Welcome (and thoughts on real-time curation)

Thanks for stopping by.

We’re hoping to use this blog as a place for our thoughts and your feedback on real-time curation. As we write in our “About” page:

We believe there is a wealth of great content being created in real-time using tools such as Twitter. From earthquakes to elections, regular citizens with mobile phones are reporting on events happening in their communities — putting many more potential eyes on a story than any news organization could possibly have.

Finding the best of this content requires a blend of both humans and computers. Machines can help sift through the vast sea of content, using algorithms to narrow down the most relevant media. But in the end, people will have to pick the best of what’s out there to highlight to audiences.

Even gearheads like Robert Scoble are coming around to this view. In a recent post on “The Seven Needs of Real-time Curators,” he discussed the lack of tools to help bloggers and editors organize the critical mass of what he calls “info molecules”:

Thousands of these atoms flow across our screens in tools like Seesmic, Google Reader, Tweetdeck, Tweetie, Simply Tweet, Twitroid, etc.

A curator is an information chemist. He or she mixes atoms together in a way to build an info-molecule. Then adds value to that molecule.

Scoble then goes on to outline some of the needs of these curators, such as bundling and editing real-time content along with tracking the audience.

We believe we solve some of these issues with Publitweet, which enables publishers to curate and present Twitter feeds. We’re just getting started and hope to work with you to invent more tools to find the best of real-time content.