Marketing via Aggregation, Filtering and Curation – Tools and Resources

by Tony Karrer on January 31, 2011 in Best, Curation

Great picture and post on the Information Overload Paradox:

The post talks about the issue of overload:

I can certainly consume more content than I could two decades ago, but no matter how much content is available, I can’t consume much more. And relative to the sheer volume of content available to me, I’m actually consuming a smaller percentage every day.

And talks to where they perceive to be the real opportunity:

The real opportunity here, in my opinion, is to create – and curate – the best content focused on one specific area frequently enough that you become the one brand that consumers look to for this information.

Let’s assume that you believe that to be true and you want to essentially become a publisher of the best content focused on a specific topic. How do you do it and what tools are available to you?

And let’s also assume that you don’t really have enough time to create that content – but you still want to be considered a thought leader in the space. How do you do this in a time-efficient manner?

The answer is that you need to make smart use of

Aggregation
Filtering
Curation
Publishing
Distribution

How Marketing Might Want to Aggregate, Filter, Curate, Publish and Distribute

Before you start to look at all the different approaches, marketing professionals should be thinking about what exactly would make sense. At the core, the following defines the heart of the concept. You collect interesting information, you organize it, you share it.

There are some key questions to think through and it’s worth making some basic decisions:

Who’s your target and what would interest them?
Are you standing up a destination site? Or does content need to flow into your existing site?
How are sources determined? What kinds of sources can you bring in? Can you bring in parts or all? Can it bring in historical content to form a library? Images? video?
Can it scrub to clean up content? Does it automatically create snippets?
How is content filtered? Manual? Social filtering?
Does it publish full copies, snippets? Does it appropriately credit the source?
Does it allow annotation?
Can you give priority to your own content within the aggregated content?
What control of output do you have? Does it produce a destination site? Layout control? Feeds? Widget output?
Does it help you attract traffic? Social distribution strategy? SEO?

Not sure? You might want to take a look through the following articles that consider how aggregation, filtering and curation can be used by marketers to build audience, reputation, influence and as a means to do content marketing without having to create lots of original content:

So now, let’s assume you’ve decided that this sounds like a good idea and you have some ideas of how you might want to approach it. But you aren’t sure how to actually make this happen in practice. Well the good news (and bad news) is that there are many tools and different approaches.

Cobbling Together a Solution

Certainly, this is not a new concept. Marshall Kirkpatrick talked about aggregation and filtering several years ago in How to Build an RSS and Blog News Site for Your Project where he had cobbled together a solution using Google Blog Search, dapper, Feed Digest, PostRank, Roller, and others. This allowed him to create what he described as:

a news dashboard for anyone interested in seeing what’s being written about at JavaOne.

The vast majority of aggregation, filtering and curation going on out there is cobbled together and often quite manual. People search for interesting content, they package it up, they post it. If you are going down this route, you probably should also be looking at lots of tools that are in the spirit of how Marshall attacked the problem. Feed creators, filters, etc. But let me start with the most common way that manual curation gets out into the word: Content Management Systems (CMS) and Blogging Platforms.

CMS and Blogging Platforms

There are a variety of different CMS type platforms that are often used associated with this approach such as:

Each of these either have built in aggregation or there are modules for adding aggregation and/or curation. Typically, you would adopt a CMS if you want to also create lots of original content and have lots of flexibility around layout. However, most of these will require technical staff and you probably are willing to spend more time and effort. That said, if you already have one of these, let’s say a WordPress based blog/site, then it may make sense to look at some plug-ins, reblogging, widgets that help with this process.

Finding Content

Sourcing the content you will use is, in some ways, simple. You likely are already using an RSS Reader to subscribe to various sources. You grab the content that appears interesting to your audience. And then you post it into your LMS. You might be using a few of the following to help you to broaden your search.

Google Blog Search
IceRocket – real-time search against blogs, twitter, myspace, news, images,
Twitter List to RSS – allows you to create an RSS feed from a list of twitter users
NewsfeedMaker – brings in content from more than 7,000 worldwide news sources
DataSift – Powerful filtering engine across twitter
Nsyght – social search
Woofeed
Topikality
My6Sense
Ensembli
Cascaad

If you want to include scanning across sites that don’t naturally produce feeds, then you should look at RSS Feed Creation tools such as:

Of course with each of these, you still have the issue of what you are going to do with the output. You can either just be feeding this to people for them to scan through and pull out interesting content, or you can leverage the fact that it creates RSS and use tools for mixing, filtering, merging RSS feeds.

Blogbridge – great tool that aggregates RSS sources and outputs to RSS, and other types
FeedRinse
FeedKIller
FeedMix
Yahoo Pipes
Feedroll FeedCombiner
xFruits
Feed Informer
Blastacasta
KickRSS
FilterMyFeed
FeedSifter
FeedoStyle
RSS Mesh
CaRP Evolution
Syndicate Press
RSSMix
Pheed.me
Blogsieve
FeedCombine
FeedJumbler
SimplePIE
PHP RSSReader

And there are a few of these tools that also help filtering based on quality measures. This is important to reduce the noise.

PostRank – Likely the best known of these tools. Leverages social signals to indicate quality content.
FeedZero – more of a personalize filtering mechanism
FeedScrub – Feedscrub filters your feeds based on your preferences. Subscribe to all your favorite feeds, then tell Feedscrub which posts you do and don’t like. Feedscrub will learn your preferences and begin filtering out posts that don’t interest you.

In order to take content (likely RSS) and get it into your CMS, you should know about reblogging and RSS to post type tools:

There are also tools that are more or less bookmarking plus annotation that allow you to output in various ways. These can be used as curation tools where the output is then used to form blog posts or can be displayed as widgets.

Distributing Your Content

You should also probably look at the following tools to help you get your content out by packaging it and/or broadcasting it.

Aggregation Filtering and Curation Platforms

There are a variety of relatively newer kinds of platforms that are designed to provide more of a complete packages and generally are designed to produce a destination. So rather than cobbling together a solution as above, these platforms generally provide a more inclusive solution and often produce a destination themselves so that a CMS is not required. Of course, it’s way messier than that.

Aggreage (formerly Aggregage) – aggregates content, leverages Social Filtering to form online publications, powerful long tail SEO. Used to produce sites like Social Media Informer
Loud3r – a real-time content discovery, curation and publishing platform was used to produce Chicago Now
Curata – content curation platform behind
CIThread – helps editors intelligently Curate for Communities
CurationStation – find, vet, select and share relevant content. aggregates anything via bookmarklet + RSS-OPML, Twitter, Google Alerts, YT, FL + commenting, output via embed, RSS, API, PHP, manual or automated
OneSpot – Tools for publishers aggregates RSS, Twitter, community ranking
Publish2 – publisher solution – share and distribute content for print and web publishing
idio – publisher platform for aggregation and publishing.
DayLife – powerful publisher platform
Eqentia – multi-purpose semantic publishing platform for knowledge tracking, competitive intelligence, media monitoring, SEO enrichment, thought leadership or any custom content.
PublishThis – on-demand content publishing platform that revolutionizes the discovery, collection, and delivery of relevant, real-time content, providing valuable audience segmentation capabilities
PerfectMarket – publisher solutions, topic pages, monetization of content
MainStreetConnect – creation of independent hyperlocal news sources
Outside.in – hyperlocal content solutions

As I mentioned, some of these tools are more aimed at producing flexible destinations – others at providing RSS feeds, widgets, etc. that can be integrated into other sites. The advantage of having a destination as a result is that they also then can provide more sophisticated audience building solutions like SEO and social media integration.

Destinations with Aggregation, Filtering and Curation

Again, this is messy, but there are also a wide variety of sites that allow you to aggregate, filter and curate within their destination. They allow you to create a new location on their site (think Facebook Page or Google Sites). Often they provide distribution of the results via social networks.

Kosmix – The best of social media – filtered and organized by topic.
Alltop – Limited blog aggregation
Twingly – Creates automatic news channel on topic you specify and makes it easy to share on social media
Evri – Social curation of news that allows you to create channels
MustExist – Social Content Curation. Coming technology that use Twitter streams to find best content on any topic. (coming soon)
Qrait – A realtime curation platform designed to fulfill the needs of content curators and reduce information overload for the rest of us. (coming soon)
CurativeApp – The Easiest Way To Aggregate and Curate Content From Around The Web (coming soon)
Paper.li – paper.li organizes links shared on Twitter into an easy to read newspaper-style format.
Hubpages – Create a hub somewhat a cross of Squidoo and Paper.li
KeepStream – Remix your tweets, statuses, and other social goodies into a neat, tidy, permanent web page.
TwitterTimes – The Twitter Times is a real-time personalized newspaper generated from your Twitter account
Anckr – Read, create or contribute to moderated Twitter streams organized around specific topics like breaking news stories.
Eddy – a media aggregation platform built for the public display of up-to-the-minute activity on realtime services like Twitter. Collection and curation of twitter around events, moderation of acceptable material, and republishing of these conversational streams.

A slightly different approach to this are the following clipping and bundling sites. They produce destination pages or widgets or both. I think of them a little bit different than the platforms because they are mostly aimed at clipping content you encounter into a bundle that can then be used. This is very much aggregation, filtering and curation. If a widget is created, you can obviously use that as part of your marketing strategy.

Amplify – social network for learning, discovery, conversation but more of a clipping service
TrailMeme – story telling through curation
PearlTrees – organize content and share via a visualization
Storyify – twitter curation with bundling
BagtheWeb – Create a “bag” to collect, publish, and share any content from the Web.
Licorize – Turn web page bookmarking and status updates into projects, ideas, teams at work.
HabitStream – aggregates various sources and allows widget based output
Curated.by – collect and organize tweets into topic based streams that can be shared or embedded anywhere
Publitweet – platform to curate real-time content, and make it more readable, shareable and monetizable
Scoop.it – service with content discovery tools for finding quality content, after which you can manually share it in your topic, which is essentially a topic-based content repository.

Other Tools

This world is so messy right now, that there are lots of interesting tools that definitely relate, but I’m not sure where they get classified. So this is a dumping ground for some tools you might want to look at:

Flocker – live reporting widget
Flipboard – Personalized social magazine

Great Articles about Aggregation, Filtering and Curation

Haven’t had enough, here are some great articles with lots more about approaches, tools, etc. Have fun.

12 Responses to “Marketing via Aggregation, Filtering and Curation – Tools and Resources”

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Reply
Barbera Klawuhn February 2, 2011 at 6:22 am #

As a Newbie, I am always searching online for articles that can aid me. Thank you

Reply
Barry Deutsch February 3, 2011 at 4:24 pm #

This is the best compilation of content/sites/tools around curation and aggregation that I’ve come across.

Here’s the issue I am facing:

I have a blog for which I am aggregating content in a particular niche – executive job search. I am using a wordpress “alltop” type templage that pulls the RSS feeds from a manually selected group of top bloggers in that niche. I then manually select 1-2X per day an outstanding article from the feeds, add my own comments/ideas and publish it as a blog (the ultimate goal being to drive SEO with classic wordpress categories, tags, and meta info through an SEO plugin.

I would like to use a curation tool to annotate/comment on articles vs. just providing the feed. Most of the curation tools I’ve looked at provide an RSS output or an output directly to wordpress (such as Amplify). Unfortunately, all the tools appear to post into wordpress directly -then you’ve got to go back and set the tags, categories, correct the page title, set the meta info — all after the fact.

Sorry about the long-winded background. Here’s the key question:

Is there any curation tool that will post into wordpress as a draft. For example, I use MS Livewriter to craft my blog postings which I post as a draft into wordpress and then make the appropriate SEO coding in tags, categories, and meta information.

Reply
Tony Karrer February 3, 2011 at 6:26 pm #

Barry, fantastic comment. Your use case is really spot on.

I don’t know a tool today that really does what you are asking for. But, I guess I’m wondering whether someone really can build a tool that will make us bloggers happy. Essentially, you are collecting a bunch of (content) resources and then you will want to edit it as you see fit.

How is this really different than copy, paste, edit? How much faster would a tool really make this?

Reply
Robin Good February 6, 2011 at 11:12 am #

Hi Barry, Blogbridge which is free and open-source, will do that for you. Go to the site download it, check the tutorials and if you have any doubts contact Pito Salas who will certainly guide you in achieving exactly what you have described.

Reply
Sprichie March 1, 2012 at 1:09 pm #

Hi Barry,

I have looked for days and days and finally found a wordpress theme that comes fully loaded and also has a bookmarklet. The bookmarklet, when clicked, allows you to pull any story from any website, add an image, highlight whatever parts of the article to quote, add your own commentary, and more.

The best part is that it opens your wordpress “add post” box and saves as a “draft” which is what you and I both want. So then you can add videos, links, tags, etc, then post.

It’s called Curation Traffic. http://curationtraffic.com/. I don’t have any affiliation with them, but they are the only solution I found.

My only question to them, and I’m waiting on an answer is. “Can I just use the bookmarklet with my existing blog?” I don’t want to change my design and install their theme so we’ll see.

I hope this helps.

Reply
- Scott Scanlon March 27, 2012 at 6:38 pm #
  
  First, this is a great overview for curation, full of great info.
  
  Spriche,
  
  Thanks for sharing our platform here. The bookmarklet as a addon for your existing blog is in the plan, right now it’s 2 months out in the development cycle.
  
  Before that we have a few things to add to the existing platform that will help with creating a top notch curation platform. Plus a few more layouts and more conversion features.
  
  Sorry for not seeing this earlier and responding but I wanted to share that we do plan on adding what you suggested.
  
  Reply
- Adam Fanslau October 24, 2012 at 10:29 am #
  
  Thanks for the post Barry, Great insight.
  
  Sprichie,
  
  I just wanted to give you an update. We have recently released the plugin version of Curation Traffic.
  
  With this plugin, you can what you are looking for, use the Curate This bookmarklet on an existing WordPress site.
  
  Go to http://curationtraffic.com/ to see if it is a fit for you.
  
  Reply