The Rise of Hacker Journalism: When Word is Not Enough
Occasionally here at Curated Content HQ, we read a blog or article that sparks plenty of lively debate, low ball humour or lousy word plays like in the title. And sometimes the discussion turns into an opportunity to change the way the game is played. Obviously for a blog to have the ‘tool up’ effect, it needs to pack a pretty intense message. And it did. For starters it called journalists ‘geeks’. Then things got really crazy with: ‘Eventually the tools of writers cease to be enough: Microsoft Word gives way to Excel, which gives...
read moreBrands are Media Companies. Is Your Content Worth Tuning In?
This is the line that sums it up nicely: Creating content for a brand feels a lot like you’re running a daily news program. Bang on. Content is responsive and reactionary. It’s created both carefully and on the fly, published then pushed out through channels, commented on, aggregated, added to, curated and consumed. Brand news coming to you live from the brand station you tune into. And if we stay with the news program metaphor (which we first heard via a fantastic JESS3 slide deck available on SlideShare), then businesses can begin...
read moreWhy the Email Newsletter is Back
The Email Newsletter is back. Not that it ever went away: you just stopped subscribing to it. And if you were too lazy to do that, you clicked delete or arranged for it to go straight to the junkyard folder. But wait! The value of electronic email marketing: What’s changed? Beautifully designed cost-effective templates, a seamless user experience, users’ preference for curated content, third party integration and powerful social analytics packages are just some of the reasons email marketing is back to being a valuable marketing tool for...
read more2012: The Year for Visual Content?
Rather than take a number in the ‘Top Ten trends for 2012’ SEO queue, we thought we’d do something a little different: make one big bold prediction for 2012, and just put it out there. That way if we’re wrong, the blog title for this time next year will read: 2012: The Year for Visual Content? (Nope) We’re a content company, creating and curating all kinds of content for our clients, so most of our thinking on this comes from our own anecdotal experience of what clients are asking for, and what we think is often the best way to tell...
read moreInfographic of Australia’s Top 30 Ad Agencies
Here’s an infographic we had a lot of fun with. The only data we had to work with was Mumbrella’s Top 30 Advertising Agencies numbered one to thirty. The rest of the research we completed based on two criteria: 1. what was accessible 2. what we thought might tell an interesting story and possibly present a different perspective. If you work in an advertising agency, especially one of the top 30, then we recommend you load up the printer with the nicest paper available and press “go” - we think this will look...
read moreWhy You Need to Visualize Big Data
We live in an age of data. It’s everywhere. From the basic metric package that tells you how many people visited your blog on cheese to the thousands of pieces of data and analytics that flow daily into the clutches of Big business – it’s everywhere we look and shaping everything we do. And now, we want to see it. According to a recent article on Big Data by the highly respected business outfit, McKinsey Quarterly, Radical customization, constant experimentation, and novel business models will be new hallmarks of competition as...
read moreInfographic on NFL Teams’ Social Media Followers
U.S. gridiron teams are competitive off-field as well. This infographic shows the top (and bottom) teams in terms of social media follows. By Column Five Media
read moreWhy the Infographic is the Next Australian Content Trend
Everywhere you turn, people are talking about content. But let’s face it, there’s just so much written content on screen you can read before your eyeballs drop out of their sockets and bounce off the keyboard. Enter the infographic, the most revolutionary content innovation we’ve seen since the advent of the LOL Cat video (and slightly more useful to society) and one that represents a fundamental shift in online content marketing. For those of you still unsure what exactly an infographic is or does, it’s simple. An infographic is a...
read moreWhy Curated Online Magazines are the SEO Future
Whether you’ve noticed or not, content curation is getting a lot of attention lately. Thanks to cool sites and apps like paper.li, Pulse, Zite, News.me and of course the one that started it all Flipboard, users are now curating topics of interest to them and displaying them in a nice clean user wonderland. And it’s happening outside the app world in the old-fashioned browser environment too. Thanks to emerging curation tools able to source the web’s seemingly infinite content pool for articles, images, blogs, news, videos, infographics...
read moreContent Marketing 101
Is the title alone, enough to make you run for the hills? Stop Hesitate and Listen (wise words from the mouth of the entertaining musician, Vanilla Ice). Because it’s not some new fangled technique that you didn’t learn, don’t know and can’t face getting your head around. It’s a pretty simple premise, really: use engaging content to attract and build an audience that has the potential to become your customer base. The ‘content’ part of content marketing can involve a mix of articles, blogs, online magazines, edms, white papers,...
read moreEvolution of the Web
In celebration of Chrome's third birthday, Google teamed up with Hyperakt and Vizzuality to explore the evolution of the Web : Over time web technologies have evolved to give web developers the ability to create new generations of useful and immersive web experiences. Today's web is a result of the ongoing efforts of an open web community that helps define these web technologies, like HTML5, CSS3 and WebGL and ensure that they're supported in all web browsers. The black timelines show major browser releases. As you click each browser icon, you can see how the browser window has changed for each release, which I think is the most interesting part of the interactive. Color bands represent browser technologies such as JavaScript, HTML, and Flash, and the bands grow as new browsers integrate the technologies. The intertwining of bands is supposed to show the interaction between different technologies, but it gets fuzzy here. Does the vertical position of bands mean anything? Does shape mean anything, or is it more for show? I think it's a little of both. More the latter. Fun to poke around memory lane either way. [Thanks, Deroy]
read more13 Mind-Bending Social Media Marketing Statistics
Yes we all know that social media marketing is an important part of a solid inbound marketing strategy. However, sometimes we need some back up when.
read moreData Visualisation: The Ugly Duckling Parable
Something very strange is happening in the world of data. It’s along the lines of this: Imagine being born a statistic forever relegated to the boring part of the presentation that sends people to sleep. Then all of a sudden, a dramatic transformation occurs and those statistics and data are turn into something truly beautiful. Now seen as an object of beauty and a tool of engagement, the statistic rightfully claims its place in the pond of visual content – slap bang at the centre of everything! Everybody has their moment of data clarity....
read moreLazy Bugger’s Guide to Content Curation
Everybody’s talking about Content Curation – which is cool for us considering it’s basically our name said backwards – but how many people are actually doing it? The answer is not that many, really. Or maybe we should say not that many, yet. Maybe everyone’s put off by how complicated it all sounds…which is where we come in. Complicated Shmomplicated. Welcome to the lazy bugger’s guide to Content Curation! Pick a topic you’re interested in. Why curate a collection of content on turnips if you’re just not interested in...
read moreCuration: Understanding the Social Fire Hose
As the tragic events of Oslo unfolded, so too did the importance of content curation in the social sphere. Some interesting commentary on the reporting of the Oslo massacre by FastCompany further advances the vital role of content curators in piecing together time-lines of events as they actually unfold based on real-time tweets. Now this is nothing new. We know that social media channels, in particular Twitter, have been used for some time in contributing to ‘on the scene’ reporting by citizen journalist. It started to reach the attention...
read moreWar of the Video Content Worlds
We love talking about the TV channel of the just-around-the-corner future, especially when the battle for content supremacy is just heating up. Users have every right to be excited and commercial free-to-air networks: terrified. To drive home our point, let’s look at some impressive strategic moves made by our favourite internet monolith: Google of late. Announced in May, Google-owned YouTube inked a deal with movie studios Warner Bros, Sony Pictures, NBC Universal and Lionsgate netting the online video channel more than 3,000 movies from...
read moreGoogle Panda: Black & White and read all over?
Whatever it is those good old Google boys are putting on their breakfast cereal – it’s working. Google +, Google Panda…Google on a Hot Tin Roof! (OK, we may have made that last one up) Point being: it’s on – especially on the content front, and if you’re not on with it, then you can kiss that page ranking goodbye and go back to cracking coconuts for a living. So what exactly does the (formally confirmed by Google on June 21) Panda Update Version 2.2 actually mean for content on the web? First up, it’s worth noting , that...
read moreContent is King at Cannes Lions 2011
You know content has come of age in advertising circles when they pull in Big Guns like Robert Redford (that’s him in the shades) to lead a panel titled ‘Content is King: Discover the Future of Branded Content’ at the Cannes Lions 2011 (the world’s biggest advertising love-in). The legendary actor was joined by a VP of Yahoo! and a Hollywood producer whose list of credits seemed to include just about every TV show ever created in the last five years, to form part of the Cannes Lions learning programme examining ‘the new ideas...
read moreThe Healthy Fetishism of Today’s Content
Let’s say your company specialised in listings of bricks-and-mortar businesses. In terms of content, you have the ‘what’ and, if properly geo-located, the ‘where’. Chances are, looking at your organization’s front-end search functionality, your search capability has exactly those boxes, prompting your users to access your data/content traditionally – or what we call the equivalent of the missionary position for search. If this is the case, has your website or app maxed-out the potential on searches like this? Are you happy...
read moreCan Curated Content Save the Internet?
The internet is stuffed with so much content that it long ago passed the point where we could hope to absorb even a small chunk of it. That’s called saturation point which leads to user fatigue (or fear of one’s head imploding from the inside). It isn’t pretty and the people aren’t happy. Accepting the general consensus that we need more not less content in our daily lives thanks to numerous channels, platforms and devices we seem to rely on, there’s only one real solution – we have to start organizing it. Not even the might of...
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