Content Curation: Pearltrees, SmallRivers [en]

If you’re at LeWeb’09, you’ve heard of Pearltrees. They’re offering an interface/platform to help people curate web content by collecting it (bookmarking it?) in the shape of “pearls”. SmallRivers are a Lausanne startup which are also in the content curating business, by allowing people to network pages together by inserting some code in the page.

I’m trying both, unfortunately with not exactly enough energy and time to do it properly. But I already have a few comments.

In a way, this kind of content curation is already possible. Blogs, wikis, and even stupid old webpages with hypertext (hypertext!) allow this. So, is the revolution simply in the interface? In some element of social auto-discovery? Part of me is excited by new services in this space, but I’m also pretty skeptical. Is this just reinventing the wheel in a pretty wrapping?

The question I always want to ask is the following: what exactly does this new shiny service do that I cannot already do (or almost do) with my existing tools, and which will justify the overhead of investing in a new space or service?

For the moment, I am “not getting” either Pearltrees or SmallRivers, but as I said, I have just given them an initial “does it click?” look. I have my pearltree account (not much in it yet) in which I’ll try to place interesting posts about the conference when I have a moment. I also tried to create a “LeWeb’09” network with SmallRivers but think I messed up a little. If you go to my initial post on the LeWeb’09, you’ll see a little widget at the bottom which opens up a sidebar to which you can connect other posts about LeWeb’09. Give it a try and we’ll see if we can build something. (Basically: click on widget, click the connect button in the sidebar, copy the javascript code and paste it into your post.)

I’ve been thinking a lot about content curation during this conference — it’s a topic that the “real-time web” really brings to the forefront. Expect more posts on the topic.