Recommended reading for writers for June 10: content curation

To do great writing, read great writing. Here’s the great writing I’ve been doing this week.

If it seems like a lot of people are jumping into content curation it’s because they are.

Content curation is a new buzzword for something editors and reporters have done forever – shift through piles of information about what’s happening in a given location or on a given topic at any given time to pick out the most important, interesting, tantalizing, quirky or downright weird to publish it in a form others can see.

In days gone by, editors sent reporters into the field to investigate and write up topics first hand to share in their newspapers or magazines.

That still happens. But today they’re just as likely to publish those first-hand observations along with related material they’ve found elsewhere. That’s the curation model that Huffington Post uses. (It’s also the technique I’m using to write this post.)

But you don’t have to be a newspaper or even HuffPo to curate content. All you really need is Twitter, which according to Steve Buttry, director of community engagement and social media for the Journal Register Co., along with the cell phone is one of the most important tools to happen to journalism in the past 40 years. Buttry talked about content curation in a livestream presentation earlier today that I happened to catch online; I’m not sure that presentation is available as a playback, but if it is, you can watch it here.

In addition to being a great tool for producing instant reporting from almost anywhere, Twitter lets writers become curators, mixing their original reporting – or links to it – with information they find and share from other people they follow.

Curation tools don’t start and end with Twitter. In fact, new curation apps that let people – not just writers and reporters but anybody – collect and publish information are appearing on a regular basis.

If you’re really into this, you’ll be interested to know there’s a new curation chat starting on Twitter called, aptly enough, #curationchat. The first one is June 14. Read more about it in this post from PRNewswire’s Joe Cardillo: Why curation? Why now?

Here are a handful of posts on the trend and some curation tools:

• Tips on curating the community conversation (The Buttry Diary)
• Maria Popova: In a new world of informational abundance content curation is a new kind of authorship (Nieman Labs)
• All About Curation (and Other Social Blog Jots) (Media Bullseye)
• There’s a New Web Curation Tool on the Block – Meet Bundlr (The Next Web)
• 7 Things Human Editors Do That Algorithms Don’t (Yet) (Harvard Business Review)

And a quick list of curation tools:

• BlackbirdPie
• Bublaa
• Bundlr
• Chirpstory
• CuratedBy
• Paper.li
• Pearltrees
• QuoteURL
• ScoopIt
• Storify
• Storyful
• Tumblr

If you’ve used any of these and care to share which ones you like and why, leave a comment.