What is Content Curation? (Click that link to learn really good stuff.)
"Unlike content marketing, content curation does not include generating content, but instead, amassing content from a variety of sources, and delivering it in an organized fashion... Many of us have been participating in content curation for years without even knowing it. Anyone with a Facebook feed or Twitter stream has seen content curation first hand."
I've been experimenting with my own style of curating my own created content for a long time in combination with personally vetting other content I find all over the internet to share with my readers in my own shared feeds. I've played with everything from simple tagging systems to manually overseeing content gathering in my own paper.li. I'm getting pretty good at link sharing, connecting, and driving traffic, more or less crossing the streams. I turn off all my pingback responses because they are so overwhelming that I swim in them, one of my worst weeks a couple of years ago netting nearly 10,000 pingbacks overall. I used to play with pingbacks, it's a good way to discover if a weird underground Chinese porn site has linked or ripped your stuff for whatever odd reason, but it's also a real headache when you link a site that is swarming with spambot problems.
Here's a sample of a content curation discussion I jumped in on, from a comment I left last May at The Dark Side of Having a Blog Post Freshly Pressed by Paula Reed Nancarrow. She did a good write-up with some excellent points and has over 70 responses containing lots more info and tips, because this is something important to think about when you update or post anything public, so check her post out if you're needing more info. Here's my comment.
"I reblogged one of my own posts once to see what would happen and was immediately disgusted with the way it didn’t track the reader back to original source. I think my own writing is so bizarre no one would ever want to reblog it, lol, although I do find my stuff translated into other languages once in awhile.
The whole point to reblog is driving traffic. The more people (and bots) click, the more monetized sites make in kickback. Blogs that aren’t monetized still make money for the host in general since ads show up on free blogs. Basically, anything you write anywhere on the internet that isn’t on your own paid for domain is a free buffet service. If you weren’t intending to make money on what you write and want to keep it strictly on site, you can turn off RSS and web crawlers and several other things, but since WordPress auto-sends out to email readers, anyone out there can copy/paste content and never source it.
One solution I’ve seen some bloggers do, and do myself, is source your material over several of your own medias like pinterest and facebook that point back to original source. This helps web crawlers more firmly establish source, too.
There will always be uncontrollable content sharing in some form or another, have even seen authors complain of their entire books being available free online after they’ve contracted sales. The game, I think, is to create a solid web presence that autotracks everything you create back to you.
Sorry so wordy. If in doubt, tighten the spam filter and block rebloggers that are probably really pingback bots."
I've played around so much with my own stuff that I can plug nearly any word combo into a 'janika pinky' search and find nearly every sentence I've ever written that is public. And if that's not enough I add on a little, like 'janika banks pinky' or 'janika bluejacky' or whatever. Mine aren't common word combos, so I kind of own my search fields. (I've noticed other readers coming in using the same keyword structuring and going straight to particular content, so I think a few of you have really caught on to this method.) I accidentally, if you will, created my own curated content on a free service, and google search is the biggest curator in the world. (My filing cabinet, lol.) One way to maximize visibility is to drag everyone you like into your own reader service, so all the links, graphics, and vids I've shared (surely 10,000 by now) either boost me closer to front pages in search engines or sprinkle my presence across numerous pages for lurkers to bump into . I'm still playing around with this, but I've been very pleasantly surprised to see how much of my content readily pops up and multiplies behind my back. I have excellent ratings on several curator sites just because I share so much myself, so it's like Pinky blog is an algebraic expression of an algorithmic dance. Once you get the hang of sourcing yourself, the rest falls into place.
