40 Social Media Curation Sites and Tools

[quasso]

Last month I shared 40+ networks that you could consider depending on your niche or interests. As part of my commitment to this community, I shared that I will expand on this list throughout 2012. So here is the first addition to that build! The topic- Curation! I thought I would focus on curation because a) I have a favorite site and b) there has been a lot of “press” on Pinterest as a curation tool and as a result I thought the timing was right. However before I list the sites let’s talk curation.
What is social media curation?
Today, with the exponential growth of social networks and blogs, it can be overwhelming searching for information on the internet. As a result, the act of filtering, selecting, reviewing and providing commentary with a perspective on an article, or collection of articles, have become increasingly important. This is known as social media curation. Recently, I had posed the question : What is a social media curator” on Linkedin. I was intrigued on the variety of responses I received. There is definitely different interpretations on what it really is. The response that I agreed with read: ”A good media curator is someone who reads extensively, then can pull content and organize it in a logical way for the benefit of others. Web 2.0+ has an immense amount of information. Curators sort through it, find the wheat in the chaff, and present it in a friendly manner” . I would agree with this definition however would also add that a curator would also share their perspective and perhaps alternative ( or supporting) viewpoint using the posts that they have selected.
Why curate?
Curation provides another offering for your on-line audience. It also helps reduce the noise of the plethora of information on the internet. Curation also provides a stream of fresh posts for your site or blog.
Curation sites
The number of curation sites and tools have grown dramatically. Furthermore, more recently the profile of curation has been elevated as more organizations and entrepreneurs are looking at ways to augment their blogs or content. I personally use Scoop.it. I really enjoy the tool because 1) it has an automatic component of crawling the web to make suggestions to supplement your topic and 2) you have the option of selection and providing that commentary to add value to your audience and 3) Scoop.it then bundles it in a very attractive on-line magazine. I would like to share 3 Master Curators on Scoop.it namely Robin Good and Giuseppe Mauriello. For the third, I would also like to mention Martin Gysler who introduced me to the field and tool. I must admit in addition to curating, I have used the tool as a depository (Scoop.it SocialMediaPearls) for key articles for my blog that you can reference at any given time. So not strictly curating- however one can say my blog posts are a result of personal experience and research whereyou can find the associated posts on my Social Media Pearls Scoop.it magazine. In addition to Scoop.it, I have used Paper.il, Pinterest and Themeefy.
Changing gears a little bit, I would like to share that I am intrigued by Bookriff which is very new site and start-up. I learned about this site at a recent conference in Canada. Very exciting site that brings curation to another level. Bookriff allows you to select chapters from an assortment of books, add your own commentary and then publish it as a commercial book. Each time a Riff is distributed, all content owners get paid. BookRiff’s technology manages the authoring, bundling, licensing, attribution, and payment details for each of these custom compilations. Brilliant! How exciting. Love it! Potentially turning the publishing sector upside down.The mastermind and CEO behind Bookriff is Rochelle Grayson. It was a total pleasure to hear her speak on this innovation.
Now it is time to share that list. Below, I have listed 40 curation sites for your perusal. Enjoy!

1. Aggregage- a new site with a content marketing focus.Agregage creates online “curated” communities by centralizing content from quality blogs, whitepapers, social networks around particular topics and then it is displayed on a new site dedicated to that given topic.
2. Amplify- “The easiest way to clip, share and discuss things that interest you.” Add the Amplify web clipper to your browser to clip and share things you find on the web.
3. BagTheweb- BagTheWeb helps users curate Web content. For any topic, you can create a “bag” to collect, publish, and share any content from the Web.
4. Blekko - “Provides a differentiated editorial voice in search.”
5. BlogBridge- BlogBridge is for true info-junkies who want a better way to wrangle all their RSS feeds from blogs and news into one pretty cool organizer.
6. Bookriff – . Riffs are remixes of published books, essays, magazine articles, and your own content.
7. Bundlr- Create topic pages with photos, videos, tweets and documents. Share them with everyone
8. CIThread- This has a content marketing focus.Simplifies content marketing production, distribution, measurement and optimization across multiple initiatives and social channels
9. Clipboard - Helps organize content, facilitates collaboration and sharing with others.
10. Curata- Curata helps marketers maximize their content curation efforts with web-based tools to easily find, organize and share online content.
11. Curated.by- let’s you collect and organize topic based content (media, links, tweets) into bundles.
12. Curation Station - allows users to gather information, select the items that fit their goals, and then distribute them . A paid service targeting marketers.
13. Eqentia “From your context, let us find you content. From that content, let us find you people. You take action.” Aggregate, curate, and re-publish content what matters.
14. Evri - automatically and constantly indexes millions of topic-specific streams from thousands of different sources to filter through the web and delivers customized news experiences.
15. Factiva-a business intelligence platform- with a unique combination of authoritative business news and Information, plus sophisticated tools, Factiva helps you easily find, monitor, interpret and share the essential information your organization commands.
16. Feedly- a simple and elegant way to read and share the content of your favorite sites.
17. Flockler- Drawing from social media and the web, publishing videos, photos and text, and personal commentary and editorial, Flockler lets you curate for a particular subject, event, person or business..
18. iFlow- a real-time, online information exchange that brings together everything you want. You can organize, combine, filter, curate or remix your flows to get a different view on your content and/or to share.
19. kbucket- KBucket is a user indexed search site. A place where experts “content curators” organize, comment, tag and publish their research
20. Keepstream a social media curation tool that helps organize tweets, into shareable, embeddable collection pages.
21. Kurat helps you to discover relevant content on specific topics. Within Kurat you can easily curate this information and publish it. Kurat can be used as content discovery and publishing tool behind company social media efforts and as a personal newsreader.
22. Loud3r- a real-time content discovery, curation and publishing platform that delivers the best news, blogs, photos, videos and social media about any topic.
23. My6sense -Read and share your relevant content from your RSS and social streams.
24. Mlkshk- Save, Share and Discover.Use browser extensions to save with a simple right-click.Pick a topic (Shake) and Invite other MLKSHKers in to post and curate their submissions with one click.
25. Mysinydicaat- a personalized agregator built on the idea that it should be easy to collect, filter, share web content that is important to you.
26. Paper.il-Paper il crawls the web linked to your topic. Once set up the curation is updated automatically.
27. Pearltrees - collects, organize and share everything you like on the web.
28. Pinterest- a Virtual Pinboard that lets you organize and share all the things you find on the web.
29. PostPost - PostPost is the Twitter strip search tool. It strips out the noise by delivering search results from the people on Twitter you value the most.
30. Qrait- A realtime curation platform designed to fulfill the needs of content curators.Qrait lets you combine real-time filtering and your own personal touch to create something of value.
31. Redux is a new kind of TV—hundreds of channels of entertaining, and-picked video, all from a community of curators.
32. Scoop.it- Create a topic of interest, Scoop.it crawls the web for related content that you can select and curate for your online magazine.
33. Shareist - Lets you create your own custom curation website. discover, create, organize, and share content that matters to your audience.
34. Snip.it- create collections of links (we call them snips), add your thoughts and discover others with relevant opinions on issues you care about.
35. Story Crawler- intelligently searches and gathers information across multiple online platforms—whether it be social media, news articles, blogs, RSS feeds, video sites forums and user generated content—to bring users the most relevant real-time data..
36. Storyfy- Lets you curate social networks to build social stories, bringing together media scattered across the Web into a coherent narrative.
37. Storyful- Storyful was founded by journalists who wanted to separate the news from the noise of the real-time web. Storyful is used to curate “stories” via social media tools, images and videos.
38. Summify- recently purchased by Twitter, Summify Creates a beautiful daily summary of the most relevant news from your social networks.
39. Themeefy- discover, curate, compile and publish your knowledge from the web to personal Theme magazine(s).
40. Yourversion “The best way to discover new content that’s relevant to you.” YourVersion brings you the latest news, blogs, tweets, and videos on your chosen topics in one place.YourVersion automatically organizes the bookmarks by topic for you.

Now that is quite the list. Now, as you consider curation and select a tool, please share your experience here! Or perhaps you already curate- do share your tips. Would love to hear from you.

Cheers

[lorenstar]

thank you for sharing 2 links in and i am already pleased

[cloneofclone]

fascinating stuff thanks

[Sharebuddy]

This is a great post! Thanks a million I was looking for stuff like this.

[retro87]

great stuuf.. +rep added

[Neorocker]

This is sterling work. You deserve more than the rep I gave. Thank you!

[theresaway]

Awesome list; thanks for posting this. I curate presently just using Google and 'past 24 hours' filter on the keyword of my choice. I'll explore these other options now.

[zynet]

rep to you for the info, contentgems is also a curation service.

[fresh]

I just saw this post today and thought it was a great read and have some useful links and info on curation. Thanks for the post and I added +rep to you. I wanted to subscribe to this thread and couldn't so i posted a thanks reply instead. :)

[Krusher]

Excellent info!

thanks

Rep ADDed