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The Next Big Trend? It's All About Curation

Fact: Information sources are exploding. More information will be created in 2009 than all prior years.

           

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The_Next_BIg_Trend_Its_All_Abo.zip (1779 KB)

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Has anyone else checked out TwitterTim.es?

I just received notification that my TwitterTim.es account is ready.

Despite the fact that it took longer than the promised 2 hours to build my "newspaper" (try about a week), it looks pretty cool. You log into TwitterTim.es using Twitter's OAuth functionality (TwitterTim.es doesn't store your password), and you are treated to a nicely organized array of stories courtesy of the links your Twitter followers have posted.

There's also an RSS option, if you'd like to subscribe to your personal newspaper in your favorite reader. 

One nice feature: in addition to listing the names of your friends who shared the links, you also see who among your friends' friends have shared the link as well, which is helpful if you want to expand your follower network:

The retweet button redirects you to Twitter's Web site, and automatically appends "via @twttimes" to your tweet, so if you want to give a hat tip to a follower, you'll need to do it by hand.

Has anyone else had a chance to play with TwitterTim.es?

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Online Forums And Twitter – Put Your Experts On Display And Curate The Conversation

I spent a few days in Dallas a few weeks back working with a Telligent client on some community strategy stuff. As expected, a lot of the conversation focused on the effect third-party social networks have on website traffic.

But more importantly, we tried to hone in on how social networks can stimulate online conversations. One of the things I’ve noticed is the relationship between forums and things like Twitter. I grabbed the screenshot from TreeHugger to show how they’re using Twitter to “lubricate” content that exists within some of their other online properties.

I put lubricate in quotations because it’s a word that Twitter’s Ev Williams uses to describe how Twitter excels at delivering multiple pathways to existing information. In that context, I don’t think  there’s a better way to describe it.

As far as my client work, the way I articulated it was to package your experts and present them online as visibly as possible. It’s not just about linking to your existing content, it’s also important to catalyze the opportunities to engage with your customers. Many describe that last piece as market conversations.

As I mentioned to my client, what better way to have your expertise on demand than having a Twitter List or widget displaying one of your brand’s experts ready to respond to forum posts or FAQs? It’s really a matter of augmenting what you’re already doing with your forums. Forum MVPs or purists will always stay close to some of their old habits, but increasingly users’ methods of interacting with you (and your content) is more free-form. In other words, your customers’ clicks aren’t always tied to your core brand content.

Today it wouldn’t be unusual for one of your customers to visit your site and quickly be whisked away to one of your employee’s Twitter accounts. 
If that’s such an increasing use case, why not bring that closer to where your brand’s conversations originate? In a sense, I think this points to an increasing expectation on companies to have some level of curation expertise.

I’d even go a step further. Is it that far-fetched to hear that one of the deciding factors in selecting a vendor was how many of its employees were deemed as industry influencers or luminaries? Of course not, it happens all the time. But nowadays, the variables for how our customers come up with their observations are much more visible. With things like Twitter Lists, blogs and Facebook fan pages, expertise has never been on such public display.

A big part of my argument in citing the “Forums” use case has a lot to do with curation. What fascinates me the most is bringing curation closer to the business. It seems like Forums are one of the obvious candidates.

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Mashable Has A Good Post On Using Twitter Lists

via mashable.com

I've been using Listorious too to find some excellent Twitter lists.

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Links of the Week 10/19-10/25

My favorite links for this week (in no particular order). Want to better curate content on the web? I'm using RSS, Twitter, and Publish2.

1. Freedom of the press ought to belong to all... not just to approved 'journalists' (Robert Niles, Online Journalism Review)

2. The Robots Are Coming! Oh, They're Here. (New York Times Media Decoder)

3. Mob Rule! How Users Took Over Twitter (Wired.com)

4. 100 Notable Multimedia Professionals (Innovative Interactivity)

5. 25 things I wish I’d known when I started blogging (webdistortion)

6. A journalist’s guide to the ethics of social media (Gina M. Chen, Save the Media)

7. Everything I learned about social media, I learned from Barry Manilow (Arik Hanson)

8. My Advice to journalism students (Ryan Sholin)

9. New Grants for Women Media Entrepreneurs (newmediawomen.org)

10. How Will Real-Time Search Fly? (New York Times)

    
    
    

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The Age of Social Search Dawns

During the first fifteen of years of the Internet's gestation, we searched the web unassisted. In the second era, we'll do so with the curated assistance of our social networks - and be able to spot trends from friends. As we wrote in our search white paper earlier this year...

"However, on the whole, social networks are becoming a key way for people to find content that's meaningful to them. In response, all of the major networks are building out search tools that could, conceivably, threaten Google."

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Links of the Week 10/12-10/18

My top ten favorite links of the past week (in no particular order).

1. How The Huffington Post uses real-time testing to write better headlines (Nieman Lab)

2. Writing Content for the Buyer's Decision Journey (Conversation Agent)

3. Got a #tip? Gawker Media opens tag pages to masses, expecting "chaos" (Nieman Lab)

4. Why Bloggers and Citizen Journalists Deserve a Shield Law (PBS Mediashift)

5. 8 Tips to Make Sponsored Tweets Work (PBS Mediashift) (Disclosure: Mediabistro is mentioned, where I work. Our job listings on Twitter are paid.)

6. New Multimedia Site [My Teacher, My Hero] Inspires and Celebrates (USC News | Digital Media)

7. Confessions of a Ghost Tweeter (We The 'Bistro)

8. The Art of Working (We The 'Bistro)

9. The Very Real Possibility of Headless Web-Media Brands (Steve Rubel)

10. 45 Free Things for Writers (Freelance Writing Gigs)
    

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Leaving 20-Column TweetDeck Configurations In The Rearview Mirror

via techcrunch.com

Erik Schonfeld writes (below) about the information overload challenge, showing the overblown, Tweet-filled desktop of Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur.

While Twitter presents new challenges staying dialed in to the stream, it still does a helluva job vetting news and information once you get your network in place. It's that last part {discovery} that poses the biggest challenge. Why else would you have to create 20 columns to scrape enough information together to get a few key morsels?

I think that's why you're seeing Twitter and other ecosystem partners focusing on search and curation. Once that starts to improve, I think you'll see higher value networks start to bloom -- and in much shorter time frames. We can then leave the "20-column" configurations in the rear-view mirror.

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"It’s 18 months later and the problem hasn’t been solved. The screenshot I took back then still resonates because the noise is worse than ever. Indeed, it is being magnified every day as more people pile onto Twitter and Facebook and new apps yet to crest like Google Wave. The data stream is growing stronger, but so too is the danger of drowning in all that information."

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Twitter to Add User-Curated Lists

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Meet The Aggregators

via microsoft.com

The Age of Curation has arrived. Sites are springing up every day that take all the good stuff on the blogosphere and put it in one place for people to read. Good curators are starting to become brands of their own. Popurls is a pretty good one. Alltop is also good. And brands are aggregating content too. We just helped launch one for Microsoft for their IT target. It's still evolving, but it should be cool. It injects the blogs of the developers at Microsoft into the conversation. Great way to be "where the eyeballs are." What's your brand doing to aggregate content?

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