The re-invention of news curation

Checking on what’s happening around the Liquid News project on the #liquidnews Twitter feed, it seems the project is advancing: Toni Hopponen from Sparkbox posted on his blog that Liquid News will likely use his service to publish articles, opinions etc. of experts involved in this project.

Sparkbox is a live reporting widget, enabling citizen journalists and experts to publish directly on websites. It has admin tools which make it possible to define user-specific rights. The look and feel of the widget is customizable, and of course sharing on networks, liking and commenting are features of this widget. Example of its use: is a newspaper in Finland having 15 soccer experts comment on the recent World Cup, they also organize citizens to report on local news.

The important thing is here that the content is curated. Maybe there once was a time that the internet was only used by gentle, civilized and smart people, but as every community manager will tell you these days what matters is to curate and moderate. While a community manager often only has one site or forum to moderate, curation of real time news is even more challenging as conflicting reports in various languages on many different platforms have somehow to be filtered and selected. It also is more challenging than what traditional journalists used to do: curating information coming via news wires and sources they often knew face to face. Journalists still do that, but they also have to handle the social media streams giving unique but not necessarily reliable information.

Robert Scoble has a fascinating collection of videos and news about “the real-time curation wars” and also Robin Good posted extensively about real-time curation.

Here you see ‘media futurist’ Gerd Leonhard in this video shot by Robin Good talking about curation:

Robert Scoble interviewing Patrick Meier about Ushahidi about crisis news curation systems:

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2 Responses to The re-invention of news curation

  1. RobinGood says:

    Hello Roland, thank you for sharing info about Sparkbox Liquid News, which I wasn’t aware of. Much appreciated indeed.

    I just wanted to say that the video attributed to me, has been shot by me but the person talking is “media futurist” Gerd Leonhard @gleonhard and not me as it appears in the caption. 🙂

    • Anonymous says:

      so sorry about this, and that while you are so recognizable in your own ‘performances! I corrected it, thank you!

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