What's more important? To save editors time and abilities in finding and reporting the most relevant stories so that they can dwell more on content production, or to leverage to-the-max the power of new media technologies such as automated aggregators, search engines, or social analysis tools, to extract on auto-pilot the best content and news available out there? Photo credit: dizeloid In part III of this guide to real-time news curation (Part I and Part II) you can find a full-blown showcase of real-world examples of good content curation, from basic lists to guides and news reporting, as well as some more traditional, or I should say, more familiar, examples of automated and semi-automated news aggregation. I am certainly not trying to build a full and comprehensive list of all examples of curated news out there, but only a showcase of the best representative references I have been able to find during my research. There are probably a lot more, and I would truly appreciate your contributions to this, via the comments area at the end of this guide. So this is by no means an attempt to rank or highlight the best out there, but only a dutiful report of what I have found during my investigation and I am very eager to discover more great examples to expand this collection. If you have been wondering what is the difference between aggregated news and curated news, or what good curated content looks like, look no further. Here is the most interesting stuff I have found out there:

Part III: Curation Types and Real-World Examples

There exists many types of curation, and many ways to interpret what curation really is. As I have attempted to illustrate in Part II of this guide, in my own view, aggregation is automated and it is not the same as curation. As I wrote, "aggregation is automated, curation is manual". This does not mean that curation does not need or can do altogether away of any form of automated aggregation or social-based filtering. These are in fact fantastic and irreplaceable tools for any serious content or news curator. But just like boiling water, salt and pasta don't make for an automatic great spaghetti dish, so curation too, generates its key added value by the very intervention of a human curator. That is, curation for me, is by definition human-based. And even if you want to stretch it and question me about different forms of automated aggregation and filtering which amount, in their results to an apparently "curated" output, I will say that: 1. Even in the case of automated aggregation or filtering there has been a human hand in strategizing the approach and in coding and implementing the specific filtering and aggregation routines. 2. There is always ample margin for improvement upon automated results as the human mind can identify certain types of patterns and see possible relationships and connections in a much more flexible way than a machine can. 3. It is not that automated aggregation and filtering mechanisms cannot produce valuable information. It is rather that the news content generated by automated mechanisms and social filters can almost always be dramatically improved, enriched, augmented and expanded in many valuable ways, by human curation. 4. I have not yet been able to find any automated or socially filtered news channel that could not be significantly improved by the addition of a human curator. But I also do recognize I am venturing in some uncharted new grounds and I am therefore open to question and evaluate my own above viewpoints also from other perspectives.
Here below I have prepared a rich visual showcase of what different real-world examples of automated aggregation, socially filtered or mediated content and fully-curated solutions look like. Again, I am not pretending in any way to provide a fully comprehensive catalog, nor to claim any best of category awards for these selections I have made. They are simply, to the best of my limited know-how in these areas, the best and most representative examples I have been able to find so far. (I would greatly appreciate, your contributions in terms of other great examples of content aggregation, filtering and curation that you are aware of, by way of the comments area at the end of this article.) What I am rather trying to achieve is to provide enough of a "curated" compilation of examples to help those new and interested in this topic, to better understand what the results of such different approaches look like. By "showcasing" instead of just writing about it, I want to help "illustrate" the different types of aggregation filtering and human curation that I see out there.
Types of Curation 1. Curated News Summaries and Lists of Links Curated lists and news summaries are concentrates of information, reduced to its smallest components. Keywords and links on a specific subject or theme. 2. Curated Guides and SuperGuides Curated guides, are curated anthologies and digests on a very specific topic or theme, created by bringing together and organizing in the best possible way, the most useful content already available on that topic. 3. Crowdsourced Automated News Aggregators - Memetrackers Memetrackers are content and news aggregation engines generally characterized by purely automatic operation in determining the most popular links. Memetrackers key benefit is the ability to aggregate existing web content under different topics, providing therefore an easier and more efficient way to scan and search for relevant info on different subjects. 4. Automated News Aggregators Automated news aggregators bring together news from a pre-selected set of news sources providing automatic topic, source and chronological sorting and search functions. 5. Crowdsourced Curated News Aggregators Crowdsourced curated news aggregators invite and accept news submissions from the crowd and then publish all of them utilizing different automated criteria to sort and organize them by freshness, popularity, topic and time. 6. Curated News Channels Curated news channels, first aggregate and filter news content utilizing automated tools of which they control the inout, aggregation and filtering variables, and then place all content through a curated editorial workflow, that sorts, organizes and picks out the most relevant stories to publish. 7. Automated Real-Time Twitter News Channels Automated real-time Twitter news aggregation channels bring together a pre-selected number of unique sources, generally selected through a human validation process, into an organic stream which can be viewed and browsed in a number of different ways. 8. Curated Video Channels Curated video channels first privately aggregate the best video-based content produced and published online, and then manually curate-select the most interesting and relevant clips according to an editorial theme or to a set of predetermined categories-topics.

1) Curated News Summaries and Lists of Links

Curated lists and news summaries are concentrates of information, reduced to its smallest components. Keywords and links on a specific subject or theme.

Web Developer's Handbook

Best Online Collaboration Tools - 2010-2011

FeedMyApp

Robin Good's Bookmarks

Twitter - Most Influential In Tech

Blogroll

from Share The Wealth by Chris Gupta

New Media Explorer - Sepp Hasslberger

"Umberto Eco in an interview appearing at Spiegel Online discusses how human beings have been using lists to try and make sense of the world for quite some time. Eco states: The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order — not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries." Umberto Eco - Creating Order Out of Aggregation

2) Curated Guides and SuperGuides

Curated guides, are curated anthologies and digests on a very specific topic or theme, created by bringing together and organizing in the best possible way, the most useful content already available on that topic.

SEOMoz - SEO Factors - Most Important SEO Factors

RSSTop55 - Best RSS Directories and Search Engines

Smashing Magazine - 25 Useful Videos and Presentations For Designers

PCWorld - 50 Tools To Speed Up Your PC

MasterNewMedia - The Video Encoding Guide

Social Media Examiner - Top 10 Facebook Pages

MasterNewMedia - Tsunami 2005 - All of The Video Clips

3) Crowdsourced Automated Aggregators - Memetrackers

Memetrackers are content and news aggregation engines generally characterized by purely automatic operation in determining the most popular links. Memetrackers key benefit is the ability to aggregate existing web content under different topics, providing therefore an easier and more efficient way to scan and search for relevant info on different subjects.

"WHEN Kevin Rose, a former host on the TechTV channel, created Digg in 2004 - before Facebook caught on and two years before Twitter’s start - the idea of a "social news" site, with content chosen by citizen-editors, was novel. "There’s no handful of editors in a smoke-filled back room deciding which stories are important; the masses are deciding," Mr. Rose told Business 2.0 magazine in 2006." Todd Wasserman - New York Times - Can Digg Find Its Way in the Crowd?

Digg.com

Reddit

Wikio

4) Automated News Aggregators

Automated news aggregators bring together news from a pre-selected set of news sources providing automatic topic, source and chronological sorting and search functions.

Google News

Topix

Newser

NewsNow

Yahoo Buzz

AllTop - Blogging

Buzztap - NBA

Buzztap provides access to the latest sports buzz, culled from thousands of sources, conveniently brought together in a single location.

5) Crowdsourced Curated News Aggregators

Crowdsourced curated news aggregators invite and accept news submissions from the crowd and then publish all of them utilizing different automated criteria to sort and organize them by freshness, popularity, topic and time.

Slashdot

Megite

NowPublic

Spot.us

6) Curated News Channels

Curated news channels, first aggregate and filter news content utilizing automated tools of which they control the inout, aggregation and filtering variables, and then place all content through a curated editorial workflow, that sorts, organizes and picks out the most relevant stories to publish.

Arts & Letters Daily

The Huffington Post

Drudge Report

Poynter - Romenesko Latest News

Blogrunner - Technology

Chron - Science & Technology

Abnormal Returns

The Week - World Business

Klickout - Lifestyle

SmartBrief

MarketWatch Bi-Weekly

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SFGate.com uses the OneSpot widget to power links to related content both inside and outside its site. “We’re curating content from the Chronicle as well as our collection of Web-only content, whether it's from the blogs or the community as well as outside sources,” said Kevin Skaggs, executive producer at SFGate.com. Skaggs noted that newspapers have always curated content; this is just an extension of it on the Web. “Users come to us because we become the place that really packages it all together in the most interesting way,” he said. Publishers such as The New York Times use curation tools to collect links for both widgets and blogs, using Publish2, which allows journalists to bookmark and publish links with a browser plugin. e-Media Vitals - How Publishers Curate World Content

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Liqurious - What's your poison

Dicole Radar

MediaGazer

WeSmirch

WeSmirch distills the lastest buzz from popular gossip blogs and news sites every five minutes. All articles are selected via computer algorithm, vividly demonstrating that computers have a very long way to go before actually accomplishing truly intelligent work.

Ballbug - MLB Buzz Bot - Baseball news

Ballbug spotlights the most buzzed-about baseball news from thousands of web sites. It auto-generates a summary page every 5 minutes, drawing on local news sites, national sports media, and baseball bloggers of various stripes.

Techmeme

"The site, developed by a former Intel engineer, appropriately enough relies on software algorithms to collect technology news in real time into what is essentially the front page of an ever-changing industry newspaper. But Techmeme also turns to humans to filter the ever-growing number of articles and blog posts published online each day, a method that is being used by Mediagazer, a new sister site for media industry news.” New York Times

Examples of Brand Curated News Channels
HiveFire - GetCurata - The Content Curation eBook - Taming The Flood In B2B Social Media

Digital Curation

7) Automated Real-Time Twitter News Channels

Automated real-time Twitter news aggregation channels bring together a pre-selected number of unique sources, generally selected through a human validation process, into an organic stream which can be viewed and browsed in a number of different ways.

Tweetmeme

Championist

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Steve Rubel on Social Content Curation - Duration: 2':40

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Muck Rack - Technology

Venture Maven

Dvlprs - Ajax

Giant Red Carpet - Actors

InkPill - Web Design

Style.com - FashionFeed

8) Curated Video Channels

Curated video channels first privately aggregate the best video-based content produced and published online, and then manually curate-select the most interesting and relevant clips according to an editorial theme or to a set of predetermined categories-topics.

Chunnel TV

Vidque


Newslook


Devour

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Gerd Leonhard - Media Futurist

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In the next part of this guide to real-Time news curation, I am going to be looking at the role of the news curator, or newsmaster, and analyze in detail the workflow and steps she must take as well as the skills she needs to have to be successful at this.

End of Part 3
Coming up next in this Complete Guide to Real-Time News Content Curation: In Part 4 - Real-Time News Curation - The Process: How To Do It In Part 5 - The Real-Time News Curator - The Skills required In Part 6 - The Real-Time News Curation Tools Universe In Part 7 - Business Opportunities and The Future
Previous parts already published: Part I - Real-Time News Curation, Newsmastering and Newsradars - Why We Need It Part II - Real-Time news Curation: Aggregation is Automated, Curation is Manual

Originally written and "curated" by Robin Good with the editorial help of Elia Lombardi and Ludovico Canali and first published on MasterNewMedia on September 22nd, 2010 as "Real-Time News Curation - The Complete Guide Part 3: Types And Real-World Examples"

Photo credits: Aggregation is Automated, Curation is Manual - cinoby Automated Aggregation Without Curation, Is Mostly... - marekuliasz News Curation: What a Difference a Human Can Make - Choreograph