To find articles for your curation efforts, MyCurator uses RSS (or Atom) feeds as Sources. Most websites, blogs and news sites have an RSS feed to distribute their articles. The Sources you use are displayed in the Sources menu item where you can add, delete and edit them. Our Setup Wizard creates two Sources, a Google News and a Bing News Source which you can see here.
Our Source It tool makes it easy to add a feed for MyCurator. After installing on your Browser’s Bookmark bar, just click on the Source It bookmarklet to grab and save the feed from any blog or site. No need to hunt for the RSS symbol or find the feed address.
Source Groups
MyCurator relates Sources to the Topics you set up based on Source Groups. This allows you to add multiple feeds and then attach them as Sources to one or more Topics. In addition, you can add or remove a feed from a Source Group and it will/won’t be processed by the Topics that use that Source Group – you don’t have to go and update the topics directly. You may create Source Groups as you enter feeds with the Source It tool or the Sources menu item Add Sources link.
You may name Source Groups the same or similar to the topics you will be using with MyCurator, for example you could have Source Groups for Content Curation or Sports News or Fashion Blogs or anything else.
Source It Tool
The easiest way to enter sources is with the Source It tool. You can read about it in the Source It documentation or watch a Training Video on it.
Google News, Bing News or Twitter Search
You can create a Google News feed, a Bing News feed or a Twitter search and have it automatically created and placed directly into your sources in the Links area. From the Sources menu item in the MyCurator menu, click on the link above the Sources list named: Click Here to Create a Google News, Twitter Search or Bing Search to your Sources. At the top of the page you use the radio button to choose whether you are creating a Google or Bing News feed based on keywords or a Twitter Search based on Keywords. Give your new Source a name, enter keywords that will be used to find articles, choose a Source Group or create a new one for this feed. When you click Create Feed, the feed will be created and entered into your Sources.
If you are using Twitter Searches or following a twitter account, you need to set up access to your twitter account by following the instructions in the Twitter API documentation.
A twitter search will find all tweets that use the keywords you enter. It will then look for an embedded link that points to an article and attempt to retrieve and classify the article. A warning, many times you will end up with duplicate articles in your training page if you have a twitter search as well as other feeds such as Google alerts or news feeds as sources for the same topic. This is because many articles have a special address when used in Twitter links and so can not be identified as the same article.
You can also follow a twitter account. Just like a twitter search, MyCurator will not post the actual tweets, it will search each tweet from the user account and look for an article link. If it finds one, it will attempt to capture the article and post it to your training page. To use this feature, In the “Feed Keywords” field, enter a single account you wish to follow, with the @ sign. For example you could enter @tgtinfo to follow our twitter feed.
Viewing or Editing Sources in the Sources Menu Item
To view or edit sources for MyCurator, go to the Sources menu in the MyCurator menus. Click on the title of any Source to Edit it. Click the checkbox next to a Source and click Delete Checked Sources to remove it. Click on the Click Here to Add New Sources link to manually add new RSS feeds with by copying their feed URL and pasting into the screen.