Whether you blog or surf the World Wide Web, I bet you use bookmarks. Right? Now imagine a bookmarklet that also allows you to save interesting articles and post them on your blog. Of course, you can do that on WordPress, using its bookmarklet, Press This. You can do that on Tumblr,too, using its bookmarklet, Share This. But it’s time you tried Scoop.it, too.
I love Scoop.it – and so will you.
“Easily publish gorgeous magazines,” says the Scoop.it website. It goes on to say:
Scoop.it identifies great content that matches your audience interest, helps you to easily edit and publish it in an engaging magazine format that easily spreads to people sharing your passion. Discover and follow great curators.
That’s what it is – Scoop.it is a curation tool that publishes content in a magazine format. By that it means a format like this.
Sindia, on Scoop.it
You are looking at a screenshot of my Scoop.it. It’s called Sindia, a name I made up, merging Singapore and India. That’s the topic of my Scoop.it. It’s about Singapore and India.
On Blogger or WordPress, you start a blog. On Scoop.it, you “create a topic”. You can create up to five topics for free in your Scoop.it account.
Scoop it: Create a topic
On Sindia, I gather news from Singapore and India. How? By using the Scoop.it bookmarklet to select and post news about the two countries from various blogs and websites.
Scoop. it bookmarklet
The bookmarklet automatically adds a picture from the article and creates a summary of the article, but I can edit the content, change the text and remove the picture if I wish to. Scoop.it also preserves the link to the original article, so if you click on the post I have published on my Scoop.it, you can go back to the original article.
And you can share your Scoop.it post on Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, WordPress and Google +. Scoop.it also has an RSS feed like WordPress, Blogger and Tumblr.
I like Scoop.it not only because it looks good but also because it seems a good way to archive interesting content. It has a search feature. In the “filter” tab on Scoop.it, you can type a keyword or select a tag to find matching content. The search feature on Scoop.it seems to work better than the one on Tumblr. On Tumblr, I can only retrieve content that I have tagged by typing the tags in the search box. On Scoop.it, I found articles by typing keywords that I had not even added to the post. So far, I have only tagged the posts, not added keywords to them, on Scoop.it.
Scoop. it also has a “suggestion engine” which shows content from other blogs and websites you could use. The suggestion engine uses the keywords you listed when you created your topic. You see the suggested content when you click on your “Curate” page.
Scoop. it is good for curation. Give it a try. I am sure you will love it.
I first read about it on a website about journalism and new media.
Sreedhar Pillai wrote on The Huffington Post:
Scoop.it, in fact, is a lot of fun. If you have ever cherished being an editor and creating a colorful magazine like Hello everyone will go gaga about, you can do it easily with Scoop.it. If you have enjoyed cutting and collating things in to your scrap book in school, you already know how to use Scoop.it and what you can do with it.
In fact the power of Scoop.it is in its capability to pull together visually appealing web pages rather than inanimate links to the urls which hide the information behind them.
The way Scoop.it will help you build your powerful magazine is simple. Once you choose the key words you are interested in and like to curate, and you christen your magazine, Scoop.it will scour the social web to collate a list of web pages, tweets, comments, etc. and will present to you the latest of them every time you visit your dashboard. All you need to do is to literally drag what is relevant in to the column and curate by adding your bit of endorsement, comment of approval, disapproval etc.
It is a win-win situation for everyone. You give extra traction to the publisher of the web property you select to add to your little magazine, you add your stamp of little satisfaction to it and dish it out to someone who trusts your views or expertise. Everyone is happy with Scoop.it.
