The new thing: web curating

January 30th, 2011

Okay, it’s not so new, but it is becoming more prevalent - and it is certainly changing my reading habits. I am talking about curated sites - where smart people select and present information and articles from all over the web, and put them in an accessible form for people in a hurry to find good reads.

For those of you who share my enjoyment of great long-form journalism, and lament its near absence in our own country, it is a wonderfully efficient way to find the stuff. Curated sites don’t do their own writing, just selecting and presenting. I think we used to call it editing. Anyway, in the struggle to keep up with the vast amount of material thrown at one on the web, it is one way to cut through it effectively.

Today I want to share two with you, and an app which makes it all easy, for those who joined the iPad queue at the local Apple Store when they started selling them on Friday.

The first is www.thebrowser.com, which finds interesting articles of all sorts and on all subjects and from all over the web, and presents them to you. They have a pick of the best new stuff, they order it also be topic, they have what they call browsings, which are interesting readings which are not necessarily current, and FiveBooks, in which they ask someone interesting to recommend five books on a topic.

The second, and my current favourite, is www.longform.org, which presents a couple of long-form journalism pieces, current as well as classic, every day. They link up well with Instapaper, in that you just click on their story and it is save at Instapaper for you.

If you don’t know about Instapaper, you should. They provide a “Read Later” button for your browser, which you click on whenever you see something you want to read but haven’t got time to do it immediately. The material is stored under your name at Instapaper, and you log in and read it at your leisure.

The Instapaper app puts it all at your fingertips on your mobile device. It was judged one of the apps of the year by the New York Time’s tech man at the end of last year.

There are lots of other curated sites, depending on your tastes and interests. Arts & Letters Daily is a particularly highbrow one, and Mario Popova is a particularly spunky one dealing with culture and innovation.

And Flipbook is the best tool for a kind of automated curating. You tell is what you like and it will curate from wherever you want on the web. It allows you to curate the curators.

For those who Tweet, you can follow @longreads, where participants are asked to share stuff they come across.

You might ask if these sites and tools are giving new life to the kind of journalism everyone says is being killed by the web. It certainly is promoting them and growing their readership, but it might be taking away their sustainability. The curated sites usually strip out the adverts that pay for the material. It is one reason that Instapaper, for example, is very readable, but it might also be killing the original source.

Smarts sources,though, are starting to tag their stories on @longreads.

Entry Filed under: Anton Harber, Journalism, Online