Everyone’s talking about content curation. It seems like an easy win. In content marketing and business blogging, if you don’t have the time or inspiration to create great content yourself, you can curate it!
Before you start down this path, be aware: content curation is a lot of hard work. To make it worthwhile, you have to be really careful about reading (viewing, etc.) and choosing the content you want to curate. Because to get points from curation, you have to truly think the content is worth passing on.
I don’t know about you, but I find it difficult to keep up with the bloggers and websites I’m already following, much less find new ones. I could do nothing all day but follow the links on Twitter posts and sift through blogs, videos and podcasts for the best ones. And I’d still only scratch the surface.
There are a few sites that do curation well. In marketing, I find that MarketingProfs is a goldmine of great information and resources. For startup marketing, I enjoy the resources put together by the OpenView team on the OpenView blog.
But, if you want to curate, or even just try to keep up, here are a couple of great resources:
Alltop aggregates blogs from all over, and is a great place to explore and find new blogs on various topics of interest to you. This blog is now listed in the Content Marketing category on AllTop.
Google Reader: Set up alerts for topics that interest you, and us RSS feeds to subscribe to those blogs you don’t want to miss. There’s even a Google Reader app on my Android phone, so I can browse through blogs when I have a few spare minutes.
Personally, I still find writing blog posts faster and easier than trying to be a trusted curator of content on the web!
Anne Janzer 
Content curation does not have to be a lot of work. These days there are technologies that can help you along the way like the one my company makes, Curata (www.getcurata.com). Content curation platform help you find, organize and share relevant content, but at the end of the day the curator is essential in the process.
Pawan, thanks for your comment. I’ll certainly take a look at your company – the promise of 19 minutes a day sounds compelling! I believe that the curator’s filter (comments, insight) should provide some value, as you said. Some people are very well suited to this. Others, like me, are more easily distracted reading everything 🙂 But thank you for pointing out this resource. Anne
Yes, there are many tools to help with curation and Google Reader is just scratching the surface. Check out (www.utilityposter.com) and places like Storify.com where you can search then drag and drop nicely curated posts in minutes rather than hours, depending on your writing speed for original content.
Jack, thanks for the links — Utilityposter and Storify both look interesting. I can tell that what I need is a curator for the different content curation tools! I’ll have to spend some time playing around with both.
Yeah lol – there will soon be a need for a meta-curation tool organizer. It speaks to the massive size of the information overload problem on the web though. Those who master curation will be very important people indeed!
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Hi Anne,
Thanks for bringing attention to this important topic. Curation is just a means to an end, not the end itself. The goals vary, and they extend beyond the business blog. Feel free to check us out http://www.eqentia.com; we’re the leading enterprise SaaS platform for managing curated content.
Wiliam – you’re so right, there are many applications for curation beyond the simple business blogging case. No doubt we’re seeing the growth in all of these great content curation tools because everyone is starting to feel overwhelmed by the vastness of sources on the web. Thanks for pointing me equentia as well – as you said, the enterprise-level take on content curation. /Anne
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Curation can certainly help. But we see it as only part of the solution. It’s also important to have quality, authored content to ensure a clear voice and direction. You should have a look at http://idioplatform.com/ – we work for major B2B and B2C brands who want to power personalised content marketing across multiple digital channels.
Basically you can manage all curated and authored content in a dashboard – delivering content across web, mobile, email, and social platforms. The system personalises content for each recipient, based on social media data and customer preferences, so that the volume of content that can be curated, only goes to the most relevant recipient. You also get some very detailed analytics on customer engagement, behaviour and preferences.
See http://idioplatform.com/2011/02/the-content-pyramid-and-the-huffpo/ for a post on this “blended content” model.
Thanks, that looks like an interesting tool.