The Unanticipated Benefit of Content Curation

I was honored to write a feature article in the recent issue of the NTEN journal called “The Unanticipated Benefits of Content Curation: Reducing Information Overload.”   I’ll be doing a FREE webinar on Thursday, July 12 at 11 am PST to walk you through the idea and practices described in the area.  You can register for the webinar here. I’ll cover the basics of content curation – what it is, why is it important for nonprofits, and how to use curation as part of your content strategy.    I’ll also be talking about how good curation skills can build staff expertise and avoid the pain of information overload and including some simple frameworks to get started. And, of course, I’ll also cover the tools.

Master curator, Robin Good, is the all around expert when comes to the topic of content curation.   His deep knowledge of the practices and the tools is impressive.  I’ve learned so much just watching his curation technique over at scoop.it.    Robin recently shared his comprehensive map of content curation skills, dividing them into couple of key categories.   There are over 250 tools in this collection, so it might be a little bit overwhelming for beginners.
Last January, I had the opportunity to present with Robin at the Social Media 4 Nonprofits Conference and he was very generous with his time, agreeing to do a video interview on skype before the session.   I asked what if someone was new to content curation – and wanted to consider a short list of tools.    One of the points he made during our planning call is that in order to curate, you need two sets of tools – news discovery and curation tools.      News discovery tools select and aggregate content based on keyword searches, but give a higher signal to noise ratio than general keywords searches or general news sites.  Curation tools are platforms that let you display your collection.
What tools are you using for content curation?