Publitweet widgets spreading: Now on Scobleizer and elsewhere

More and more publishers are adopting the Publitweet widget as they seek better ways to engage their readers with curated, real-time content. We’re growing fast and looking forward to helping more sites give their audiences a better experience.

Some of the latest sites using Publitweet:

Tech personality Robert Scoble installed two Publitweet widgets on his popular blog: http://scobleizer.com/

The Spokane Spokesman-Review is using  a Publitweet widget to present Tweets from its staff: http://www.spokesman.com/twitter/

SF Public Press has a widget on their home page: http://sfpublicpress.org/

Noted tech journalist and analyst Tom Foremski is using Publitweet: http://siliconvalleywatcher.com/

Belgium’s top newspaper Le Soir has placed Publitweet on its home page: http://www.lesoir.be/

Local news and curated lists

One area where real-time curators can add particular value is with local lists, applying their concentrated knowledge of their surroundings for the benefit of the community.

It can be as simple as a regular citizen putting together a list of local taco carts, which could be useful for more readers if they simply know where to find it. Local journalists can assemble a list with the best sources for political news. By bringing together these authoritative sources,  curators filter the real-time firehose into something useful.

As an example, the SF Public Press, a non-profit news startup, put together a list of news sources for the Bay Area they are displaying on their home page. By curating this list, they get a real-time feed of new information on their site without having to actively update their page. Using the Publitweet widget, they can also see how people are interacting with the widget to find out how that news is spreading, potentially leading to ideas for issues they should be writing about.

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.