Curate Your News Streams or Drown in Them

Getting your news via Twitter streams is very useful, but getting your news via curated streams is even more powerful.

We’re all consuming news via our Twitter accounts, in essence following what our followers are following or paying attention to.

But if you want to read what everybody else is reading, where is your competitive edge? If you are following what everybody else is, then you’re barely keeping up.

It’s one thing if you’re consuming news for entertainment, discovery or educational purposes. It’s another thing if your job depends on it. In the latter case, you can’t entirely rely on Facebook, Twitter or your “friends” because your “friends” may not be experts in your business (except for the social media subject where *everybody* is an expert). Twitter is great for breaking news, Facebook may be good for surfacing some popular news, but ultimately you must take news consumption more seriously if you’re a professional.

You must configure more powerful streams of news by using capabilities like filtering, text mining, aggregation rules, etc., the kinds of features that the Eqentia platform provides. And no, Twitter Lists aren’t enough for that. You can’t filter them appropriately and managing them is a nightmare, worse than managing RSS feeds in a reader.

The Twitter mobile app is great for consuming news once properly configured. I have several curated news channels, by topic, theme or groups of topics, and that unclutters the steady stream from followers. Flipping through these Twitter accounts is not easy on the web and carries latency, whereas it’s a snap on mobile.

Here are some simple examples of curated streams that I consume efficiently, daily:

Tech Essentials: The top 50 Tech blogs (TechCrunch, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, Gizmodo, AllThingsD, etc.) all into one stream. http://portal.eqentia.com/bigtech or Twitter @tech_essentials

Tech VC’s Speak: 130 VC blogs into a single stream. http://portal.eqentia.com/techvcs or @Tech_VCs

Canada Tech News: Everything about start-ups and technology in Canada. http://portal.eqentia.com/canadatech or @canadatechnews

Future of News: Tracking how the news and publishing industry is coping with the digital and social media tsunamis. http://portal.eqentia.com/newsfuture or @thefutureofnews

These are some of the 35 existing custom news streams we have in the Eqentia showcase accessible here http://portal.eqentia.com.

The best part is that these custom streams can be assembled in minutes using Eqentia’s powerful Admin tools. Then once you set it, you forget it. And you go consume it via a Twitter news channel. Or you can get an email with the top stories according to social media attention.

Curated news is where the next intelligence will be.

Related articles

• Real-Time News Curation – The Complete Guide Part 4: Process, Key Tasks, Workflow (masternewmedia.org)
• Eqentia.com – Like Google News But For Businessmen (domainmacher.com)
• Twitter’s Evan Williams On Secret “Reputation Score”, Facebook Talks and the Secondary Market (blogs.forbes.com)
• Power Tools for Content Aggregation and Curation (conversationagent.com)