I just finished some research for one of my classes last week about content curation. Although I have used a lot of different tools in my PLE/PLN over the years – [netvibes, google reader, netnewswire, delicious, diigo, twitter, pinterest, flickr, zite, feedly, river of news, instapaper, and pocket] – to name a few, I had not discovered “curation” tools – although Pinterest, Zite, feedly and scoop.it are in that category.

I wandered into some social media zines related to business and found a goldmine of resources and descriptions of a variety of tools. If you are also new to this area of social networking, you will find these articles and news about curation tools of interest. The first article by Beth Kanter is a good introduction to the topic which she describes as “the process of sifting through information on the web – from articles to images to videos to tweets – to organize, filter and make sense of content and then to share the very best material with your network.”

In my teaching field of web design, the concept of design thinking is becoming far more important than the coding involved. Curation tools are great resources for UX designers and anyone trying to understand the users who for whom they are designing. Curation is also a strong element in keeping up with the rapid changes in the web design industry – and of course most marketing is also based on design thinking or developing an empathic view of who you are designing for. Designing in education I find much the same. I well remember discovering Maish Nichani’s article back in 2002 about “Empathic Instructional Design” and its impact on helping me get ADDIE out of my bored mind when starting my doctoral studies in ID.

Peruse these excellent resources for an introduction to content curation. Be prepared to be amazed and spending a lot of time evaluating the tools!

“7 Smart Techniques for content curation“, at Socialbrite.org

“Authors or curators: Who will be the more valuable in the future“, at Mashable.com

“Take charge of the curation wave with these slick tools“, at socialmedia.biz

“Top tools to help you curate business content“, at socialmedia.biz

You will find other useful links on the pages of these articles, as these are very informative business zines.