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By Nitasha Tiku 1/04/12 6:52pm

Curation Nation

pint

Is Pinterest’s Push-Button + Boards Formula Really Going to ‘Change the Web’?

What makes Pinterest so appealing? Like growing traffic 4000 percent in six months appealing? Betabeat has been struggling with that question. The pretty dresses? The food porn? The lady-centric-ness of it all? But investor and entrepreneur Elad Gil, a Google mobile and AdSense vet, who sold his startup Mixer Labs to his new employer Twitter, thinks he’s pinned it down: It’s the social content curation, stupid.

In a thoughtful post on his blog today, Mr. Gil traces the “evolution of social media from long-form to push-button” and posits in the headline that Pinterest “will transform the web in 2012″ as the “next big thing.” Read More

By Nitasha Tiku 12/15/11 6:11pm

Curation Nation

Mr. Blier with his daily brew.

Percolate Raises $1.5 M. and Turns Away from Consumers to Helping Brands Curate Content

Percolate, the New York-based curation engine that helps brands source relevant content for their social media presence, just raised $1.5 million. The seed round was led by First Round Capital. Lerer Ventures and SV Angel also invested, as well as Path founder Dave Morin and Rick Webb, who used to work with Percolate co-founder Noah Brier at the Barbarian Group.

Along with the added cash, which will be used to hire a sales team and engineers, Percolate moved its platform from alpha to beta and unveiled a new design with a focus on helping brands generate content for “the social web”–in other words their Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter profiles or other branded sites.

The last time we spoke to Mr. Brier, Percolate was being bootstrapped by its founders and had just announced that it would be powering Counterparties, the Reuters owned website, for its editors Felix Salmon and Ryan McCarthy. Since then, the company has helped find content Amex OPEN Forum’s Tumblr and taken on a similar role with sites from Mastercard and GE. Read More

By Ben Popper 5/31/11 3:16pm

Curation Nation

reddit obey

Reddit Sees a Surge in Digital Vigilantes Posting Personal Info

The community at Reddit has grown rapidly with the decline of Digg, realizing the initial vision of co-founder Alexis Ohanian of a “front page for the web” for a growing number of users. The downside? Reddit has scary reach and power.

Today the company addressed a growing problem on its blog: Reddit users have been “doxing”–posting personally identifiable information a la 4chan–lately more and more: Read More