kbavandi's blog

Two studies dealing with how users interact with news online one by "The online Journalism Review" and the other by "Pew Research" make the case for News curation and best practices for curators.  I will share excerpts of each study and then share my insight on how this relates to curation. 

I just had an insight!  I have been contemplating the best way to express the value of context in news curation (extends to any research) and came to it while browsing this KBucket page on Middle East.

I noticed that even though each one of the articles in and of itself is another footnote in history, the collection of the news events is historical and will always be relevant.

You often hear people say that Content Curation is a disruptive business, but what does that really mean?

Curation is a new layer of activity that sits between the content creators and the consumer, in essence disrupting the original flow of information - providing tools that empower a mass of users to manage the context of information. 

 Curation is an entirely new activity with 3 distinct phases of operation.

Will walking into someone's library and looking at what they read impress you, or at least compel you to want to listen and see what this person has to say?

We just released a new tag feature.  In the KBucket system each link comes with a one or more tags.  Tagging is one of the main features of KBucket pages.  The tag cloud make it possible for users to quickly filter and navigate articles based on topics of interest.

Our new feature highlights all the tags that are related to the tag we have chosen.  In this way the user gets a better overview of related topics. The main tag in the following picture is "Curation Strategy" - the grayed out tags all share the "Curation Strategy" tag.

The entire curation story - Why do we need it? - What is it? - Where is the value? - can be told from the picture below:

Information Overflow (Left Image) - The reasons for curation are multiple and the image on the left characterize the problem perfectly and as follows:

The following question was posted on Linkedin's Content Curator's group:

Anybody know of any studies on the ideal number of curated items an average person prefers?

KBucket pages can now be published on mobile phones.  This means every user can now create their own custom news channel on any topic, organize it into multiple streams, and publish it as a Mobile app.

The best way to understand how this works is to test it.  We have a demo app that takes this KBucket on Curation, Marketing and Search and publishes it to your Mobile platform.

I don't know about you but I often don't get things right the first time.  When I start a project - a blog, or a curation project on KBucket - I start with a topic , by creating a few categories to store my curated links .

What happens next is inevitable - as I curate my ideas on how to tag and organize changes.  Often the reason is because I can not find what I curated and that tells me that the tags and the grouping are not optimal and they need to change.

Curation works best when the curated topic is crowdsourced.  This statement is based on a 2 year case study of  a real world environment where a group of 70 users - used a KBucket type curation to improve findability of information.

I am of course assuming that the curator has two main objectives - Help people find information easier, educate people on what to look at.