gawker post from the previous day titled "The 19 Most Powerful Images of 2012," which was mostly a shameless, edited-down rip-off of a BuzzFeed post titled "The 45 Most Powerful Images Of 2012," consisting of intense wire-service photojournalism from Reuters, the AP, Getty and others, which derive most of their support from old-school print-centric publications around the world. Gawker's excuse for its act of, uh, curation: "Who has time to scroll through 45 pictures?""

Blending of curation and commerce at gilt groupe

film studio Lionsgate and Tribeca Enterprises, the media company behind the Tribeca Film Festival, announced today they are teaming up on a new, subscription-based video-streaming platform. The service will be known as Tribeca Short List and is slated to launch sometime during the first half of 2015. You can expect a "prestigious selection" of movie content from Lionsgate, which will be curated by Tribeca with help from "leading voices in contemporary culture.

Demand Media, a digital content firm that owns eHow and Cracked.com, has announced its acquisition of Creativebug today, a website for instructional videos on various arts and crafts. Part of effort to expand within e-learning category

But at Tumblr, at least, there's something else very interesting going on: according to Karp, there are 9 curators for every creator on his site. 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. (As Arianna Huffington says, "self-expression is the new entertainment".) 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.