Curation tool Bundlr goes public

Content curation tool Bundlr goes public today, making it accessible for people to sign up through Twitter and Facebook instead of by invitation only.

The new public version also boasts some additional features, including a embedding, timeline visualisation, and a search function for users and bundles.

Bundlr is based in Coimbra, Portugal, and has a three-strong team consisting of Filipe Batista, Sérgio Santos, and Pedro Gaspar.

The team came to Journalism.co.uk’s most recent news:rewired event, and created a bundle with blogs, quotes, tweets, audio and images from the day. See the news:rewired bundle at this link.

You can see more about the launch and sign up on the Bundlr site.

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news:rewired on Bundlr

Our good friends from Bundlr in Portugal came over en masse last week for news:rewired, and they built a page dedicated to the event.

You can find tweets, quotes, pictures and video from the day there.

Bundlr is a free tool for online curation, clipping, aggregation and sharing web content.

The idea for the tool actually came about as a way to cover conferences. Founders Filipe Batista and Sérgio Santos, from Coimbra, Portugal, told Journalism.co.uk in February:

After attending a great conference, we thought about ways to show how it really was to be at the event. Share photos, videos, reports and all that was being published online, in a single shareable page. But we couldn’t figure out a simple way to do it.

But now they have. Check it out by way of news:rewired here.

You can see Journalism.co.uk’s own round of blogs from the day at this link, and visit the news:rewired site to find speaker presentations, liveblogs and more.

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#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – five rules for using Storify

Writing on the Storify blog, Staci Baird has compiled five rules for using the increasingly popular social media curation tool:

Tipster: Joel Gunter.

To submit a tip to Journalism.co.uk, use this link – we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.

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The Economist: Aggregation, curation, and the changing journalist’s toolkit

A blog post by the Economist from the South by Southwest (SXSW) event in Texas takes a closer look at a much retweeted tweet: “@robinsloan The way to cover big news in 2011 is not “here’s what happened.” It’s “here’s how to follow the story” http://t.co/sMqGOuh”.

You might say that you don’t need to be a journalist to cobble together a list of links. But actually, given the huge proliferation of sources these days, you do. Being able to scan a vast range of material, determine what’s reliable, relevant and sufficiently objective, decide what will actually interest your particular readers and arrange it in a way that they can use are not trivial skills.

Full post on the Economist’s SXSW blog post at this link

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Digital Trends: LinkedIn launches aggregated news service

A post on Digital Trends website reports that LinkedIn has launched a news aggregation service as a way of increasing the length of time people spend on the site.

Think about it: How much time do you actually spend in LinkedIn.com? Unless you’re fine-tuning your profile or searching for potential employees, the answer is probably not a lot. Most of us are content to let our accounts sit there until we can post an addition to our resume. Of course LinkedIn knows this, which is why it’s launching LinkedIn Today.

Full post on Digital Trends at this link

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Lostremote.com: NBC to integrate tweets from top Twitterers

US TV network NBC is planning to integrate tweets from the top 20 Twitter accounts within its 10 markets, according to a report by lostremote.com.

‘The 20′ will be asked to discuss trending topics in their area and the discussions will be featured in on-air segments, the report adds.

There’s no word on how NBC will pick the top 20, other than follower counts. NBC says the list will likely evolve over time as new voices emerge.

“In the age of social media, ‘voice’ is democratizing, with fresh new perspectives about important issues facing local communities,” said Greg Scholl, president of NBC Local Integrated Media. “‘The 20′ will connect these relevant new voices with NBC’s local broadcast and online audiences to facilitate discussion and debate, and help shape local media coverage.”

‘The 20′ will be launched in New York, San Diego and DC this January, lostremote.com adds.

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In defence of aggregation: Journalists stand up for maligned practice at university event

The role of news aggregators was defended yesterday by journalists at an event for City University’s journalism students.

Speaking at ‘Pimp My Blog’, Patrick Smith, Karl Schneider, and Tim Glanfield argued that news aggregators add value, rebuking claims by former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr that news aggregators are “parasites living of journalism produced by others”.

“I do think we are adding value,” said Smith, the editor of news aggregation site TheMediaBriefing. “We have got a semantic tagging system that actually makes this industry searchable and navigable and I think that has got a good value.”

Patrick Smith at Pimp My Blog:

Glanfield, a former Times journalist and co-founder of Beehive City, echoed Smith and questioned whether newspapers added any value or helped readers by simply “copying each other’s stories over and over again”.

“There are plenty of people who call themselves journalists out there who are basically just copying stuff from each other.

“Whereas what TheMediaBriefing and organisations like that are doing is aggregating news which is adding value.”

YouTube: Tim Glanfield at Pimp My Blog

Schneider, the editorial director at Reed Business Information, criticised newspapers for blaming their failures on others.

“I think there are lots of examples of newspapers trying find someone else to blame, whether it is bloggers, Google, or Craigslist, it is always someone else’s fault,” he said.

“Actually I think newspapers have sat on their backsides and failed to respond effectively to a completely changing media landscape till it is pretty much too late.”

Schneider added that in the future newspapers will have to “fundamentally reinvent themselves” online, because the aggregation found in print does not make sense online.

YouTube: Karl Schneider at Pimp My Blog

Coverage elsewhere:

Thoroughly Good Blog: We’re online publishers now

BBC College of Journalism blog: video

Rajvir Rai is a postgraduate journalism student at City University London. He can found on Twitter @R_Rai.

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Yahoo rolling out new US local network in beta

Yahoo has started to roll out a new local product offering dedicated pages of news, events and deals for a number of locations in the US, lostremote.com reported this week.

Beta pages for Yahoo Local have emerged for San Francisco, Brooklyn and Michigan, which can be viewed by city or neighbourhood and feature a list of aggregated posts.

Many of the headlines, especially at the neighborhood level, originate from neighborhood blogs. You can post an event, or sign up with Associated Content to become a paid contributor. “We have launched Yahoo! local in a few neighborhoods and towns to refine the experience while gathering more content for the next set of cities,” explains the site.

Journalism.co.uk reported earlier this week that Yahoo had launched a new contributor network which enables its users to publish content onto its sites, following its acquisition of Associated Content earlier this year.

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Yahoo News launches new Weekend Edition

Yahoo has launched its new Weekend Edition on Yahoo News, a news package featuring original video and editorial content aimed at weekend audiences, according to a press release from Friday.

Weekend Edition programming will cover a wide range of topics, including travel and leisure, culture, family, and healthy living. In addition to featuring content from across the Yahoo! network and from Yahoo’s content partners, Weekend Edition will be anchored by an original video series with several high-profile hosts.

According to a report by MediaWeek, content will also be aggregated from sites such as The Daily Beast, Time and LiveScience.com.

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NYT: David Carr on the ‘vanishing divide’ between mainstream and digital media

The New York Times’ David Carr reflects on what he perceives as the “vanishing divide” between mainstream and digital media, following the move of media writer Howard Kurtz from the Washington Post to The Daily Beast.

Carr addresses the evolution of web journalism, which he says is not only changing the way news is collected and presented but also the way it is valued by audiences. The brand, he says, is no longer the priority.

On a journalistic level, the new playing field is more even. Many people see the news in aggregated form on the web, and when they notice a link that interests them, they click on it with nary a thought about the news organization behind it. Information stands or falls on its magnetism, with brand pedigree becoming secondary.

More and more, the dichotomy between mainstream media and digital media is a false one. Formerly clear bright lines are being erased all over the place. Open up Gawker, CNN, NPR and The Wall Street Journal on an iPad and tell me without looking at the name which is a blog, a television brand, a radio network, a newspaper. They all have text, links, video and pictures. The new frame around content is changing how people see and interact with the picture in the middle.

See his full post here…

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