Creating new content all the time can be a big drain of effort. Often times, promoting and sharing great ideas and high-quality branded content from other content creators can have the same impact as your own ideas. However, while doing this you want to make sure you curate the right way, giving proper attribution and not just copying but delivering the content with real value addition. Content curation tools help you do this and more. They help in recognizing, gathering and sharing content with your audience with minimum effort and great accessibility.
While content based on news has a shelf-life, curated content has lasting value. It typically includes FAQs, how-to manuals, definitions and lists. Remember, this is not a restrictive list of what can be curated – you can even curate a number of news in context for instance – so let your imagination fly. There are a number of content curation tools available to help you do this – our list here will allow you to browse through these tools easily:
Pinterest is a social networking site that allows its users to share pictures and videos from anywhere on the Internet. The website’s user interface lets you ‘pin’ media onto a ‘board’. These boards become theme based collections of media that are completely created and managed by the user. Pinterest allows its users to ‘repin’ from other boards, follow other users’ boards, or even just simply browse through their collections. The site was co-founded by Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra, and Evan Sharp, and is managed by Cold Brew Labs. Pinterest is really helpful as a free online marketing tool for small businesses.
Delicious is a web service that facilitates social bookmarking. The website allows users to store, share, and discover new web bookmarks. Instead of saving bookmarks on the web browser of your personal computer, you can now save them on the Internet. This gives you access to your collection from anywhere in the world as long as you have an internet connection. Delicious allows you to categorize saved sites with different keywords, helping you share links with other people while also making it easier for you to find new sites. Delicious was founded by Joshua Schachter and later acquired by Yahoo!. After this the site was sold to AVOS Systems. Delicious is designed as a free service for its users.
ScoopIt is an online service that allows its users to create their own webpage through which they can share anything interesting they find on the Internet. The site also allows users to find interesting content that other users have shared through smart searches and sharing the same with the ScoopIt community. The site helps in creating a better web page by letting you work with suggested content based on keywords, which you can add other web pages with the help of a bookmarklet. Material from other topics can be “rescooped” onto your own page or you can create your own scoops by entering images and texts. ScoopIt was co-founded by Guillaume Decugis and Marc Rougier. The website is a free platform for publishing by curation at its basic level, however, more advanced and sophisticated versions of ScoopIt are available with premium offers.
Storify is a digital curation tool which easily allows users to search for different components of an event. After locating these elements from different sources, you can then put them together, to be able to portray the entire story in a better way. Storify allows you to make your story accurate with the help of appropriate media that is found over all popular social media sites. Storify also serves as a social networking site as you can follow other users and have them follow you. The website also allows you to interact with other users in the commonly seen “likes” and comment” section that is available for each post. The website was co-founded by Xavier Damman and Burt Herman. Storify is open for use by the public and it does not charge users for basic usage. The website, however, does also offer premium services for paying users.
Paperli is an online content curation service that facilitates users to create and publish newspapers on a particular topic. The web service automatically adds content into your newspaper that can be refreshed at periodic intervals you can set as per your requirements. The content is added through boundaries that users ascertain beforehand. As you create your own newspaper which features different people from around the world, it helps you to build relationships and provides you a great starting point for a conversation. Therefore, Paperli can serve users as a social networking site as well. The web service was co-founded by Edouard Lambelet and Iskander Pols. The basic version of Paperli is free to use and available for public usage. Paperli also offers a Paper.li Pro upgrade with added tools for your newspaper.
Factiva provides its users with business related news and information from all over the world. It provides you with comprehensive and curated information, allowing you to make better decisions as you get relevant information faster. The content provided to you through Factiva is collected from thousands of sources such as newspapers, journals, magazines, and photos. It is one of the best services that can facilitate information management for companies. Factiva is owned by Dow Jones & Company. Factiva offers both basic and premium services depending on the leverage users are looking for in their information coverage.
Mass Relevance is a web service that helps a brand or company deliver curated and relevant social content to their audience. Any social interaction or content from around the world that is relevant to your brand or company can be sourced and used for marketing and advertising with the help of the Mass Relevance Platform. This content can be guaranteed to be relevant with the help of limitless filters and can also be modified to be visually engaging as well. Mass Relevance was co-founded by Sam Decker, Brian Dainton, and Eric Falcao. Most of the services provided by Mass Relevance need to be paid for, but some have free trial period offers.
Embedly is a website service with a range of products and plans available that enable you to add embeds (rich and engaging HTML previews of a combination of text, images, video, and audio to your web page). This helps to create a better overall look for your viewers and deliver a more engaging and interactive experience. Thousands of website developers and bloggers rely on Embedly to add richer content and therefore improve the web experience for millions of users. Embedly was co-founded by Sean Creely and Art Gibson. The website service offers free, starter, basic, core, and plus plans that can also be upgraded to move on to use one of the Embedly products.
Diigo (short for “Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff”) is a website that allows its users to bookmark and tag web pages for future use. Furthermore, this social bookmarking website allows its users to make use of highlights and sticky notes on these tagged pages. Users can highlight specific parts of web pages and attach notes to these highlighted areas or even to the whole page. These highlighted web pages can be shared to groups within Diigo or forwarded as a link to someone else. The tools of this web service provide for easier reading of archived pages and can help to build a personal library. Diigo was co-founded by Wade Ren and Maggie Tsai. Diggo services are can be upgraded through their different plans. Free plans, basic plans for $20 and premium plans for $5/month or $40/year are offered by the company.
Flipboard is an online content aggregator that collects and presents content in a magazine style format. It provides access to high quality curated content on all types of topics. Preferred selections of regularly updated content may be added to a user’s profile along with social networking sites. Flipboard allows users to search for content they are interested in which is presented to them as images, video and text in a magazine styled format. Favorite content from around the web can be saved with the bookmarklet and curated into your own magazine which may be then edited and shared. Magazines of Flipboard can also be subscribed to. Flipboard is available as a mobile application and web browser plugin. The company was founded by Mike McCue and Evan Doll and is free to use.
Addictomatic is one of the first real-time search engines available to search for the best live sites. With Addictomatic, you can at any time, search simultaneously across twenty different sites. The site’s search results include the latest blog posts, news, images and videos from across the web. It is the most efficient tool to be able to keep up with any hot topic. The results that Addictomatic presents to you are quite impressive as well and the layout of the results page is easy to view and customizable for the benefit of regular users. You can move the different source boxes around for you convenience, bookmark the page and revisit it at any time for updated results. The site was founded by Dave Pell and developed by Crowd Favorite. Addictomatic is available for anyone to use free of cost.
Curation of content is extremely important as it is a very helpful way to view information without having to search and filter through thousands of resources. LiveBinders makes it possible for users to curate all of their collected content, whether web pages, PDFs, text documents, or images into a digital binder that is stored online. The site also makes this collected content to be kept private, easily accessible to a private audience or shared with the LiveBinders community to become a useful resource of knowledge. This bound content of resources can also be embedded onto your own web page. The basic service provided by LiveBinders is free of cost and available to any signed in user, whereas the other plans offered need to paid for.
Pearltrees is an online digital library which lets users collect, curate and also share their content. This digital library can be made up of different URLs found online and uploaded files. This library can then be organized to suit each users need. The interface of this web tool is unique as it lets users drag and organize content into specific units known as pearls. Users can also take part in a social collaborative curation of information under a topic as part of a group. Pearltrees was founded by Patrice Lamothe, Alain Cohen, Nicolas Cynober, Samuel Tissier, and Francois Rocaboy. The service is free of cost and available for all signed up users. However, additional features are available for premium users.
Storyful is an online news agency. It is the first of its kind in the social media scene. Storyful is an online tool that can create an accurate narrative or a precise story about an event or topic, by using content and updates from popular social media sites. It helps online media organizations all over the world to have an aggregate of all relevant online social interactions about a particular event. Storyful’s founder is Mark Little who was previously a foreign correspondent and TV anchor. To be able to permanently use Storyful it is necessary to be a paid member. However, free trial packs are also offered.
Kippt is a bookmarking app that helps users save what they read online for future use. After bookmarking, this saved content can be easily organized for convenient use later on. Kippt focuses in helping you get through all your saved content more easily. It also allows you to import your previous bookmarks from various other services, so you never have to start from scratch. Kippt also provides basic options to edit content before bookmarking it. The service can thus provide a little bit of everything, delivered with a very easy to use and simple interface. Kippt was co-founded by Jori Lallo and Kaari Saarinen. Kippt is available as a free to use basic application for anyone who registers with the site. However, Kippt Pro is also available as a premium option which costs $5month or $48/year.
RebelMouse is an online publishing service that aims to be a personal home page for all your social media sites. RebelMouse automatically updates itself to gather content from feeds that you have published online over other social media sites. RebelMouse can be used to generate a personalized page of your content that can be edited with the help of many attached tools. This page which consists of grouped content from all your other social media sites can be embedded in your blog or website. Paul Berry is the founder and CEO of RebelMouse. RebelMouse can be used a free service for anyone who registers with the website. It is also available as a powered site for $9.99/month. This paid service allows users to avail many more features to personalize and enhance their RebelMouse page.
PublishThis is an online web service that discovers, curates, and publishes content through any digital medium. It helps businesses gain marketing leverage by engaging customers with relevant content. This service can be extremely helpful not only for small businesses, but to large enterprises as well. The content marketing procedure is automated and reduces digital publishing costs. PublishThis works with trending content over a large number of different industries. This content can be customized with a large number of curation tools and can then be published by brands through social media or their own blogs. PublishThis was co-founded by Matt Kumin and Scott Decker. Brands are required to pay an annual license to have access to the software. Three tiers of pricing are available and can depend on the number of topics or sites to be managed, frequency with which curated content is published and various other factors.
Zite is an online web service that delivers personalized and curated content on specific topics of personal interest to the user. Zite is designed to provide the best of online magazines, newspapers, blogs, videos and images to its users thus taking on the form of a personalized magazine service. The web service evaluates millions of online articles every day depending on its type, its keywords and how it has been shared. These articles are then matched to your personal interests to deliver refined and curated content put together just for you. The more a user uses Zite and ‘likes’ various topics, the more personalized the delivered information content becomes. The founder and CEO of Zite is Ali Davar. Zite is available for free download on most mobile application stores.
Symbaloo is an online bookmarking service that aims to enhance and make a user’s web browsing experience easier. The website serves as a personal start page for you that can serve for easy navigation of the internet with frequently visited and important sites available at your fingertips. An easy to use visual interface allows you to compile your favorite bookmarks together and upload them onto the cloud for quick access with any device at any place. Symbaloo was founded by Tim Has, Koen Dantuma and Robert Broeders. It can be used from any device and the basic Symbaloo is completely free. Premium accounts are also available for educators.
NewsMix is an online personalized newsstand that allows its users to leverage certain tools to organize social media conversations. In this way it becomes easier to receive, read, and share news that is relevant to your online social interests. NewsMix delivers a social magazine with content that can pull feed from your social media sites. After having enough feeds, NewsMix can break down the content and sort it into different relevant categories for easier viewing. NewsMix is available as an application for the iPhone and iPad and also as a web service and has been developed by Sobees. The NewsMix service is available for free to users who register with the website or download the application.
Top 95 Content Curation Tools List (21 – 35)
Top 95 Content Curation Tools List (36 – 50)
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