How do sites that feature curated content get their curated content?

October 9, 2012 2:30 PM

CONTENT CURATION: How do apps like flipboard and sites like Hypebeast, Slamxhype, etc, generate their curated content? I often see the same content on each. Surely they're not downloading images and writing blurbs by hand. Right? I assume at least part of the process is automated. But how?

I'm working on creating a website that is part original content and part curated content, with the curated content being pretty simple: an image, a title and a blurb, linked back to the original article.

I'm using wordpress, at least for the original content. What are ways of generating the curated content? I'm not looking for it to be automatic though. I want to be able to filter the content to choose what gets added. The question is, how?

This need not be about wordpress plugins. It's fine if it is, but I'm open to other ways of accomplishing this that don't involve wordpress.

Ideas?

posted by 2oh1 to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Can you give us an example of an "automated" Hypebeast or Slamxhype post? I always assumed that both sites were entirely hand written. Despite each site now employing several writers, I think they have a very consistent editorial voice, which would suggest that they aren't just reusing external feeds verbatim.
posted by roofus at 2:54 PM on October 9, 2012

You set up a bunch of RSS feeds relevant to the subject, and go through them every day to pick out the handful of articles that you want to feature.
posted by COD at 2:56 PM on October 9, 2012 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Roofus: Maybe they are hand written. I could definitely be wrong, especially since I'm not familiar with either site. I'm building a site for someone and was given those links and a few others as examples for a curated content section. I looked them all over and noticed the same thing again and again... photo, title/link blurb, and the photos looked like promotional stuff that all originated from somewhere. I assumed, perhaps incorrectly, that I was seeing a sort of flipboard-meets-twitter-ish version of content curation. I assumed it was being hand picked, though not necessarily hand written.

Regardless, I'm looking for something more along the lines of the flipboard blurbs, which I assume are being pulled from RSS feeds?

Perhaps a wordpress plugin is the way to go here.
posted by 2oh1 at 3:19 PM on October 9, 2012

I know someone who used Yahoo Pipes to create a (semi?)automated queue of retweets on their twitter account. It makes them look Very On Top Of Things.
posted by zippy at 4:07 PM on October 9, 2012

As far as the feeds-as-source idea, you can give FeedWordPress a bunch of feeds(duh), and configure it to automatically put particular bits of information into certain fields, etc. which would cut down on the amount of manual editing work. Your particular needs would dictate just how much, obviously, but it'd at least do the initial entry creation. As far as you manually choosing what gets added, you'd just tell it to create the entries as Pending Review, or even use a custom status.

A specific example could get you a more specific answer.
If they are coming from some particular source, it might be possible to hunt it down. But note, for example, that Vimeo posts have descriptions provided by the authors. Those descriptions are sent along in feeds produced by the site. I can browse vimeo.com, watch things and flag them as favorites, grab a feed of those favorites that gets pulled into FeedWordPress and automatically put into the entry body field, with the video title in the title field, and so on.
posted by Su at 9:43 PM on October 9, 2012