Curator services try to make order of online mayhem

By Christof Kerkmann Oct 16, 2011, 3:06 GMT

Berlin - Blogs, news portals, YouTube, Twitter, etc - all of them are working together at times to ensure a nearly overwhelming amount of data coursing online. Now, thanks to curating services like Storify, there's always hope that the information can be bundled and made more accessible.

A perfect example came in September, when a tremor was felt in western Germany. It was first noted on Twitter, as people began asking around to see if they were the only ones who had felt the ground shake. Soon, others were twittering about the details of the 4.6-magnitude quake. Before long, it was being reported on blogs and by local media.

A reporter at the Ruhr Nachrichten newspaper found all this information and used it for his own report. He then went a step further and combined it all using Storify to create a unified narrative of the event.

That put him on the cusp of a developing trend. More services are popping up to make sense of the flood of information threatening to inundate any web surfer.

Along with Storify, there are options like Licorize, Scoop.it and Curated.by. All allow users to organize and comment upon events, with just a few clicks. Curating, as it is called, is thus easier than making one's own blog.

Storify allows users to pull together content from Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and Facebook, dragging and dropping them together to make a story, all the while leaving one's own comments. A special connection makes it possible to export the story for posting onto a private website.

Storify is image intensive while Scoop.it has more of a journal feel. It searches links and comes back with previews full of captions and pictures. Users can upload their own images. And those registered with the service can follow and comment works by others, similar to Twitter.

Web designer Henry Zeitler was one of the first adopters of the new systems. There are still problems here and there, but he's hooked.

Scoop.it, he says, is not there for nerds, but for everyday computer users. 'It's interesting for people who don't have their own blog but still want to share something. The simple execution is just fun.'

But he does see problems. 'Not a lot is going on right now, it's just treading water.' The service is in a closed test version. The company promises that, soon, anyone will be able to use Scoop.it.

While Storify and Scoop.it focus on curation, Diigo is more of a comprehensive information manager with its own social network. Users leave things they find there, making notations on them with a virtual marker. But there are still curator aspects.

'I can put together lists of links and comment on individual posts,' says Andreas Auwaerter, who researches e-learning at the University of Koblenz and has used Diigo since 2008.

Diigo can't compete with Storify and Scoop.it when it comes to graphics, since it doesn't use pictures or previews. But Auwaerter is impressed by other features, like its search and group functions.

'I can decide if I want to share links - in a closed group or make them public - which is a must for me,' he says.

If you make something new out of your gathered content, don't forget about copyright law.

'If you put together links and comment on them, that's not a problem,' says lawyer Carsten Ulbricht. But when you take blocks of text, be sure to quote them. 'I can take parts if I quote the original source,' says Ulbricht, who specializes in IT and internet law.