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Backstitch for news curation

I've been playing around with a tool called Backstitch, which is a news curation tool. There are plenty of them out there of course, but this is quite elegant. You can set up a free personal account and choose subjects that interest you. I chose to create a 'CILIP' collection, and Backstitch went away and found sites, social media resources and so on that I could add into my collection. When I was happy with what I had I could save it and share it. 

What I particularly liked about this product was that I could then start searching in the content that it had found for me. It was quick and effective. The tiled results were a bit on the large blocky size for my liking, but that's a minor point. It also has filters for excluding material (including pornographic) which worked well. 

If you're looking for a good tool to collect content for you, this is one that's worth trying!

Flipboard for the web

I find news curation tools very useful for keeping me up to date with what's going on in the world, but some of the best ones are tablet only, which is a pain. However one of the best, Flipboard is now available on the web. You can create magazines of subjects of interest that will display on the screen in a summary version, and you can then click to read the entire story. You can also follow other people, and you can create your own Flipboard magazines to keep friends and colleagues up to date with what you're doing. My personal favourite is still Zite however, but since that's been bought by Flipboard it may not have long to go.

Listly

Lists made easy + social + fun! It's pretty much exactly what it says - it's a list making device with a bookmarklet to make it easy to add to. The social element comes in that people can comment, vote up or down lists and so on. It's a nice enough looking news curation tool, but doesn't come close to things like Pearltrees for example.

NOOWIT for news curation

'How do you find all the stuff that you do?' is a question that I'm often asked, and one of my responses is that I use news curation tools that find it for me. So I was interested to see a new one on the scene; NOOWIT. What's different with this one is that it's actually web based, rather than an app on a smartphone or tablet, and there aren't many of those around.

So - if you want to try news curation, have a look at Noowit. Unfortunately, that's about as positive as I can get really. In comparision to other excellent tools such as Zite and Flipboard, this one is sadly lacking. It uses the magazine concept of small news blocks like magazine articles that you can click on and go to the whole story, but these are *huge* - you're lucky to get 2 or 3 to a page. This requires much more scrolling than should be necessary (they make a big thing of scrolling left right and up and down - but guys - that's just scrolling, we've had the for a while now), and it's really hard to work out exactly where you are. Some of the images cut over the text, and so I can't see what it is that I'm supposed to be reading.

I found stories being repeated on pages, which was irritating. Unlike Zite for example, which greys out a story when you've read it - very helpful - Noowit doesn't do that. I liked the fact that you could share stories on social media, like or bookmark them, but again, that's not revolutionary, it's just to be expected. There wasn't a like/dislike option as you have with other tools, so how could it learn quickly what interested me and what didn't; if you're going to have a personalised news feed, it's got to be well... personal.

I was slightly disconcerted over the reference to Google Reader, which died over the summer. Admittedly, it gave me an option to import my OPML feed, which is helpful, but most people will have moved on to other tools already, so why the emphasis on GReader, when it should have been on an OPML file? This just makes it look worryingly out of date.

I didn't have the flexibility to choose subject areas of interest to me, which I have with other tools, and I was fairly limited to choice of sources, although admittedly I could pull in my own RSS feeds, but again it's not ideal. I expect a vast array of subject areas, and having two - yes, two - for internet material was a little laughable. It just doesn't cut it.

So in summary, if you don't have a tablet device, and you're interested in news curation tools, give this one a go; it will give you a vague flavour for what people are experiencing on a tablet device. Hopefully Noowit will improve, but until it does, I'm not really interested in it.

RebelMouse - social activity curation tool

Want to draw all of your social media activities together in one place? You might want to take a look at RebelMouse in that case, and you can take a look at my version at https://www.rebelmouse.com/Philbradley/ Basically you authorise sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and so on to be able to take your content and put it onto your RebelMouse page. It's a bit like a cross between Scoop.it and a bookmarking site as far as I can tell. It's a nice idea if you're intending to do a lot on social media and need to park your activities all in one place. I can see how it would work well for a library for example.

MyNews.is

From the site: "Inspired by the beauty of print and native iPad apps, MyNews.is brings this experience to every device. Along with a new algorithm, designed to discover articles, MyNews.is will transform the online reading experience." It looks ok, but I'm slightly put off by the claim that it's the world's first personalised discovery magazine, when clearly it's not even in the first ten of these things. Sure it's fine, but I'll stick with Zite, Flipboard, News.me, Pulse.me and so on.

Backstitch

"backstitch is a personal web experience that aggregates content from your favorite websites and services into a consistent user interface. Unlike other 'data aggregators' backstitch translates information into descriptive formats such as articles, photos, and products. With this common format backstitch is able to provide a consistent experience (regardless of source) as well as allow for detailed personalization such location search, price limits, and social filtering"

This is an interesting cross between a news curation resource, portal and start page. It pulls content in, does its best to ensure consistency through semantics, and then allows you to post material to the websites that you choose. It does look very attractive indeed, and is a good fit for other news curation tools.