Robotic Social Curation, a buzzword compliant activity

I am a robot curator, lately.  At our company, we have been building apps that follow thousands of Twitter users in real-time, and then we process the links those people share. The result is a robot that produces a news-site. We could describe the result with several fashionable buzzwords... Automated news-spotting, social stream curation, collective intelligence. We had to invent an acronym to name the project internally (and to present it to calls and customers), and we have finnally opted for Robotic Social Curation. RobSoC.

We have launched two RobSoC sites this month. Two prototypes, we might say. One about real estate in the United Kingdom, the other about cycling in Spanish.

Nestoria News UK is assciated to Nestoria, the real estate search engine based in London, a customer which we have worked with before.

Noticias Kisale, on the other hand, is associated to Kisale, an e-commerce venture in which our company has a partnership. Kisale sells bikes and material for cycling in Spain, so the focus of this news service is cycling news in Spain (well, international events and races do also gather attention among Spanish cycling fans, and it's their tweets that we follow).

In both cases, our robots follow hundreds of Twitter users, and we rank according to several parameters. It's an automated process, so experts go up and down the ranks, and new twitter users can also be detected.

Moreover, the tweets from those users are analyzed and the URLs that they share are checked. If they match the content intended, and they surpass a certain threshold of publication, they go to frontpage.

News are published with a snippet of text and a thumbnail, and the link always goes to the source. In some cases, with sites that let us embed more content, as can be the case of Youtube, for instance, we include the full piece (video, in that case). Then, not only the news reference is published, but also the relevant tweets that the users in the community made about that link.

If a conversation has erupted in Twitter around some news item, that thread can also appear, as it happens with the announcement that Nestoria made.

You can follow these services in the web, and also following the Twitter accounts, NestoriaNewsUk and Kisale_es.

I am confident enought that over the following months we'll deploy more of these RobSoC machines. Probably the next one will be in our own language, Basque. We'll see ;-)