There’s a lot of effort that goes into running a blog professionally. And the larger part of a blogger’s time is spent in researching and organizing information – often more than it takes to create the content itself.
But it’s possible to save a significant amount of time at this stage if you use the right curation tools.
Curation helps you filter out the signal from the noise and manage information more efficiently.
Here are a few such curation tools that can help you do this. One thing we kept in mind while creating this list that the tools should be aimed for use by individual users only and not enterprises, and consequently, a majority of their feature set must be offered for free.
Recommended Reading: 20+ Essential Tools And Applications For Bloggers
1. Listly
Use it to: Create smarter lists that your readers can interact with.
Bloggers know that list-based stories work. That’s why we have so many "9 ways to…" and "13 things you need to know about…" posts flying around. Lists work because they’re easier to consume than a chunk of text. But what if you could crowdsource your list-making?
Listly brings a collaborative approach to list-making that is much more suited to online publishing than just standard, text based lists. Once a list has been created, readers can make additions to the list, vote the entries up or down, comment on an entry, share the list, and even embed the list on their own website.
2. Headslinger
Use it to: Find news that’s relevant to you faster than ever before.
Need a way to quickly browse through news headlines? Give Headslinger a shot. With Headslinger, you can follow the most popular publications on the Internet categorized under different sections such as arts, auto, tech, food, travel, health, humor, entertainment, and more.
You can sort your news sources and keep them in separate folders for better organization. At one glance, you are presented with all the headlines of any publication along with a small excerpt – from here, you can directly share these headlines on your social networks or "sling" them to be read later when you want to.
3. Utopic
Use it to: Easily save web pages with one click and sort them in folders.
Browser bookmark systems are often too basic to serve any real purpose. In most cases, we just click on the bookmark button and then lose track of it; the bookmarks just keep piling on in an endless list that we never end up using. But thankfully, better tools are available.
Utopic is a visual bookmarking tool with social features that lets you find, save, and sort web pages. Setup is really easy, all you need to do is sign up with your Twitter or Facebook account – and once inside, you can either use a bookmarklet or a Chrome extension to create your bookmarks. If you’re looking for an alternative, check out Diigo.
4. Prismatic
Use it to: Get highly personalized recommendations of what to read next.
Prismatic is a beautifully designed news curation and discovery app that uses machine learning algorithms to filter content that aligns with the interests of a specific user. To start your account, you select and follow ten topics out of the many available such as business, television, health, technology, automotive, DIY, and more.
Once you’ve done that, you’re led to your Prismatic homepage, which presents stories from the topics and the people that you’ve followed. Once you start reading, liking, and sharing stories, Prismatic automatically and continuously serves up content best suited for you.
5. Protopage
Use it to: Set up your go-to page on the internet for information and task management
Protopage is an RSS reader, virtual desktop, and Internet start page. It’s an extremely feature rich tool that allows you to create a completely customize page just for yourself on the Internet. You can use it to read your own selection of blogs and news, create to-do lists, keep bookmarks, place sticky notes, add photos, manage your calendar, and more.
The basic organization on the page is done by creating, editing, and arranging widgets as per your needs. Protopage also optimizes content for viewing on mobile devices such as Android, iOS, and Blackberry.
6. Saved.io
Use it to: Create bookmarks easily without installing any resource-intensive extensions
Saved.io is the simplest bookmarking system that you will ever use. There are a lot of bookmarking tools out there, but almost all of them need you to install some sort of browser extension to work – and of course, if you use different browsers on multiple devices, you’ll need to find and install the right extensions for them all. No need for all that with Saved.io.
All you have to do is create an account and prepend "saved.io/" to any link in your browser and hit enter. That’s it. Your bookmark is now saved. You can create lists if you like, but other features such as tags and descriptions have been eschewed in favor of simplicity. Who’s complaining?
7. Kippt
Use it to: Collect design inspiration, tell stories, research new subjects, and much more
Kippt is a full-feature curation and archival tool that allows you to save links, read articles, watch videos, share notes, and much more. Your collections can be private or public, or shared with the people you work with. Kippt makes your information workflow and archiving effortless.
When you collect something to Kippt, the page and the content will be searchable, organizable, readable on your devices and easily sharable too.
So these were some tools that can help you save time, be more organized, and manage information in a more effortless manner. What are some tools apart from these that you use to curate information?
Editor’s note: This post is written by Vishveshwar Jatain for Hongkiat.com. Vishveshwar, a writer and editor for over 6 years, with experience in both digital and print media, is now a content marketer at AdPushup; which helps users optimize ad revenue generated from their existing ad units. Find him on Twitter.
7 Content Curation Tools For Bloggers
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