Clip + Collect + Collate + Collaborate = Curate

Carat, Color, Clarity, and Cut: the Four C’s that define the quality of a diamond and what Certification it is worth.

Similarly: Curation determines the quality and value of Web content.

Wikipedia defines digital curation as: “the selection, preservation, maintenance, collection and archiving of digital assets.”

  • Readers of online material want more ways to experience individually relevant content.
  • Publishers of web content want to engage their readers with more relevant content.

At Rooh.it, we have designed solutions to satisfy both parties; all with the underlying theme of giving users the ability to clip, collect, collate and collaborate their favorite Web content thereby giving them a level of online interaction never seen before.

Clip

Any content a user highlights using the Rooh.it instant highlighter is automatically clipped and saved for the user.

Collect

When you search, the information you seek is rarely found on a single page. Typically, only a part of any page is of interest, not the entire page. As you surf just highlight the relevant portions.  All your highlights are automatically collected for you.

Collate

The Rooh.it collection of highlights can be cherry picked from, and any subset can be combined and collated to be viewed in one shot.

Collaborate

With a plethora of sharing and social tools (and a very powerful new feature coming soon!) Rooh.it takes online collaboration to a finer level of granularity.

You can share just-the-highlights, and/or entire highlighted-pages with anyone (including non-Rooh.it users) using email, Facebook, Twitter or any other medium.

Curation

Curation is the newest trend on the Web and will be reshaping your online experience for a long time to come.  Rather than being dependent on Search Engines and computers to deliver results that are uniquely relevant to you: get interesting content delivered to you as determined to be relevant for you by human eyes.

Rooh.it is brought to you by (Al Gore moment!) the creator of Social Networks – ok pioneer ;) Yes, our founder also created one of the earliest Social Networking websites – launched in 1997 – with several million users back then…

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Ten Benefits of Rooh.it

You’ve heard of Rooh.it but how much do you really know about one of the newest (and we like to think, coolest) curation solutions out there?  Today we’d like to tell you a little more about what makes Rooh.it so special.
  1. Collect (remember) what you like on the Web: The Rooh.it highlighter makes saving and remembering the most important pieces of your Online world faster and easier than ever before.  Today, more people read their news on the Internet than on print newspapers.  Having a powerful live tool like the Rooh.it highlighter allows any user to instantly clip the sources that they love and save them forever.  Even better, they can share them across their existing Social Networks, inviting any connection to explore the world through their eyes, or their highlights in this case.
  2. No sign-up: At Rooh.it, we understand that the last thing anyone needs is another user name and password to remember.  This is why we made our service accessible with no sign-up required.  Rooh.it simply just works with your existing Internet  browser on virtually any webpage.  How does it remain personalized to you?  Simply sign-in with your existing email address and Rooh.it recognizes what highlights to display.  Do not worry, at Rooh.it we value your privacy; your password and username are never saved on our servers.
  3. No installation: No sign-up would not be complete without no installation!  Rooh.it technology works with your existing system without the need to add anything.  No installation means no worries of viruses or other potentially harmful additions to your computer.  Simply type rooh.it/ before any URL, or use our handy Rooh.it bookmarklet shortcut to activate the Rooh.it highlighter instantly on virtually any page.
  4. Fast: Time is money and nobody understands that better than the Rooh.it Team.  That is why our engineers have worked tirelessly to not only provide a powerful product, but an efficient one as well.  Rooh.it tools are all optimized to work quickly and seamlessly in order to make all users’ experience as productive as possible.
  5. Free: They say the best things in life are well, free.  Rooh.it is no exception.  Take advantage of all the tools and solutions offered by Rooh.it at no charge to you!
  6. Easy: Fast and Free solutions wouldn’t be much without the simplicity to use them.  We are proud of the fact that our solutions are efficient and simple to use.  We are confident that any Internet user can pick up any of our products and take advantage of the power behind them.
  7. No copy/paste: Rooh.it solutions are in place to provide a better alternative to the ancient copy/paste mentality.  Never again lose the context of what you share or struggle with broken shared links.  Simply use the built in features of Rooh.it to instantly share your highlights & pages across your email or existing Social Networks.
  8. Consolidate all your search findings: If you have used the Rooh.it highlighter your know how addicting highlighting your favorite material can be.  Lucky for us, Rooh.it provides an excellent way to organize and save the collection of highlights we create.  Simply visit your personal Collection Page on the Rooh.it site and  view, consolidate, delete, tag & do much more with your personal highlights.
  9. Collaborate: We understand the Internet is a Social Environment and have tailored Rooh.it to enhance the connections you have already established Online.  All of our solutions are built to flawlessly interact with your Social Networks in order to help you better collaborate and share with the people you love.  You can invite others to view what you are reading by sharing your Rooh.it highlights or display your’s and others’ findings using the Rooh.it Widget.  The possibilities are endless.
  10. Browser agnostic: Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, it doesn’t matter.  Take advantage of Rooh.it on what ever browser you prefer.  Remember, it just works!
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Where do you get your news?

According to the annual State of the Media report, conducted by the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, more people today are using the Internet over newspapers as their main source for news.

At Rooh.it, we are passionate about online material and are curious as to where
you like to go to get your news fix.  Head over to our Facebook page and participate in our latest survey, asking our fans what outlet they prefer for online news.  If you have not done so already, we encourage you to ‘Like’ our Fan Page to stay up to date on our latest discussions and share material with us. We love interacting with our users!

Happy Tuesday!

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Top 3 Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do With Your Highlights

So you just finished reading the latest entry on your favorite blog.  Of course, you used your handy Rooh.it Highlighter and made a bunch of colorful streaks throughout the text.  Now what, you ask?  Today we explore the Top 3 things you did not know you could do with your Rooh.it highlights.

3. Tag

You’ve made thousands of highlights but are frustrated because you wish there was an easier way to sort them.  Well, there is.  Next time that you highlight, simply mouseover any highlight and write in your personalized Tags in the Tag Bar provided on the popup command menu.

Adding Tags to a Highlight

Use this powerful piece of Rooh.it technology to make searching and sorting your highlights easier and more efficient.  Take advantage of the Tag system to stumble upon other relevant content members of the Rooh.it community have similarly labeled.

2. Private

We understand that part of the beauty of Rooh.it is our strong community of users.  Through our users and our open technology many people are able to discover new sources of information to help them in their everyday lives.  However, we know that at times you just want to keep your highlights to yourself.

Don’t be scared away; simply make your highlights private.  When highlighting, mouseover any highlight and check the Private box to keep those highlights for your eyes only.  Worried that you’ll change your mind later?  Simply go to your Collection page, select the highlight and click on the Public button on the Header.  Likewise, you can change Public highlights into Private ones from this same Header Menu.

Make Highlights Private

1. Comment

Ever make a highlight and then completely forget why two hours down the line?  Never again!  Take advantage of the Comment feature to further personalize your articles.

Simply mouseover any highlight and click on the Comment link of the popup command box.  Type in anything you’d like and it will be instantly saved for you to view in the future.

Add Comments to a Highlight

You can also make comments on existing highlights by viewing the highlight in your Collection page.  Take advantage of this extra level of customization to make your Rooh.it experience richer and more efficient than ever before.

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Top 10 Reasons to add the Rooh.it Bookmarklet to Your Favorites Bar

  1. Rooh.it is one of the 25 Most Popular apps on Google Toolbar.
    There’s a good reason why everyone is using it.
  2. It’s extremely easy to add: just drag 
    Rooh.it
    to your favorites, and you are done!
  3. Highlight any page instantly: just click the Rooh.it bookmarklet!
    No need to worry about remembering to type in “roohit.com” before a URL, the bookmarklet does it for you!
  4. Sharing a web-page?
    Rooh.it before you share it (rooh means soul/essence)
  5. No more copy-paste and emailing.
    Rooh.it so you can save and collect it.
  6. Do you forget where you read things on the web?
    Rooh.it is your online clipboard with instant memory of #hilights.
  7. Do you write a blog & refer t0 other web-pages?
    Rooh.it so you can auto-blog to their relevant sections.
  8. Highlight what you find relevant! Forget about the unnecessary fluff that so many blogs or articles have… get straight to the point.
  9. Forever forget about the key strokes “Ctrl+C” and “Ctrl+V” – we make them obsolete on your browser.
  10. Do you really need a tenth reason? Just do it!
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Uncensored User Feedback

Here’s what one user had to say about their experience on Rooh.it:

“So I just discovered this great new web application Rooh.it. It allows you to highlight anything on a webpage and it instantly saves it to a clipboard that you can access at any time. Say goodbye to copy and paste and trying to remember where on a webpage you saw that funny quote or that one piece of information you needed amongst all the uselessness. This is probably one of the next best things to hit the college crowd since the internet! Let’s break down the pros and cons:

Pros-

  1. Perfect for research papers! Especially when half the sources you look at only contain one paragraph that you need anyways
  2. Very easy to use once you get the hang of it
  3. Great when you have a lot of different tabs open

Cons-

  1. Probably easier to use with an actual mouse than a track pad on a laptop
  2. When posting to Twitter, the links and promotion use up the majority of your 140 characters
  3. Automatically saves what you highlight, so make sure you get the right text that you want first time around
  4. Requires a little bit of practice until you get the hang of it

All in all, Rooh.it is a great new application! Yeah it may be more useful for practical purposes like research rather than for entertainment, but it’s definitely a must use!”

We really appreciate the feedback and are always looking for more!

Can anybody think of a better way for us to share tweets?

If so, feel free to share your ideas here or with us @rooh_it

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‘How To Videos’ added to the Forums and YouTube

We just added over twenty videos explaining how to use various Rooh It features. The videos are on YouTube as well as in the Support section of our Forums. So you now have helpful video to explain nearly every aspect of Rooh It whether it be posting to Twitter or changing the color of the highlighter.  Each video is shorter than a minute. We think that this is a great way to learn about the benefits that Rooh It has to affect how you browse and share online. So what’s your favorite way to use Rooh It?

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Deleting Highlights made Easier

We’ve moved the delete button to make removing a highlight easier! If you accidentally highlight something on a page, just mouse over the highlight – as if you were going to share the highlight – and click the red ; done! No more having to click the down arrow to reach the delete button. Clicking this will delete the highlight on the page and from your collection. What do you think?

Remember: you can still add tags, and make notes about the highlight  by expanding the mouse-over highlight menu.

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Google Toolbar Users: Auto-bookmark web-pages and/or Share Highlighted Pages

Updated the Google Toolbar button: Just click it on any page to Start Highlighting the page your are on. (It is already in the 25 most popular buttons of all!)

Now: it also auto bookmarks any page you highlight in your browser itself!
Please try it

25 Most Popular Buttons

C’mon try it out: You wont be disappointed!

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Top 10 Requirements for a Successful Blog Presence

I’m going to start my blog with an article I wrote 2 years ago…

Here are my guidelines for creating and maintaining a successful blog presence.

  1. Personalized URL: Every blog must have a simple web address. Ideally a two-part blog name such as http://gigaom.com. If you don’t have your own domain, at the very least have a personalized URL of the form http://billgates.microsoft.com. It is important that you have a URL where your username is prepended to the company name. URLs of the form http://microsoft.com/billgates are far less effective than ones where the username is prepended.
  2. Viral: Make your blog viral. Viral is not where you don’t have a marketing budget, but you actually have to make your blog inherently viral. Viral Marketing is an art-form and a science. The essence(rooh) of viral marketing can be distilled down into one sentence: “A person to person interaction where the focus of the interaction is the product itself.” You can apply this to any successful viral web play, and find that it holds true. It is what I call an empirical rule. Examples: Paypal – send-me-money; Youtube: look-at-my-video; Hotmail: get-your-own-free-email, and the list goes on…There are proven strategies that you can learn from and embrace, e.g.
    1. Social Discovery: Facilitate groups. Let users with shared interests congregate. Enable crowds. Crowds are good. The more people that can align themselves around your content, the more they talk about it, and the more buzz they create: driving ever more increasing numbers of people with that interest back to your site. Youtube used this strategy very effectively to display more related videos thereby not only driving hordes of new users to their site but also to make their site extremely sticky! To name only a few: Facebook, MySpace, digg, and delicious are examples of companies that have used this strategy very effectively.
    2. Provide visible direct URLs to content which others can easily link to: Use a modular approach to your blog along with anchor tags. For example, if you are putting a chart, picture, or any other rich media type provide a visible URL that others can easily copy. This will allow other bloggers to be able to use your content on their site. More importantly it enables them to directly hyperlink to it from their site: driving traffic back to your blog!
    3. Controversy: This is a double-edged sword that can very quickly catapult your online presence. However if not done correctly it can just as easily be even more damaging. Radio shock-jocks have been around for a while. The most in-famous of them being Howard Stern. While Stern is regarded by most as vile, it has not prevented him from amassing a loyal following, more importantly a LARGE following. Paris Hilton, on the other hand, is another celebrity that continues to surround herself with controversy yet manages to keep her own reputation largely intact. Always remember: not all controversy is good.
  3. Know your audience:
    1. Keep it Real: put yourself in the shoes of your audience. (Dis)arm yourself at their knowledge and understanding level of the topic at hand, now write.
    2. Analytics: You must track usage. Whether you use Google Analytics or some other piece of software, it is essential that you know
      • Who is reading what?
      • Where they are sending your content,
      • How they are using it, and
      • Who they are bringing back (if anyone) to your blog; and
      • Why the new user is coming to your blog.

      Use web analytical tools that will tell you what are the most relevant portions of your blog. Remember a web-page is an artificial container of information. The soul(rooh) of relevance is at a level of granularity below that.

    3. Listen to your readers: Let users tell you what is of relevance to them – individually & in aggregate. Regularly read the comments that users leave on your blog. Utilize tools that will help you determine what your readers find to be of relevance.
  4. Sharing Tools: All successful websites – and large blogs – know the value of sharing tools.
    1. E-Mail: Virtually every content page that a visitor goes to has an “E-Mail this Page” kind of functionality. Right from large News websites to even shopping and auction sites like eBay don’t skimp on this functionality. Never under estimate the value of peer-to-peer recommendation. Look for ways and tools to make this sharing be even more effective, and perhaps focused!
    2. Print: As more and more of the world is going online don’t discount the value of this. Before the advent of GPS systems, we all knew Mapquest. Why? Because people would print out directions from Mapquest and carry them to their destination – infecting more & more people with Mapquest. Again a peer-to-peer interaction where the focus of the interaction was “how to get there?”
    3. Social Bookmarking: Has become such a rage that it has given birth to companies like AddThis and ShareThis whose entire product offering is around spreading your content to other communities.
    4. Community: Again a very powerful and compelling idea embraced by most successful blogs. Allow your users to make comments on your blog. It provides the beginnings of the glue required to build a community around your content. If done right, this community will align around your content, refer to it, link to it, and hopefully facilitate Social Discovery!
  5. Make sure to add these fundamental tools to your blog.

  6. Micro-sharing: As there is an information overload, seek out new tools that will allow micro-sharing. No one has time. This is a large-part-reason why micro-blogging services like Twitter are such a huge success. If you want your users to be able to share your blog with others, find ways that will allow them to only share the relevant portions: selective relevance to individual readers. Copy-paste is tedious and painful: requires repeatedly copying passages, launching e-mail program, inserting quotes etc. etc. Use tools that will allow users to share just the highlights. A finer level of granularity is a must.
  7. Collection & Archival tools: are another critical requirement. Given the dynamic nature of blogs, content is in a constant state of change ;) Provide your users with tools that will not only allow them to archive (and refer) to your content in the future, but will also allow them to (clip and) collect interesting portions of your blog right here right now.
    1. Permalink: provides your users with a permanent URL to the content that they are looking at right now – the entire module.
    2. Page As-It-Was: is an idea whose time has come. Enable a user to be able to take a snapshot of your page as it is. This way groups of people (communities) can engage in a dialog around your content without having to worry that the page will change while they are in the midst of a discussion.
    3. Bookmark: Allow your audience to be able to bookmark easily. Social bookmarking has devolved to the point where a lot of bookmarks are added to a central repository. But sifting through one’s own bookmarks is a tedious process that not very many readers can, or do. Go back to the basics: provide automated browser based bookmarking functionality of “Bookmark this page”
  8. Enable blogging of your blog: Seek out and discover tools that will allow your readers to blog about your blog. At the end of the day: a significant portion of blogging is based upon people writing about what they read on other websites. Make it so that your blog is that ‘other site.’
  9. Provide them with quotable quotes that they can easily pick-up from your blog and/or link back to. Create Social Media Releases, whereby you create an article along with a video, if relevant, and package it present it in a format so that others can use it as-if-it-were-their-own. Don’t be hungry for attribution and/or traffic. The attributions and traffic will come with the larger distribution that you get out of it. It will increase your Reach and Retention by orders of magnitude.
    Deliver mechanisms that will allow your readers to be able to Auto-Publish your content with minimal, if not zero, effort.

  10. Use new gizmos, gadgets, and tools: Stay abreast with technology. Don’t be afraid to try new tools, and widgets, especially if it makes common sense. Trust your common sense. Neither clutter-up your blog, nor give-up easily on new widgets. After all consumers require a little bit of exposure to anything new. Did you know there was a time when the founders of Youtube were trolling on Craigslist trying to get anyone to use it, without much luck; and then it popped! And, boy did it pop! :) So be persistent with the tools that you like – especially those that deliver value to your readers and two, those that propagate your own blog.
  11. Make sure that the tools you use seamlessly integrate. Tools that ask your readers to install a software/browser plug-in, require them to sign-up should be shunned at all costs. Protect your readers from such tools. (Be your user).

  12. SEO: Don’t underestimate the value of Search Engine Optimization. Even though in the opinion of this author, this is an artificial industry (topic for another posting), yet it can, and it does do wonders for driving traffic to your blog.
  13. Be “Open”:
    1. Make it Personal: Share with your users what you are reading: show them what you find interesting on the WWW. Add link rolls showing your social bookmarks. Show your tag cloud of how you are organizing your information. If they are interested in your blog means they are interested in what you are reading. Share your discoveries on the WWW with them – enables Social discovery in a very big way. Solve the granularity problem and show them exactly what is of interest to you.
    2. No Popups: Don’t be afraid of losing visitors. When hyper-linking to other websites, don’t try to open them in a new (pop-up) window. Google doesn’t open search-results in a new window. They have a made a huge business out of providing you the fastest way to leave their site.
    3. Link to Relevant/Related content: Remember you cannot be ‘all things to everyone.’ So link to other relevant content and users of related content. Provide outbound links liberally, links that your reader will benefit from, at the same time don’t create links for the sake of hyper-linking.

Some of the ideas presented in this article straddle subject headings. I have described them under the one that made the most sense to my convoluted brain. As long as you can pick up on these ideas – no matter how you yourself decide to classify them – and make your blog more effective I am happy. :)

THE END

Appendix: List of Tools:

  1. Widgets: Slide, RockYou, Rooh.It, CitiesIveVisited
  2. Site Highlighter: Rooh.It
  3. Personal: Youtube, flickr, digg, delicious
  4. Mailing List & Forums: vBulletin, phpList, phpBB
  5. Micro-sharing: Twitter, Rooh.It
  6. Email, Print… Toolpanel: Rooh.It
  7. Sharing Buttons: ShareThis, AddThis
  8. Social Bookmarking: reddit, digg, delicious
  9. Blogging Software: WordPress, Blogger
  10. Auto-Publish Widget: Rooh.It
  11. Analytics: Webalizer, Rooh.It, Google, awStats

Bio:

Rohit Chandra is a consummate Consumer Internet Entrepreneur and the visionary inventor of the Personalized URL (in use by about a Billion users on the web): any time you see a URL of the format http://john.blogger.com, with the username before the domain name, you are using his invention. In 1997 he founded the earliest Social Networking website called eCode.com(=openId+Facebook+LinkedIn),  that had millions of users, and hundreds of corporate partners. He has been written up in more than 300 top-tier analyst and media articles: WSJ, NYTimes, Forrester, Jupiter, Business Week, etc.

Living life on his own terms, in the prime of youth, he took 5 years off to travel the world and visited nearly 50 countries. He now lives in Silicon Valley and hosts a unique Talk Radio Show on entrepreneurship called Sapne Salamat.

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