The goal is clear – slice through the noise of SXSW by preserving the most compelling Twitter content. The portal will be organized by day, time, and topic to help people during SXSW and way after to be able to quickly find the panels and conversations that interest them.

Starting Thursday, March 10th, tune into the SXSW 2011 Sessions Guide: Unofficial collections of social media from the best SXSW Interactive 2011 sessions:

Click to Visit SXSW 2011 Sessions Guide

It’s not just about archiving the content though, it’s also about handpicking the best content. That’s why our archives will focus on original, insightful tweets – the best stimuli for conversation, and the most interesting content to read.

Panelists and speakers will see these archives and want to share them with their followers. The collections are a great way to present the content, both as a takeaway for attendees and for people who couldn’t make the session. Maybe even more importantly, it will help the conversation last way beyond just the day it happens – essentially forever!

We’ll be taking full advantage of the event in more ways that just archiving tweets. We’ll be livestreaming from our scrappy little downtown office, where we cowork with fellow Austin startup, Hurricane Party. Starting Thursday and lasting through Tuesday, you can tune into their video broadcast and chat with the companies at http://hurricanestream.com.

It’ll be a way for attendees to see what life is like for a startup, especially during a crazy time like SXSW. And to mix things up, why not get a little silly! We hope it can be an inspiration for what startups are all about – making great products and having lots of fun. Activities currently scheduled include a beer pong tournament, free ice cream, and a nerf gun war, among others.

Watch the video here, or on the HurricaneStream site:

Are you coming to SXSW? Come find us or stop by our office! We’re at 906 E 5th St. in downtown Austin, tweet me @timgasper to get my attention.

And don’t forget to track all the best tweets with the SXSW 2011 Sessions Guide!

Some popular chats include:

• #journchat - long running weekly conversation (Mon 7-10pm Central) between journalists, bloggers and PR people
• #prstudchat – a platform for conversation between Public Relations Students, Educators and Professionals (monthly, time varies)
• #campuschat – connecting college-bound students, their parents, educators, and administrators (Wed 8-9pm Central)

For more info on Twitter chats, check out this blog post on Mashable.

Twitter is great for serendipity – chance encounters. However, hashtags and conversations are more structured, and can benefit from being archived to be viewed later. What if you want to remember the conversations you had? What if you want to follow up with certain people? What if you missed the chat?

Keepstream is a great solution for publicly archiving your discussion tweets, whether you save all the tweets from the chat or only the highlights. All of Keepstream’s benefits come along for the ride, including link previews, annotations, and embedding. The embed widget is particularly useful – most chats have a post-chat recap blog post, and Keepstream’s widget is the ideal way to incorporate tweets into it.

Twitter chats aren’t the only discussions that happen around hashtags. Conversations happen all the time spontaneously or deliberately with hashtags or keywords at their core. Some example collections on Keepstream:

• #LessAmbitiousMovies – They would have been easier to make, but definitely not as good. http://keepstream.com/JimEngland/less-ambitious-movies
• #KDMCinfo – Tweets during Will Sullivan’s multimedia workshop on mobile reporting tools and tips. http://keepstream.com/ModernJourno/mobile-reporting-wisdom-from-journerdism-kdmcinfo
• #PCATX – Conversations during ProductCamp Austin. http://keepstream.com/PCAustin/productcamp-austin-6-what-people-said

If you ever have questions on how to archive a hashtag discussion into Keepstream, reach me anytime at tim@keepstream.com.

An example embed:

Don’t let those tweets disappear. Keepstream them.

Twestival Local is coming up, and that means that there is going to be a storm of chatter on Twitter supporting your cause – leading up to and during the event!

All those conversations and statuses should be preserved and archived so that your attendees can find them later. Twitter search is only temporary. Keepstream can help you pick out the most important tweets and save them on a permanent, shareable webpage.

Each local Twestival event typically has its own unique hashtag. You can look up that hashtag on Keepstream and save the best tweets. Watch the video to see how.

After the event, go onto Keepstream. It uses Twitter Connect so signing up is a snap. Then hit the big gray “Create” button at the top of the page. It works just like a Twitter client where you see various timelines and you can search for a keyword or hashtag. Search for the hashtag for your specific Twestival event, and add the tweets you want to save by hitting the “+” buttons. You can add as many or as few as you’d like!

When you are done, you can sort the collection chronologically, and give the collection a name. Then hit publish! This makes the collection page a public, shareable URL – so you can post it on Twitter and Facebook. Or we also have a widget so that you can embed the tweets onto your blog or local Twestival website.

Have questions? Shoot an e-mail to tim@keepstream.com and I’ll guide you along.

The natural disaster was first picked up on Twitter by Sandra Fish, Journalism instructor at the University of Colorado. She live tweeted the latest updates through the #boulderfire hashtag and posted updates while listening to the police radio broadcasts. Her curation caught the eye of many, including Robert Scoble, Epic Colorado, and Andrew Hyde.

With Keepstream, Sandra was able to save the most important tweets and build a collection on the topic. Embedded below is that collection of tweets from #boulderfire.

photo credit -> andrewhy.de
Taken on Anemone trail in Boulder.

You and everyone you know is now a content creator. You blog, you Twitter, you Facebook, you YouTube, you Flickr – and all those other companies-turned-verbs.

But all this decentralized content creation has many people thinking… how can I consume all this stuff? Our streams and readers are getting bloated, and we’re all wondering “Am I well informed? Or am I drowning in a content sea?” On top of being overwhelmed, there is a big problem of noise. Finding relevant content and commentary can feel like searching for needles in a haystack.

Don’t fear, a new age of “curation” has been declared. It doesn’t matter if you think this is a revolution or just a new buzzword to describe what was already happening, curation aims to filter the web and serve you only the best, most relevant content.

Where it all began

The term originally refers to the museum curator, selecting the best, contextually related masterpieces and bringing them together into a collection. The museum curator oversees the care of the pieces, and adds her research and captions to tie the whole collection together.

The careful selection and commentary paints a narrative that is more powerful and compelling than each work individually. The best museum curators are such a prized asset that in smaller institutions, they might be the only paid staff members.

How it morphed

The curator profession has connotations for both archival and presentation, which made it a popular metaphor to describe editing and filtering in a very general way. The expansion in meaning hasn’t been taken lightly though, as many people argue that traditionally a curator implies some sort of wisdom and expertise – advanced degrees and many years of experience. Pretty much anyone can edit and filter, but only scholars can curate.

Regardless, the words “curator” and “curation” have already been popularized, and now represent the act of filtering digital information, and more recently – links and social media. There is so much noise, and people – with the help of computers – can bring the best, most relevant information to the surface.

Haven’t we always been doing this?

We’ve all been producing and distributing content on the Internet for a while now, so haven’t we been curating already? Most content flows through Facebook and Twitter, we make things more visible by “liking” and “retweeting” things, or voting things up on Digg or StumbleUpon.

What’s different? The main thing is the volume of information getting blasted around. Now there are 500 million people on Facebook, and over 100 million Twitter users – and each of those people are a yelling voice trying to be heard. It’s no wonder people are calling social media “the firehose”.

The Internet is a newspaper, and it’s hiring an editor

Due to the nature of the “firehose”, there is so much important, relevant information that you simply miss. If the Internet were a newspaper, who would be the editor? Some publications have taken up that mantle – such as the Huffington Post, a popular online news publication. They’ve been sourcing their articles via the Internet for a while now. Freelancers and bloggers contribute their user generated content, and Post editors publish the best, most compelling pieces.

It’s not without controversy though – other publishers often scorn Huffington Post by using amateur and non-expert content. Also, many people dislike how in general, they don’t pay users for contributing their content. Despite this, Forbes has openly gone to a curation model for their editorials, and Yahoo has purchased Associated Content in the range of $100m to contribute to Yahoo News. It seems like Curation is here to stay, and many other publishers might be forced to get on board in order to stay relevant.

Apple and The Guggenheim

Publishers aren’t the only ones curating. Apple has often been tied in with the idea of curation because their App Store applications marketplace has very strict standards for quality and usability. By manually “curating” which applications make the cut to be available for download, the overall user experience is supposedly less noisy and more consistent. This is often contrasted with the Google apps marketplace which is much more lenient and depends more on crowd reviews. I’ll go ahead and ask it – technically they are both curation right? Apple curates from the top, and Google depends on grassroots curation? But Apple gets the credit.

In another example, the infamous Guggenheim museum recently had a contest on YouTube where they called for YouTube video art submissions. It’s an ironic collision between the traditional museum curators and the newer trend of Internet content curation.

A Brave New (Curation) World

Just like a museum curator builds a gallery of masterpieces, can the citizens of the Internet be the collection keepers? As the social sites provide more ways to cancel out the noise, the web can be more relevant for us all! But who has the time and the tools to do all this curation? Will people do the curation manually, or will it mostly be automatic?

Blogging platforms like Posterous and Tumblr make sharing content and editorializing it easier than ever. Digg is transitioning to a new model (which some like and some don’t) that emphasizes sharing your “digged” links with your friends. It’s yet to be seen whether one site will be the killer curation app, or if it will be a more distributed trend.

What are your thoughts on curation? Do you think it’s just a buzzword, or do you think it has real relevance?