Content Curation versus Aggregation

I have been playing around with Paper.li and have a couple of 'newspapers' (here is an example) that are gathered from tweets and RSS feeds of people I follow.  

The main purpose was, well, selfish: I wanted to get a glimpse of the tweets and feeds in one go for my own reading pleasure.  But it seemed to have caught on a little bit given the retweets and "thanks" I have received on Twitter.

And a friend of mine asked me, "How do you find time to curate all these?" 

Well, it's automatic so I guess, the only time I really spend is the time reading them

The bigger question though, really, is "am I curating them?"  

I am not.  What I've set up simply aggregates information.

If I were curating them, I would have to find the time to have a look at each piece of information, edit them, provide my viewpoints, and then publish - very much like what I did when I was the school paper editor in high school.

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I found this on SlideShare and I thought it captures what curation really is all about.

Building Thought Leadership through Content Curation

View more presentations from Corinne Weisgerber

Comments

[Kelly]

Hi Philip,

Interesting point you bring up. I work for Paper.li, do you mind if I comment?

We see our service as a balance between manual and automated and highly encourage publishers to take the time to review their content, and content streams, on a regular basis.

Paper.li is used in many ways from a timeline reader to promoting awareness and education on very long tail topics.

We find that our topic based publishers spend a good amount of time upfront curating and fine tuning their content sources before publishing, reviewing sources and content on an ongoing basis and editing editions, deleting, repositioning content and so forth.

Our aim is to make the publishing of a topic easy for anyone to do. We bring the technology to the table that fetches, analyzes and presents content in an easy to digest format, however the "human" touch is needed in order to bring a topic to life.

Kelly

[Philip Tiongson]

Hi Kelly -

Thanks very much for your comment! I am a fan of Paper.li - and so are my colleagues in the office (who when introduced to Paper.li started to create their own papers!).

Indeed, the "human" touch is still needed - particularly in curating the topics that are being aggregated. And that is probably where most of my "papers" and topics are missing.

I'll spend more time with my Paper.li account and see what "human touch" I can add in to my papers.

Thank you once again for the comment.

Phil