Scoop.it is a French startup, co-founded by the world-traveled and eminently interesting Marc “Fuseki” Rougier. [Fuseki, Marc’s twitter handle, stands for the open board of the Japanese board game GO].

Curation opportunity for Brands

Scoop.it, Marc Rougier’s latest initiative, is a curation site with some zip that is still in its Beta test phase. Nominally, it is designed to provide readers with pre-selected information and sources around specific topics. But, the part that makes scoop.it different is that it is conceived to help the writer publish. You can publish a contextual tweet (or Facebook post) within two clicks: once on a page you find of interest, you “scoop.it” thanks to a bookmarklet, then you publish with a pre-created contextual post.  Since content creation is hard to create ex nihilo, scoop.it provides a convenient platform for creating one’s digital footprint — even if the content per se is someone else’s, the selection, arrangement and presentation is individual and, just as for a museum curator, marked by the curator’s signature.  I believe that for brands that are looking to be content creators, a service like scoop.it can be a very effective facilitator/platform.  The ease of publication of a previously vetted list of content could be a boon for digital marketers, forever in search of extra time.  (We’ll see how the soon-to-be-launched premium version enhances this idea.)

Bookmarking service

Going in another direction, I personally find the system to be a useful way to bookmark content. From a functionality standpoint, the search and retrieval may not be there, but like a clipping service, I can post to one or other category (à la Del.icio.us) according to the topics I have.

Here are the sites that I am currently curating on scoop.it:

• Social media marketing
• eLearning

For the francophones, you might be interested to listen to an interview (podcast) I had last week with Marc Rougier.

Other curation sites

Scoop.it is certainly alone in the curation marketplace.  Here is an array of different curation sites that you might want to visit as well, each with differing angles with more or less easy (read: automatic) publication:

• Curate.us – (formerly known as clp.ly) allows you to post clippings and quotes – UPDATED November 2015 – Closed Down.
• Storyful – launched by the Irish journalist Mark Little, is designed as a news service.  The site states that storyful “uses the power of social networks to create an authentic, cooperative and socially useful journalism”
• magnify.net – for video curation
• pearltrees – a mashup of social, community & mindmapping curation (French)
• netvibes – less a curation site, but a personalizable dashboard (also French)

There are many more… Here is a rather useful table whose content is in French, but it’s good for a list with URLs.