Curation: The act of curating, of organizing and maintaining a collection of artworks or artifacts; The act of curing or healing; The manual updating of information in a database -Â en.wiktionary.org/wiki/curation
How do we curate?
Content Curation
In today’s internet, everyone is a content curator. We dig through the mountains of crap to find the good gems, and then we share it with our friends on platforms like  blogs, forums, facebook, youtube, linkedin, twitter, foursquare, digg, tumblr, mirc, chat clients, email, etc.  This  process of collecting, filtering, refining, and re-distributing content in a unique-ish package becomes what we call “content curationâ€.
Reader Curation
To share content we need to have readers right?  We need to have friends, subscribers, followers, or linked accounts in order to content share. It stands to say that if we can collect, organize, and share content, then we also have the ability to collect, organize, and target readers.  With Twitter we can search for people who are tweeting about things you talk about things related to your content and engage them to follow you in some way (introductions, replying on their topics, etc.). Most users of services have voluntarily tagged themselves with information that can identify their interests.  Targeting these readers and organizing them into your content delivery systems is the other side of curation, reader curation.
Tools to help with Creation
GOOGLE READER
Before Google Reader fully integrated with Google+ they had a share setting that would allow us to send articles we read “with an attached note†to a customized public RSS feed. We could use this reader platform to follow all our blogs, sort through the crap, select the gold, and then use the shared items RSS feed to redistribute the hand selected content to the blog/platform of our choice using RSS importing. It was very powerful stuff!
We can still use google reader to curate content to Google+, which is still a very powerful feature for building readership, but we’ve lost the capability to use RSS to export to other platforms. For those who want to revive this capability, keep your eyes on the HiveMined Reader alternative.
BLOGSENSE AUTOMATION TOOLS Â - For curating content with the WordPress CMS.
BlogSense automation is the parent software of this blog, and provides automation tools & solutions to self hosted WordPress blogs. Â Features that make BlogSense good at content curation are , like an RSS reader, you can store a wide variety of RSS feeds and then use filtering methods to block unwanted articles or use the direct importing mode to import select articles and add commentary to the articles you would like to pass onto your readers before publishing.
BlogSense also allows the user to post content to the ‘draft’ or ’pending review’ publish status for review before publishing, while additionally offering the option to have articles emailed to you email for manual approval before publishing.
Tweet Adder For Curating Twitter Followers
Tweet Adder does not curate content, but instead curates readers (followers). With this tool you can use keyword based automated searches to pick twitter users out of the collective pool and arrange to make content with them, promoting a potential follow. One time I made a quick video introducing the Tweet Adder interface: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhB5y7tC420
TUBE TOOLBOX For currating Youtube subscribers
This software is similar to Tweet Adder in the since that it uses automation to connect with users through keyword searches. You can use keywords related to whatever topic you think worthy, and harvest user accounts that turn up in the results, and then use Tube Toolbox to auto-friend these people, share a video with them, message them, suggest them to subscribe to your channel, etc.
What are the different types of curation models for content?
There are a couple of different types of curation models and each has it’s own level of internet respect. You could even say that these models could be ranked in order of superiority.
The first and weakest model is called the summary & link based curation model. It consists of a editor hand selecting and re-distributing articles in tact with the original summary and a link to the original source.
The second model is a little strong and it’s the excerpt + editorial commenting + link to the original article. This model consists an editor hand selecting content and then using it as a platform for writing your own editorial content. This is by far a stronger model then the prior own. It adds a personality to your blog and increases the chances of retaining readership loyalty.
The third model is the strongest and at the same time most professional model employed to date. It is the journalistic curation approach aka 90%+ original content. Usually the results of a complete re-summarization of a topic inspired by a hand selected article, providing editorial content and possibly, but not necessarily, citing the inspiring content source.  This model usually emerges when a reporting firm has the money, talent, and readership to power the model.
Many popular sites such as TechCrunch , started out at level two content curation to end up at level three.  Most reporting agencies (both local and internet based) operate at level three.  Many small reporting/curation still exist at level two and experience loyal readers and have no aspirations to move into level three. Most all of Google+, Twitter, Facebook, etc accounts operate successfully at the level two curation. Some distribution channels  provide the full article written by a third party. This can be through guest posting or permission based posting (with links back to the original content).
So you see, this is the current paradigm my mind sits at concerning content curation. Hopefully in the future I’ll be able to add some more tools for both content and reader curation services.
Feel free to comment and improve!
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The BlogSense Guide to Internet Curation
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