A quick review of content collation and curation tools for newsletter creation

One thing I’m not particularly good at, is sending out a newsletter.

I thought I’d have a quick look at some curation tools to see if they help (and yes, I know this could be considered procrastination).



I knew about paper.li and mytweetedtimes because I see these randomly appear in peoples’ twitter feeds.

I found this list:

• http://www.curata.com/blog/content-curation-tools-the-ultimate-list/

Some of these were out of date, but I had a look through to see what was possibly useful.

After working through the list I narrowed it down to:

• http://paper.li/
• https://elink.io

Sadly, neither of these are really suitable for me.

Paper.li doesn’t really have the granular control of content addition that I’m really looking for.

• I can see that you can manually add content but it has to be an ‘article’
• I tried to add a few links but it didn’t like a link to a pdf or a normal page
• you need to upgrade to add new headings, which is a find reason to update
• I couldn’t see how to add a description to a heading -e.g. a summary

Elink.io doesn’t really have the formatting I’d like - e.g. headings, description fields etc.

I’m going to have to do it the ‘hard’ way by building a draft and adding content when it is suitable.

• elink.io looks like a great tool for creating ‘lists’ of content really easily so if you want ‘top 10 X’ or ‘best videos I watched this week’ type lists then it looks like an excellent choice.
  
• paper.li looks like a great way to pull in info from a lot of sources with easy/daily propagation.
  

But neither of those are the way that I Want to engage with the world at the moment.

If either of the two use cases I described are what you need, then paper.li or elink.io might be worth checking out.