Online curation and sharing of content

Lately I have been thinking about how to share the content I find interesting over the net with colleagues and class mates, so I decided to surf the internet in search for a free tool that allows you to create compilations of news and articles.

This could be a great idea for teachers because students could subscribe to their feed service and be updated instantly with the suggested reading of a course without having to send links in e-mail chains or looking after tons of URLs stored in the web browser bookmarks unopened in decades.

First I tried Paper.li which is a weekly or daily news paper that you can feed with your own content or provide news channels (like CNN technology). It will organize it and present it in a very nice way so you can share your paper with everyone. I think this service is good for you to read your personal news paper every morning with the type of news you are interested in reading but the thing is that it updates regularly so the articles you upload wont be available for a long time and it is not so intelligent when picking the right content that you want to read.

• The url is something like http://paper.li/f-1362157097
• It is not posible to customise it
• It chooses random news from the sites you provided

Then I tried is Pearltrees, which I think is a very interesting idea to share and collaborate in content trees to discover and enrich your knowledge. I found about it in a HP teachers forum. It is really fun tu use but you simply need to upgrade to a payed account to take advantage of the sharing with others feature. But if you are willing to invest some money to administer your bookmarks in an atractive way, this is it. With a map interface it makes it very nice to see but at the same time is based in flash so it is not very friendly for mobile devices and it might be too heavy. Here is a video

• Impossible url
• Needs payed upgrade to share and collaborate in a private project

I then passed to Scoop.it wich I found really easy to use and it was exactly what I was looking for. It allows me to sett in my selected articles from the web and it also sugest me a very accurate list of news sources and readings based on my uploads. I was surprised by the relevance of the suggestions it offered to me. I also liked the fact that it is used by many important companies and professionals who do content curation. Here is a video

• It is very easy to customise
• Amazing content suggestion
• The url is easy to promote: http://www.scoop.it/the-music-outbreak
• I can also publish my opinion on each story

And finally Storify. It is more or less similar to scoop.it because it is a curation service to tell stories through social media but I found not user friendly. Of course like all the above you have to sign in to follow or subscribe to someone. It is nice to comment and sett your view on a story but I didn’t found it that attractive visually, not so easy to customise and not easy to understand, plus, it doesn’t suggest content like scoop.it does. Here is a video

So judge by yourself and give online content curation a try.