On the heels of Yahoo’s acquisition of news summarization startup, Summly, there are now talks of Yahoo acquiring Tumblr. 

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is said to be closing in on a $1 billion acquisition deal with David Karp, the CEO of New York-based Tumblr.

This time though the deal will not be for $30M, but rather $1B.  Though Tumblr can be used for posting original content, it’s often used for curating images and text abstracts from third-party sources.  Does this new acquisition hint at bigger plans for Yahoo to incorporate curation into their offerings?  After all, Yahoo started as a curated directory of links to begin with.

Read original article at mashable.com…

Byline post by Pawan Deshpande discussing the content pyramid. The different levels are defined by what the goals are for the content. The article also dives into how to move through the levels, creating or curating content to achieve maximum benefits.

For that we turn to the Content Marketing Pyramid, a framework for mixing short, low-effort content with longer, more time-intensive content.

Read original article at cmswire.com…

LinkedIn following on its new vision to become the place for content for professionals, announced the launch of “channels”, a new feature within LinkedIn Today:

Channels bring together curated content around general subjects like technology, marketing strategies, retail and healthcare — 20 in all, with more getting added soon — with each one combining popular posts from news sources with those from selected people deemed influential (LinkedIn’s list of “influencers”) in the given topic.

The feature bubbles up content not through expert or internal curation, but rather through social curation by monitoring content shared by experts in those specific topic areas.  It will be interesting to see how this plays in with the recent Pulse acquisition.

Read original article at TechCrunch…

Investor Business Daily recommends some best practices on how to get the most on big piles of data for executive insight:

Intellectual assets set firms apart from the crowd. To maximize the corporate brain trust, take a thorough approach to managing overflowing data streams.

The article puts forth several guidelines including going deep, mining the minutiae, linking silos, curating, increasing your research, discriminating, and gaining expert appeal to 

Read original article at Business News…

Google’s Matt Cutts hints at which fresh content gets ranked highest in their search results, and why that happens:

There are some queries that deserve freshness (QDF), [but] there are some queries that are better served by evergreen content that’s been around for a long time.

In other words, based on the query string Google will decide whether its worth showing more fresh content or more evergreen content.  Content curators often rank well for fresh content because they are curating on a regular basis, unlike their peers who are creating all the content manually. To optimize for search though, content curators should retitle content and write abstracts that cater to queries that favor freshers content versus evergreen content.  Such queries would include event, time sensitive and transient queries that have spikes in search volume, unlike queries that always have a decent but stable search volume over a long period of time.

Read original article at brafton.com…

J-P De Clerck of Content Marketing Experience writes about how many companies fail in the demand generation and marketing automation campaigns because of a lack of content marketing:

To succeed in demand generation, conversion & customer relationships you need a solid content marketing approach or your marketing automation will fail.

He goes on to make an analogy with cars, saying that marketing automation is the car.   Regardless of whether you’re car is a Kia, a Camry, a Lexus or a Rolls Royce, if you don’t have gas in it (content) or a map (direction and strategy), you will fail. 

Read original article at Content Marketing Experience…

As online shopping and the size of online catalogs continues to grow, retailers are seeing their shoppers confused by having to wade through large piles of products and may be impacting sales.

A search for ‘black dress’ in Clothing & Accessories on Amazon.com brings back 65,529 results! For consumers, this large number of choices can lead to confusion, exhaustion and dissatisfied purchases, or worse, no purchase at all.

While many B2B marketers have employed content curation in the context of curating relevant and educational content for their prospects, the new wave of curation will be for B2C marketers:

A tailored experience is no longer just a desire for shoppers, it is an expectation.

Rather than curating informational content, curation for retailers will be the curation of products to give consumers less choice, but better choices at the same time that will ultimately lead them to a quicker purchase. We are already seeing this happen before our eyes with e-commerce sites such as Etsy, AHAlife and Svpply (acquired by eBay). We have yet to see the major retailers adopt this, but it’s coming soon.

Read original article at PSFK – New Ideas and Trends…

The Sunlight Foundation today released a small app to detect plagiarized content online which they are calling “chun-alism”.  

‘The tool is, essentially, an open-source plagiarism detection engine,’ web developer Kaitlin Devine explained. It will scan any text (a news article, e.g.) and compare it with a corpus of press releases and Wikipedia entries. If it finds similar language, you’ll get a notification of a detected ‘churn,’ and you’ll be able to take a look at the two sources side by side.

It’s a move in the right direction, and should help content curators build more differentiated content, curate ethically, and pro-actively avoid any copyright and ethical issues. However, the tools is pretty raw at the moment.  A quick trial of the tool revealed that it only matches content from a limit set of databases such as press releases.  Hopefully this can grow going forward and become more powerful.

Read original article at mashable.com…

An in-depth look at Google’s patent for some of the algorithms at work reveal some very interesting elements to their ranking algorithm. While some expected  factors include frequency of news publication, or the length of the articles, some of the more surprising factors include number of authors for the source (staff size), writing style, usage patterns, global reach of the news source, breadth of coverage and more. For curators, these are all factors to consider as you curate content to decide what content is most relevant for your audience.  They have put a lot of thought into these algorithms over the years, and its worth at least a quick skim.

Read original article at Monday Note…

Following LinkedIn’s acquisition of SlideShare, Linked recently acquired Pulse, the popular news reader on mobile devices.  With the acquisition, LinkedIn revealed their aims towards become a key resource for professionals and content.  Here’s what one of their VP’s Deep Nishar had to say:

We believe LinkedIn can be the definitive professional publishing platform — where all professionals come to consume content and where publishers come to share their content.

Many content curators using curation for marketing are B2B with a target audience on LinkedIn.  With LinkedIn’s focus on content on their platform, it’s more important than ever to share your curated content not only on your own properties such as a microsite or blog, but only on professional networks where your audience congregates such as LinkedIn.

Read original article at AllThingsD…