If you follow me on Twitter, you’ve probably seen my Scoop.it topic posts. I’ve been on Scoop.it since mid-January, and I recently signed up for the free trial of the “Pro” version. I’m planning to continue with the Pro version, which features analytics and up to ten topics; the free version only allows five topics and has no analytics.
What do I like about Scoop.it? First of all, it’s easy to set up a topic and start collecting articles. You simply enter search keywords and Scoop.it searches Twitter, YouTube, Digg, Google Blogs and Google News feeds for matches. You can add any RSS feed, search a Twitter user, list or search stream. You can add a Facebook page or import an OPML file.
There’s a bit of art to selecting the keywords. Too specific gets you few articles and too general gets you too many. For example, for my topic “Social Media Analytics and US Politics“, I started with a specific story about Facebook sharing data with Politico. This was too specific; I later added keywords for “social media analytics” and political terms like “President” and “election.” This yielded far too many hits, so I dropped the political terms and filtered out the non-political stories by hand. Someone with more experience in search engine keyword analysis could probably do this much faster than I did.
Once the collection is in progress, as a curator, you receive a stream of potential “scoops”, presented with the newest entry first. You can either discard or accept each suggestion. If you accept it, the “scoop” is pushed onto the top of your topic, displacing older entries. There are numerous controls for resizing and repositioning your scoops on the page. There’s a comment feature, although I have yet to receive any comments on my scoops.
There’s a “Star” option that will push a scoop to the top left position. There’s a “re-scoop” button that allows you to take any scoop from one of your topics or anyone else’s topics and add it to your own. You can share individual scoops on Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and StumbleUp and whole topics on Twitter and Facebook. You can also share to Tumblr and WordPress blogs. And there’s a bookmarklet you can use to capture scoops while browsing.
I’m not going to say much about the analytics, because they aren’t part of the free service and I’ve only been using them for a week. I will say, though, that if you’re serious about the platform you’ll at least want to do the free trial and check them out for yourself. There’s also an API, and Google+ integration is coming.
Finally, I want to say a bit about the Scoop.it network. So far, it seems to be joyfully spam-free. I follow about 100 topics and have discovered some interesting people on Scoop.it that I probably would not have discovered by chance on Twitter. My most popular topic, “Computational and Data Journalism“, has about 35 followers. I don’t know how rapidly the network is growing, though. I’m planning to stay with it at least a few more months, and I invite everyone to come join me, even if it’s only at the free level.
