Comments (2)

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…