Information Curation is when you gather, organize, and place in an online presentation different types of articles on a particular topic. With the variety of tools available to help you organize the information, you are able to see articles at a glance and quickly. In the internet and in application format, there are many Information Curation tools that you can use to organize all types of articles.
According to the creators of Zite, this app was originally intended for I Pad. Zite might be changing its presentation and might have more bells and whistles pretty soon since it has joined forces with Flipboard.
Another Information Curation tool is Paper.li. I was not able to download it as an app in Android or in I Pad. I had to use the internet on a PC. I find this to be the negative side of Paper.li since I would not be able to access articles I put together unless I have my laptop. When I first signed up to this site, it asked me to create a page with my preference. I had to give it a title. Then, I chose my interest in articles. Once I was done, it created a page with all my preferences and a few of their own. The articles were good, but I was just not impressed with their presentation. One thing I did like was being able to sign up with my Twitter account. I did a search, for example, under reading, and it brought up my post from my Twitter account, so I was familiar with the people who were writing the articles. Overall, I felt this site to be okay, it does the job, but it did not please me aesthetically.
I was able to find Prismatic on I Pad, Android, and on regular PC. The app I found on Android did not work. The app told me how to use it, but when I tried to open the app it did not work, even after several tries. Another service Prismatic has is Pocket. It allows you to save your articles to be read at another time. I find this useful since I only have a few moments to read articles, and I wouldn't have to be wasting time hunting down the article I was previously reading and did not complete. To me, to me this app was simple, but it did the job. As I looked at it in I Pad, it has a feel of Facebook due to its presentation. When you click on the pictures, it would open the article associated with it. With Prismatic, you are also able to like or not like a page. If you want, you can start a discussion on a story you just read. You can also share those pages you like on the social medias. Prismatic does have a way to look quickly look for your preferences in topics and go to the one you want to see at that moment without having to go looking through all the articles. Overall, I like Prismatic. It did its job. I just did not like that I could simply search for a topic and it would look for the articles. With Prismatic, it gave you a list of topics to choose from.
I loved the presentation of Google Currents on the I Pad. The pictures were huge, and to change topics you just slid your finger across the screen. I also like that it first starts you on breaking world news. That topic is a high interest for me. What I did not like was that the huge pictures only had one or two sentence captions on them. I would rather have a short paragraph so I can have a brief summary, and from there, I can choose rather to read the article or not. I just feel I can not make that decision with one sentence. I also was able to download the app for Android, but I was only able to go in once with the the name Google Currents. The next day I noticed that I could not get into it by touching the current icon. I found out that the name had changed, only on Android, to Google Play Newsstand. Since I have an Android phone, it already had an app with that name installed on the phone. Once I got on the right app, I saw that this app placed the articles in squares, almost like a Facebook presentation. You could change this squares to make the articles smaller or bigger. Also, you have to subscribe and pay for magazines if you want to see them. It did have a limited amount of topic choices to choose from when it came to the free topics you could choose. Overall, I like this app in its I Pad presentation. It did provide interesting articles to read.
As soon as I signed up for Scoop.it, I was guided step by step in setting up my list of preferences. One of the things I liked most was that it allowed you to do a general search on any topic you wanted and then it would also let you pick from a list of topics. I like the presentation and since I signed up using my Twitter account. I was able to download an app in I Pad and it also caught my eye. I thought it was very interesting that when I like an article, I could click on the Scoop. it icon, and it would make the article smaller and post it to you Twitter or Face book account. I feel that this app was able to gather a more interesting articles than the other Information Curation Tools. Scoop.it was also available for the PC and Android, but did not open in Android from some reason. I think of all the apps on this topic Scoop.it was the easiest to use. I also like the fact that many of the articles came from the people that I follow on my Twitter account. I think this is what made them more interesting. Overall, I think Scoop.it is a very nice app to put all your high interest articles together.
Of all the apps that I tried, Flipboard was by far, my favorite. It was extremely eye-catching on the Android. I was able to see in a-not-so-crowded way. I also tried it on I Pad and it provided me a slide show if I stayed too long on a page without flipping to see the article. I found myself lost looking at the articles and pictures. I also like the way it also let me see my Twitter and Facebook accounts, all in one place. It had a different presentation from the original social apps. I was able to pick the topics I wanted to see on my Flipboard. It provided me with current news and interesting articles. I was also able to click on an icon and see my interest and social media icons so that I could quickly navigate to those articles without "flipping" through everything. I was also able to like and comment on the articles I was reading. As with Prismatic, I was also able to save articles to read for later when I had time. This app allowed me to go to the internet and view the article there or go to the actual magazine site. I really got lost in Flipboard.
Of all the Information Curation tools that I was able to look at and try out, I feel that the best one was Flipboard by a huge margin. I think the aesthetics and ease of use is what won me over. I think this would be great for students to use to do research on a topic. By using this app, they could do a search on their topic and Flipboard could gather all the articles together. I think this would save lots of time. Also, with Flipboard, I was able to get the same quality in boty I Pad and on the Android device. I would also use Scoop.it. I liked being able to read articles by the people I follow on Twitter since it used my Twitter account to look for the topic I was researching. Scoop.it was just simple to use, and the app guided you every step of the way. Flipboard and Scoop.it make searching for Information Curation tools more interesting and fun.
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