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By admin, May 12, 2010 2:00 pm

I’ve been working recently with a group out of Italy called KipCast.  They have their origins in the dark days of syndication technology – back when FeedBurner seemed to be the only game in town.  In the last few years they have repurposed their crawling and scraping technology – which is highly precise – to support content republishing.  Unlike commodity web crawlers out there, they don’t just spider and crawl to build a general-purpose or vertical search index.  KipCast is used to crawl a targeted list of sites, extract the core content, clean it up, enrich it with consistent meta-data and then publish it somewhere else – usually in aggregation and usually just a summary. 

This approach certainly flies in the face of the notion of the linked data cloud – wherein content stays where it started and is never copied but, rather, linked-to.  Acknowledging that, I still think that republishing is a better approach when it comes to curation.  Deep stories and even links to related content need more context in a curated story in order for it to truly engage the reader.  Simple links just won’t do the trick imho. 

Story curation is just one example of how KipCast can be used to engage audiences.  In Europe, they have done a lot of work with listings and directories to, for example, build aggregated catalogues of items for sale from various far-flung, long-tail e-retailers.  I suppose this kind of aggregation around a purchase decision can be easily seen as curation too…

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By admin, February 5, 2010 6:39 pm

My oh my.  I am really impressed.  I just started using Zemanta – and I can’t say I know much about it’s history, but I like where it is going.  You don’t need to use it with LiveWriter – it works with most blogging platforms, but if you use Windows, I suggest LiveWriter.  I truly hate posting content in the tiny not-so-WYSIWYG editors found in most CMS systems and blogging tools.  LiveWriter is clean and simple and, when paired with Zemanta, it becomes a pretty decent tool for curating stories.

I certainly use OpenCalais within Wordpress and have used it in some custom applications, but OpenCalais only goes so far in helping me find decent related content.  Inform and Sphere are also good alternatives, but their model seems more closed and proprietary – things may have changed, but Inform, for one, didn’t give me a chance to select the related links myself.  It just select all the related links for me, which was rarely good enough.

Zemanta sits there on the right side of LiveWriter (or your blogging tool’s edit screen), analyzes what I’m writing and goes out to find related content suggestions on the fly.  Brilliant – and it will probably just get better.  I noticed a few oddities – at least in the LiveWriter plugin.  It doesn’t always refresh the list when you start writing a new post.  Relics are left behind from the previous post, but they are only suggestions anyways and can be ignored.  The LiveWriter plugin also provides suggested in-line links for your content, usually linking off to Wikipedia for definitions.

It also offers a media gallery that, presumably, goes out to media repositories and grabs readily-licensed or public domain images that are relevant to your topic.  Given my subject-matter, I haven’t seen much in the way of relevant images – yet. 

You can also feed Zemanta with your own Flickr account and provide it with a list of your favorite feeds.  I assume this will allow me to see more related content and images from my preferred sources.  Very nice.   I’m not entirely sure what their business model is yet, but I like where they are going.

I think they need to improve a few things – and maybe this is where their business model comes in:

• tier the suggested links by: my site, my network of sites, my content partners, trusted sources and then the broader web
• allow me to roll over the suggested links to get a summary of content
• provide sentiment analysis on the content showing me indicators of whether the content is positive, negative or balanced
• allow me to help it along by selecting topic phrases out of my content; automated topic extraction is hard to do well – we believe in manual assistance, so let us assist.

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By admin, January 31, 2010 2:11 pm

Curating for Topic Exploitation

Google and other search engines, including emerging semantic search, do topic exploitation very well.  You give the search engine a topic keyword or phrase, and it will do its best to show you relevant articles for that match the topic.  For curators, exploiting a topic according to a keyword is important, but Google will always do it better.  We think good curation considers exploitation, but techniques for enabling exploration are more important.

Curating for Topic Exploration

A great curator has a sense of how a topic ought to be explored.  That is the art in the science of publishing to the digital channel.  Google will never do this very well.  Exploration can branch in many directions, depending on the user, and providing useful paths for exploration is not easy but, if done well, your users won’t go back to Google right away and your all important engagement metrics will improve dramatically.  Advertisers and sponsors will learn to appreciate topic engagement because (and depending on the topic) it provides a great context for promoting brands, products and everything else that advertisers care about.  Ironically, the best example of curating for exploration is Wikipedia – a web property that can’t even be monetized.