Digital Sandbox

Ember is a Mac and iOS app that allows you to easily capture parts of a screen, a specific image, a whole window or a full web page easily and to edit it, collect it and organize it according to tags, themes/groups and colours.

Ember key strengths are:

a) the image "capture" toolset, which is second to none. It offers maximum flexibility, it is simple, and allows you to save directly to any folder/group/collection you have set-up.

b) the image editor utility that integrates a set of useful tools that includes cropper, focus/blur areas, rotate, add text, freehand drawing.

c) the elegantly designed "library" where you can organize your images and screenshots easily via drag and drop into collections. Each image can also have a description and multiple tags. In addition Ember can automatically sort all your images by colors.

d) the "subscription" area where you subscribe to image feeds from various sites and galleries to get inspiration and ideas.

iCloud-syncable.

Ember is a beautifully designed app that does a fantastic job of capturing any kind of image or screenshot from the web and to give you relevant tools to edit it and "curate" it into private collections.

N.B.: Though Ember is really a great app to use, I would not pay its relatively hefty price tag, unless it allowed me to publish or export (in a publishable format) some of my collections.

Free to 14-day trial.

Price £.34.99 

N.B.: Ember requires Mac OSX Mavericks to run.

More info: http://realmacsoftware.com/ember 

Free trial: http://realmacsoftware.com/redirects/ember/try/ 

Download from Mac App Store: http://realmacsoftware.com/redirects/ember/appstore 

Download from iOS App Store: http://realmacsoftware.com/redirects/ember-ios/appstore 

Check these two use cases: 

• http://vimeo.com/80786477
• http://vimeo.com/86498714 

#WebConsultants #WordpressExperts

When we launched the private beta of Scoop.it, TheNextWeb's Martin Bryant called it "blogging without blogging". I liked the term and made included it in my Twitter bio.

Of course blogging and curating content are different things and I won't go into a debate of whether one is better than the other. However, Andrew makes a good point on our blog explaining why the time constrained who have expertise might find it easier to curate content than blogging. This was our starting point for creating Scoop.it: we had things to say but not the time to write them. We also saw a lot of bad blogging that was just paraphrasing existing content under a false pretence of creation. And we saw good curators getting traction too and bringing a lot of value. 

Curation is the new creation...and it works.

Curation though should be done with creation in mind - joining dots & spotting patterns is the name of the game

Steven Rosenbaum says in the text: "With creation now ubiquitous and overwhelming, we must adopt new content organization and consumption methods in order to find meaningful information in the fast-moving data flow of the web. The cure for information overload is coherent curation — data-driven discovery managed by skilled, thoughtful, and in some cases expert curators. Much as the quality of a restaurant is created by the chef, the quality of the curated end-product is going to be made by the curator."

Makes sense to me.

Curating - how to manage it. And curation experts already exist - they're called Librarians!