Maybe I’m just lazy. Maybe I’m overly ambitious. Maybe a little bit of both. All I know is… blogging as much as I would like to is a freakin’ lot of work!
I do write original stuff sometimes – and some pretty good stuff at that, I think. I’m also a decent curator of content. For example, Linked Intelligence has grown into the definitive unofficial source for all things LinkedIn.
But being a good curator is tedious and time-consuming. And a lot of the reason for that has to do with a sub-optimal workflow. At the moment I’ve cobbled together several tools, each to handle a little piece of the flow, but I’m really not happy with what I’ve got. And what I really want seems so simple and so obvious, I find it unfathomable that nobody really seems to have built this yet. If someone has, please tell me, because I’ll buy it, I’ll review it, and I’ll tell everyone else how great it is!
What I want is a single tool to:
- Find interesting content to share.
- Facilitate either sharing it directly or blogging and then sharing.
Wow – does that really seem so difficult?
Let’s get into the specifics of what that means:
- Let’s start with an RSS reader.
- Then let me combine feeds and filter them by keyword, author, tag, date, etc.
- Then let me 1-click share, yet contextualize it for each channel, all in one interface, e.g.:
- Shorter comment and a link on Twitter, LinkedIn; longer comment and a link (and selectable image thumb) on Facebook; longer comment and a selectable excerpt and link on
- Refer to the author with their Twitter handle on Twitter, by name on Facebook and LinkedIn, and by their name, linked to their blog, in a blog post
- If I blog it, give me the option to share my blog post, rather than the direct link, to the other social media channels
I don’t want to completely auto-blog. I believe in the value of human review and commentary. I just want to make the workflow a LOT more efficient. Let me define a narrow set of rules to give me a manageable short list of content to review, that’s likely to have high quality. Queue that up so it’s as close as possible to being ready to publish. Let me review it and modify it – add the human touch. Then go do all the publishing.
Is that really too much to ask? Is there a tool that can do all this? How close to this are you? And what tool(s) are you using to do this?
Images: Will Lion, catspyjamasnz
Have a look at Shareist – www.shareist.com/ – I’ve been using it for a couple months, and I love it as a curation platform.
Hey Scott. Sounds like you might need to talk to a developer!
I just did a quick scan for curation tools and found www.scoop.it/. It looks interesting from a research and discovery standpoint. I only played with it for minute but I might start using it to find topical content for posts.
Good luck.
Thanks for the suggestion, Mat. I played with ScoopIt for a bit today and really liked it. The curation was simple and efficient, I love the look of the output page (see www.scoop.it/t/linked-intelligence ), and you can get the output as RSS, which you could use to feed your blog, as well as other social networks.
However, on a free account, all the links redirect to ScoopIt (your page on ScoopIt, with the individual story in a pop-up window). It’s not the best reader experience — requires 2 clicks/page loads to get to the actual story. To even think about using this for business, I think you’d pretty much HAVE to get a business account — at $79/month. I think the value is there, in terms of time savings, but it just FEELS a bit pricey… we’ll see how I feel about that after I’ve looked at some of the other tools though. 🙂
I will second Shawn’s recommendation of shareist.com. It will pretty much do everything you need and a LOT more. Been using it for a while now and it is a great way to curate all sorts of content.
Shareist sounds great — the copy on their site was speaking directly to me! Unfortunately, it’s in invitation-only beta at the moment. I’ve requested a code, so we’ll see. If either of you guys know anyone there, let me know. I’ll try nudging them on Twitter too.
Hi, Scott I agree with you and thanks for all tehnics and resources from this post it help as.I like this blog.
Hi Scott. We’d love to have you on board. This post shows that you’ve been thinking about this stuff a lot. Check your email in a few minutes for an invite to GetShareist.com, our membership site for shareist beta testers. Once you’re in there, we’ll get you set up with your own Shareist site.
Wow! Scott I have been thinking about this all day. I decided to search twitter for Curata and found your post.
I was coming at this from a different angle. We have hundreds of customers who don’t quite get the content marketing thing and I was looking for a solution that we could recommend to them so they could have an easier time with creation.
Curata is way to pricey for our customers, but I will check out the others.
An invite to shareist would be nice as well. 🙂
I grew frustrated with curation tools and pretty much stopped looking for a while. I’m planning on revisiting it soon for an upcoming project, but until then, there’s just too much crap out there to sort through. In other words, it’s hard to curate the curation crap.
Great post! I’m a new blogger and I really need this information. I have never heard about www.shareist.com/ But I think based on the discussion here it sound interesting.
Hi Scott
I agree with you regarding scoopit. I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks and yes it is good but I find myself using it to find the content and then I use posterous to do the curation.
In other words I am doubling up on the work but at least scoop.it is dragging the content in to me and i can filter it.
This shareist looks interesting, let me know how it goes.
I’ve requested an account so if you can give them a nudge and a wink I’d appreciate it.
cheers
Terry
Our product Curata (www.curata.com) is pretty close to what you are describing.
Yes, it is. It’s also completely out of reach for small businesses or solo professionals. $1,000 a month, right?