Friday, December 17, 2010

Be a Personal Publisher - Future Media with Curated Online Magazines and Newspapers

The super cool idea is really simple one and elegant - you start acting as content aggregator and route quality content to your readers. Rohit Bhargava, author of Personality Not Included defines Content Curator as “Content Curator is someone who continually finds, groups, organizes and shares the best and most relevant content on a specific issue online.”

There is a lot of quality articles and blog posts from various content providers available online. By aggregating this online content you become a personal publisher who defines what topics or actual articles are the quality ones that you want to share with your readers.

Content curation can happen in many flavors and models, and actually the simple model is your daily Twitter RE-tweet activity. There are a few innovative services online that let the user curate his/her own news magazine. Most famous one currently is the cool Paper.li service that creates your very own daily magazine from the links shared by the people you follow on Twitter and Facebook.




Other kind of approach is personal content aggregator applications that are available to smartphones and tablets like iPad. Apps like Flipboad and Pulse can be configured to aggregate the most interesting content just for you from various sources like news portals, Twitter, Facebook, and RSS feeds.

iPad Flipboard App

iPad Pulse App


Great new example of Personal Publisher functionality is Microsoft Fuse Lab Montage service, that provides you possibility to publish a very own Curated Online Magazine. Montage is really simple and fun to configure and you can create cool looking online newspapers and magazines with it.

Ready Montage publication

You can design your Montage Magazine around any topic or idea you can imagine by adding content that pulls information from variety of sources, including RSS feeds, Twitter, Bing News, and YouTube. For advanced user Montage also offers flexibility with several options to fine tune the structure and content of a magazine.

Montage content source selction
This kind of a Personal Curated Publishing with content aggregation and curation features will become more and more popular in future. So definitely a future trend happening now.

#FutureWebTrendsNow










3 comments:

  1. Thanks for the post. A topic that deserves attention.

    I have been trying out curated.by. Even though Quora is more of an Answer service, some times you find content links that blow your mind and would have taken you hours to research and find.

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  2. Dead on. Many suppliers of information are broad in topic. People, however, have much more particular interests. That's why a magazines like Inc. and Popular Mechanics exist; we don't all want to read Time and get broad news!

    The problem is if you like mechanics, there are now 1000 places to get news on entrepreneurship or cool engineering. And many of the sources are great and how can we find all the sources and monitor everything they produce!

    So you are exactly right! We need more curators to monitor our favorite niches and tell us who is writing the best stuff. Apps like Pulse do this to an extent, but I think they are still tending to cover big, mainstream writers and not all or even most great sources.

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