Qusetion: Making Use of the Web Content Aggregation and Curation Locating valuable information to read on particular topics or to share with your online social network may take some effort. To help find material, you may want to use content aggregation, an automated process that uses keywords to gather and filter materials someone else has written or produced on the Internet. Another option is content curation, which is a manual process of acquiring this information and then expanding the content into original and useful material to post. A good content curator can edit the content to share, add annotations and notes, give attributions to the original source, and provide additional viewpoints. As a starting point, Twitter and blog feeds, bookmarking tools such as StumbleUpon, and services that provide email notifications, such as Google Alerts, provide the opportunity to view webpages, photos, videos, and additional material about celebrities, sports, politics, businesses, and other people and subjects.

Research This: (a) Visit StumbleUpon and two other bookmarking services. If necessary, sign in to these services and compare the features. How do users select the categories to view? What information is required to create a profile? What opportunities for feedback are provided? What procedure would users follow to delete their profiles and terminate their accounts?

(b) Visit Google Alerts and two other email alerting services. If necessary, create an alert for at least two words for which you would want to receive email notifications. What options are available to customize these alerts? For example, can you specify the frequency of the alerts, the types of websites to search, the geographical region, or the number of messages sent?