September 27, 2010 – Scobleizer

Back in March I wrote a post about the seven needs of real-time curators. Over the next week or so no less than three companies are shipping services that will fulfill that dream with tools that comply with all seven needs.

What are they?

1. Curated.by. (My Techcrunch Disrupt tweets on Curated.by is here).
2. Storify. (My Techcrunch Disrupt Storify bundle). Most of Storify’s tool is under NDA until announced later this week, so I can’t talk more about the tool.
3. Keepstream. (My Techcrunch Disrupt page on Keepstream).
4. Bag the Web. (My Techcrunch Disrupt page on Bag the Web).

First, I recorded an audio post about what is real time curation and what problem does it solve? You might listen to that, because it’ll explain what these tools are solving and how I’ll judge them over the next few days. Listen here:

http://www.cinchcast.com/cinchplayerext.swf

Second, I recorded a video last week with Curated.by’s founder, Bastian Lehmann. This is the first look that I know of at this curation tool and a discussion of how he’ll compete and make money providing these curation tools.

Based on my first playing with these tools it is clear that Curated.by and Storify are in the lead. They let you mix multiple media together, not just Tweets, and have good and easy-to-use drag-and-drop interfaces to let you reorder things. Who will be best? I need a few days putting them through their paces. If you are using these tools at Techcrunch, post your URLs in the comment area here and I’ll link your curation into mine, which is one way to get group curation.

Also, most, if not all, of these are embed-able in blog posts, so they are designed for the modern web and they seem to understand how to distribute themselves back into Twitter and Facebook. Below I’ll embed each of the curated feeds so you can watch them all in the morning and see how they behave when updated.

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Curated.by:

http://curated.by/embed/embed.js

_bundleWidget({
bundle_id:863,
title:’Techcrunch Disrupt’,
subtitle:’curated.by/Scobleizer’,
scrolling:true,
update:true,
shell:true,
auto_width:false,
per_page:20,
font_size:’11px’,
border_color:’666666′,
heading_text_color:’ffffff’,
heading_bg_color:’666666′,
link_color:’666666′,
text_color:’333333′,
content_bg_color:’ffffff’,
content_divider_color:’cccccc’,
width:300,
height:450
});