The Huffington Post: Curating the Madness

Several media and technology sources recently reported on The Huffington Post’s intentions to aggregate and curate Twitter entries (Tweets), categorizing them into the 19 sections The Huffington Post already covers, from technology and politics to local news in Chicago and Denver. The speculation was short-lived and now HuffPo is doing the much-needed work of curating the madness in a design that already shows some promise.

You can access “The Twitter Edition” of each news category at the top of each section’s page. For example, click on World and a link at the top of the page will take you to curated Tweets on world news. Typically, each page of curated Tweets on HuffPo is divided into two sections: in the world news case, traditional news sources like CNN and the European edition of the Wall Street Journal post their own stories as Tweets, and readers of these traditional sources and citizen journalists link to articles they consider noteworthy. In other words, HuffPo curates professional and amateur Tweets separately.

Further down on some Twitter Edition pages, more categories are defined into which Tweets are placed. For example, the bottom of the Politics Twitter Edition categorizes Tweets from members of Congress according to their body (House or Senate) and political party (Donkey or Elephant). Russ Feingold (D-WI) wishes all his constituents a Happy Founders Day!

This project is in its first stage, so naturally there are kinks to iron out, or ban completely and forever as the case may be. The division between professional and amateur Tweets is perhaps widest in the local news columns. In the Denver Twitter Edition the professional Tweets come from local news stations, while the amateur Tweets come from your average man-on-a-Denver-street. Josephbrady, for example, is one Denverite happy to offer an occasional lewd quotation, or failing that, some wisdom from Cicero.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, user Boris23.