Group items tagged

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).

3 curation tools: Paper.li, Storify, and Pinterest

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.

So Facebook wants to bring you content serendipity with Paper, a standalone iOS news reader app it revealed today that delivers human and algorithm-curated full-screen articles and photos in categories you select like Tech, LOL, and Pop Culture. Paper launches to everyone in the U.S. on February 3rd, the day before Facebook's 10th birthday.

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

weekly 12.10

"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?""

"Here are five lessons in the art and science of storytelling I learned by studying the pros ... 1) Adopt a newsroom mentality Make content development a core part of the way you do business - just as it is in journalism. Embed it in every department. Hire journalists just as LinkedIn, Qualcomm and others have done. Curate voices like we do on edelman.com. 2) Hand-craft your content for each venue Some companies try desperately to create singular pieces of content that can be simply be dumped in different places. That no longer works. Instead, hand-craft your content for each venue. Jonah Peretti, Buzzfeed's co-founder, summed it up best when he said: "Twitter is for your head, while Facebook is for your heart." 3) Cultivate superstars who have a POV News and information, to some degree, is commodity content - it's everywhere. Deep, thoughtful analysis, however, is in high demand. Just as the New York Times has Nate Silver and ESPN has Bill SImmons, you too can grow and cultivate rock stars who create thoughtful content with unique analytical point of view. 4) Be relentlessly data driven Speaking of Mr. Silver, if there's one thing he taught us this year it's that data rules. Follow in his footsteps in not only how you use data to inform and deliver your storytelling but also in how you measure your results. Many newsrooms, for example, now have real-time dashboards that help shape their decisions. 5) Let constraints fuel creativity Finally, it's often hard to convince management to put resources behind content until there's proven ROI. However, constraints can breed creativity. The Wall Street Journal's daytime video network, for example, was challenged to cover the Olympics without footage. So instead it creatively turned to using puppetry - and with great success. Be creative to get around constraints."

"But someone must still curate all of this citizen journalism, and that's where a group called Video The Vote comes in. A member of a network of voting rights groups known as the Election Protection Coalition, Video the Vote wants anybody who notices voting problems to document the situation and bring the footage to its attention. "In an era of partisan voter purges, onerous ID requirements, and organized intimidation, it's not enough for citizens to just cast their ballots," says Matt Pascarella, Video The Vote's campaign director. In addition to collecting citizen uploads, he'll field a national network of his own videographers to target swing-state hotspots."

"800,000 Instagrams were tagged [Hurricane] #Sandy, and Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom thinks that makes it the most digitally captured event in history. But "how do we mine all these photos, make sense of them so you can consume the most interesting photos about Sandy?" he asked today at GigaOm's RoadMap conference. His conclusion was "We're going to need to be a big data company." Systrom says Instagram's focused is on "making meaning of all the data coming in, and improving the experience of curating." For example, he said that there were only 85,000 #SuperBowl Instagrams, compared to the 800,000 #SandyGram. People can't consume 800,000 photos, but they still want to pull valuable information from them."

This could be really cool