Content Curation Sites - Two And A Half Free Ones

Before I get into the curation sites, I want to mention that I made this image with the iPhone (and iPad) app Waterlogue. I plan to talk about Waterlogue in my next post.

It is not an image straight out of the app. I imported it onto my laptop and then copied the central section to make three flamingoes.

I plan to upload the image to our ecard site at Quillcards and will do so in the next day or two when we also upload a bunch of Valentine's Day images with quotes or text - all based on Waterlogue images. I'm looking forward to it.

Meanwhile, back to the curation sites. There are others besides these three, including some very heavyweight (aka expensive) ones for companies that want to build their online presence that way.

That's because as well as curating content, all of them can also be used to publish original content. In other words, they are micro-sites as well as being curation sites pulling in content from elsewhere.

RebelMouse

I mentioned the Rebel Mouse content curation microsite in a short post here in April last year.

This is the blurb for Rebel Mouse:

Digital publishing reimagined for the social, mobile, real-time web. So you can breathe new life into your site and be proud of it once again. Maximize content discovery and sharing with social insights, feed management and community engagement made completely effortless and turnkey.

It rankles to be told that I need to breathe new life into my site and be proud of it once again. It kind of implies that by setting up a RebelMouse site I buy that description. And conversely, it implies that if my site has plenty of breath left and I was proud of it, then I wouldn't need or want RebelMouse.

Be that as it may, my site is at RebelMouse/Moi and it curates my tweets, blog posts, things I've scooped on Scoop.it, and probably other sources as well.

What good does it do me? Well it may be a valuable resource to someone else. Maybe.

But let's turn it on its head and think of other people's RebelMouse sites as a portal into what they have posted around the web. For example, I follow Kristi Hines (here is Kristi's page at RebelMouse- KristiHines.

There's bound to be some snippet in there that I'm interested in. And looking now, for example, I see that she contributed to MonetizePro with an article about the SAAS (software as a service) eCommerce site, Shopify. I always like to read thorough ecommerce reviews, so that was a good find.

Pressly

The next up is Pressly and here is the blurb.

Curate your content from across the web into an engaging experience. Select and publish the most relevant content for your audience from your blogs, across social networks and around the web. Instantly create and launch immersive content experiences for any device. Reach your audience wherever they are.

My Pressly is at Moi (yes, I chose the same name as on RebelMouse) and I made what Pressly calls a hub at Moi oh Moi

This time around, with RebelMouse under my belt, I decided to ask the people at Pressly how I could best use my microsite.

This is the reply from Jeff Brenner at Pressly:

One of the best ways to capture an audience through Pressly is our distribution widgets.

Email: You can leverage a Pressly widget for more compelling and engaging email marketing
Web: You can embed our Pressly widget on any webpage to drive traffic
Social: Anytime you share out a Pressly link on social, we automatically optimize the link to show a thumbnail and other meta data

On our roadmap is the concept of 'following' and monthly newsletters

We shall see.

Overblog

I don't like the name Overblog. May as well say it now and get it out of the way. I signed up and created a microsite that I named 'Greetings' and found myself in the admin page where I saw a list of links to Twitter, Tumblr, etc. I clicked a couple and saw this message:

Social Hub.Aggregate and curate your posts from hand-picked social networks.Upgrade to a premium account to enable this feature instantly.

A €4.99 (that’s about $7.00/mo) account gives me more themes, a custom domain name, emails. and three links to social networks. There is also a €19.99/mo small business acount with more links to social networks…. etc. and a Facebook Page on Social Hub (no, I don’t know what that is).

Thanks but no thanks.

But I can publish posts with the free account, so I published a short intro post that I entitled Hello. Nothing if not inventive, eh?

So in the absence of pulling in tweets unless I upgrade, overblog is more of a post-and-publish microsite than a curation site. What I do see though is that I can broadcast the post with a tweet, a shoutout to Facebook, or to LinkedIn.

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Scoop.it

I haven't mentioned Scoop.it here because it is so well known, but if you want to check it out, I have a couple of 'scoops' of which one is Visual Intelligence. One of my last re-scoops was a mention of Composer.io which is a way of posting once to all your social networks.