As a matter of fact, all these options are available within Cronycle! Receive newsletter subscriptions, and follow Curated Feeds, RSS feeds and Twitter links – all within your feeds (click on Create Feed).
Cronycle feeds aggregate content from several sources, combining RSS (a standard for sharing web links), Twitter handles (web links shared on Twitter by these handles) and Cronycle Topics (our own automated curated feeds). This article is about our new tutorial for advanced mode for this aggregation: how to curate from your source library.
In Cronycle, there are indeed several ways to create a feed aggregating sources:
From the Create Feed option in Feeds: easy mode recommended if you are relatively new to Cronycle and to curation.
From the library of sources: our advanced mode, described here.
For Cronycle Topics only: search any Topic in the top search bar or on the Discovery page.
Click or tap on Manage all Sources to access the source library discussed here
When should I curate from the source library?
There are different cases when you may want to use the source library:
You imported or want to import a large amount of sources, either via an OPML (if you came from another aggregator) or a connected Twitter account. The library is where the results of the import will appear and where you’ll be able to build feeds.
Over time, you have manually added a large amount of sources, and reached a point where a spring clean is welcome
What does the source library do?
Cronycle’s source library lists all the sources you have added in feeds and imports. It also lists the Cronycle Topics you are currently using. You can add and remove sources, search and filter the listed sources, create feeds to read, and folders to further organize your sources.
This post is about how to collaborate on sources when doing curation as a team. Cronycle has a unique feature – Source Pooling – that allows just that for Twitter and RSS sources, as well as Cronycle Topics. It is available with our Enterprise plan.
Why collaborate on sources?
A team collectively curating content can share sources for several reasons. Here are a few:
Share the load of scanning for relevant news: ensuring there is no duplication of work
Read the same content to have same information for discussions and decisions
Help junior or non expert team members get to quality content efficiently
Share good sources relevant to another team member’s focus – this was the case for our customer Taylor & Francis
If you use it (or consider doing it) for other reasons, let us know. It can help us improve our solution!
What does source pooling do?
Cronycle users who collaborate together are grouped in worspaces which we call “Organizations”. Within an Organization, team members share several work items: sources, feeds, boards, publishing, tags and contacts (for sending newsletters).
When sources are shared, all users within the Organization can see all the sources of all the contributors. If Vijay adds a source, Kate will see it. And vice versa. Before you take the decision to share sources, you may want to consult your team.
Cronycle users primarily build feeds using sources. There are two ways to do that: either from the feeds (easy mode), or from the library of all sources (advanced mode). In this second case, team members can see the amount of feeds the source is used in, and filter by user who added. Soon, we will add more information for each source (total number across the Organization, list of the feeds and their owners, who added and when).
Each team member can then use the sources they and others added to create custom feeds. They can also discuss how best to structure feeds as a team. Note that we are also working on a separate feature to make feeds shared across several team members. More on that soon!
One needs to be invited by an organization admin to join and work collaboratively on sources, feeds, boards and sources. For Enterprise accounts, this happens on the Admin Console, in the Users page.
When you have taken the decision to start pooling sources, go to the Admin Console. Under Resources, select Sources. There is a simple switch to enable and disable source pooling.
Depending on the amount of sources across the organization, loading the whole source library could take a little longer. This is particularly true if you connected a twitter account with a lot of followees, or large OPML files with many RSS links.
Now, go to your Source Library (click on Feeds, and then Manage All Sources in the bottom left). You will see that the source pooling switch is also available on this page.
And that’s it: in the source table above, you can see all the sources from your organization, ready for you to build feeds. We will update this post soon, as we will release changes to make it easier to manage large amounts of sources within a team. To stay tuned:
Cronycle’s collaborative workflow have made it a tool of choice for organisations who want to curate in a collective manner. Having an ex-Microsoft as CEO, and other team members from the enterprise world, we knew that we had to go a step further in building an Enterprise-grade offer. So, in the last few months, we have focused our efforts on building a strong Enterprise plan.
Our Enterprise plan
While we will have more news on this subject in the next weeks and months, there is already plenty to tell you about:
A dedicated admin console to easily manage the organisation: users, teams, branding, and more soon
Collective resources, such as pooled sources and the list of tags shared across the whole organization
The possibility to name several admins so teams can be managed more easily
Dedicated support and team training to help onboard teams, provide advice, and share feedback with us to continually evolve the platform
More of everything: feeds, boards, sources, Topics, contributors…
Our new Admin Console
How to start in Cronycle as a team?
Contact us to book a demo and to try our Enterprise plan.
As a result, we also decided to lower the price point of our pro plans. A Pro plan will now cost 24$ per month if taken on a monthly contract. If you prefer the annual subscription, the price will now be 19$ per month.
If you already have a paid contract with us, these changes will take effect from your next monthly invoice. Note that there are new usage limits on feeds and Topics: if you already have a paid Pro account, you will not be impacted.
To compare our plan, check our Pricing page. This may be a good time to check whether our new Enterprise plan could be relevant for you and your team. We are available to do demos: you only need to drop us a line.
Content curation requires the aggregation of several sources within a single view that can be easily scanned. In Cronycle you can aggregate content in Feeds. Applying filters on top of this content aggregation helps information workers organise incoming content in a particularly relevant manner. Cronycle also lets you save, organize, and publish content (check our product page if you are not familiar yet).
What sources does Cronycle aggregate?
For each feed, you can collect content from different sources: RSS feeds, Google Alerts, Twitter handles (we retrieve links shared) and our own Cronycle Topics.
You can also subscribe to your favourite newsletters and have them delivered in a specific feed.
How does it work?
Today, we have just updated the way in which you create feeds: it is now easier to collect several sources into one feed, from the Feeds page. Simply click on Create Feed (top left) in our Webapp. (Our iOS app works in a very similar fashion too).
This opens a full screen interface dedicated to creating your feed, so you can concentrate on this task. You can see suggested or trending Topics, Curated Feeds from your own organization (if you have a team in Cronycle), and the possibility to subscribe to newsletters. And at the top, you can search any subject you are interested in.
You can preview the kinds of articles coming from each source to check the quality and relevance of the source. Once you decide a source is good to add to your feed, simply click on the plus icon. You can select several sources. They appear in the right frame, as seen below:
Once you have a good set of sources, you can click on Done, name your feed, confirm… and see the resulting feed which aggregates the content. Note that you cannot add more than 5 Cronycle Topics (our automated feeds) per feed.
Achieve better relevance
You can make your feeds aggregate content with even more focus and relevance by adding your own keywords to include or exclude, or by switching to advanced mode for boolean operations.
A major part in the art of curation is organizing content. Cronycle proposes several levels of content organization:
Content pinned onto boards: worth saving, often associated to one or several large categories / boards.
Content with one or several tags: relevant to specific subject(s), criteria, workflow status, or anything you can describe in a set of tag words.
Editor approved content: content ready to be sent to publishing.
On your boards, you can filter and search across several criteria, on a single board, or across all boards. Also, when adding tags, we display those already used on the current board to help you apply the same tags again.
But now we go a step further, with Organization tags.
We noticed that managing tags is difficult enough for one person, and very quickly gets out of hand in teams. We worked with some of our customers to provide teams a way to have a controlled tag list, applied across the organisation.
Admin users can upload a CSV file of their tag list. From that point onwards, users in their organisation can only apply the listed tags. To update the list, the admin can replace it any time by a new tag list. Next month, it will be also possible to edit the tags within the list, in Cronycle.
Note that this feature, and the brand new Admin Console to access it, is only available for Enterprise users.
Cronycle lets you integrate the widest range of sources, including Google Alerts into feeds.
Feeds are used as a starting point for your information workflow. Other sources you can use to create feeds include RSS feeds, Twitter handles, newsletters, and our own automated Topics. (Note that you can also also add files on boards.)
This posts explains how to create a Google Alert and add it to Cronycle.
Step 1 – Create a Google Alert
First, in Google Alerts, create an alert for the subject you are interested in. You will see it in your list of alerts, such as Artificial Intelligence Ethics in this example:
You can use common syntax elements to shape these alerts, such as + to include content with several words, – to do exclusions, “or” to have several options, “quotes” for specific expressions, etc. Read more about more tricks to optimise your Alert here.
Step 2 – Generate an RSS link from your Google Alert
Click on the pen of the Google Alert you want to follow to show the settings. Select RSS feed in the last option to deliver the alert to.
Save to update the alert. Now, when you hide the options, you will see an RSS icon by the alert. Right click to copy the destination link – a fully working RSS feed URL.
Step 3 – Add the Google Alert in Cronycle
Now, you are ready to add this RSS link to Cronycle. In Feeds, click on Manage All Sources (bottom left).
Paste the link in the input field to add new sources: as soon as the alert is loaded, press on the + icon to save it to your source library. It appears in the list of sources, at the top.
Paste the Google Alert RSS URL in the Add new sources field and add
Next, you probably want to create a feed to see content flowing in from that Google Alert. You can select one or several sources, of different kinds if you want (Twitter handles, RSS, Google Alerts, Topics). Click on “Create Feed” to build your own custom feed.
Select the Google Alert(s) and any other source to group into a feed
You can also start adding keywords to further refine your feed. From there, you can pin interesting content to boards and continue the workflow all the way to publishing.
The resulting feed. A keywords adds more relevance.
Step 4 – Try a smart alternative: Cronycle Topics
While you can do the above to use your current set up, know that we have an alternative to Google Alerts, which we call Cronycle Topics. Our mission is to help you gain time by surfacing relevant content. You can search and preview Topics easily in the Discovery section in Cronycle, or from Add/Create Feeds.
We identify thought leaders, or influencers, per Topic. They are ranked in terms of influence within the community of the Topic, so we are confident they bring value to the discussion. We look at what these influencers share about the topic on Twitter to surface important and relevant content. You can read more about how this works on this post from Vishal, our CEO.
Explore Topics, here with the list of influencers
You can add one to five Topics per feed, and add keywords within Cronycle to you can get content at the intersection of some of our 50k Topics and another dimension.
Feed with 1 Topic (Artificial Intelligence) and ethics / ethical as keyword filters
You can also limit the influencers to take in consideration, by deactivating them individually, and/or by selecting a range.
In feed settings, filter by influencers
To try all this, create an account for free, which gives you all the power of a pro account for 28 days. No credit card required!
Some of you may have noticed issues when copy-pasting in Chrome, whether on Mac or Windows. This problem is not specific to Cronycle: it also happens on any site, even Google’s.
Like for us, it may affect your workflow and productivity. So far, the only solution we found was to uninstall and reinstall Chrome. Because all the bookmarks, passwords, extensions, etc are saved on the cloud, this is actually quite quick to do. This trick seems to work, let’s hope it will last…
You can easily start to curate content using Cronycle: we let you import the standard file (OPML) from feed aggregators, import your Twitter contacts (Pro Trial, Pro & Enterprise plans only), get suggestions based on your Twitter activity and/or search for RSS feeds, Twitter handles and our automatically curated feeds on 50k Topics. We even have a Chrome and Safari extension to save single pieces of content or to grab RSS. This is an important start in our end-to-end workflow, to let you curate, organize and publish content.
This post is about importing OPML.
How to import sources using an OPML file
RSS aggregators let you export sources as an OPML file. This is a standard file format that consists of a list with structure and links. In the case of Feedly, the OPML file groups sources together, by feed.
In Cronycle, we have a source library to import and manage sources (in Feeds, find “Manage all sources” to the bottom left).
When you import an OPML file, you will see that all the sources appear in a list. Also, if you want to keep the same feed structure as in Feedly, you can filter sources by folder, select all, and click on Create Feed.
Then, you can name the feed, add or remove sources, and even start to add keyword filters. Save, and your feed is ready to check through!
A little work about source pooling…
Our Enterprise plan includes a unique functionality: the ability to pool sources across your organisation. All curators and admins within the organisation can see the same sources and build feeds.
We’ll soon have more news on this space, as we’ll make it more collaborative…
We have some news in Feeds! You can now curate newsletters too.
Cronycle Feeds already lets you curate content from RSS feeds, Twitter handles and our own Cronycle Topics – Dynamic relevant feeds across 50k topics automatically curated from top influencers.
Now, you can receive all your newsletter subscriptions in a dedicated feed, so all your content can be collected in the same tool, ready to be filtered, selected, organised, enriched and published.
How does it work?
First, in Cronycle, go to Feeds. Click on Add Feeds. Near the bottom of the pop-up window, you will see a section called “Subscribe to newsletters”. Click on “Start Now”.
Simply copy the email address provided and use it to subscribe to your newsletters. You can close the pop-up.
As soon as the first email will be received, you will see a new feed in your feed list, named “Newsletters”. Note that this can take a couple of days, depending on the pace of your subscriptions. This is where all your issues will be collected, as well as address confirmation emails (so don’t forget to check it out!).
As an alternative, for subscriptions you already have, you can also auto-forward to the email address we provide from most email applications.
Currently, if you want to curate a link from a newsletter issue, you need to open the original content. From there, you can use our Content Clipper extension (available on Chrome and Safari) to save it to a board, where you can organise, enrich and publish.
Did you know? You can also easily create and send your own newsletters from your curated content, within Cronycle. Learn more here.
We recently did a total update of our plugin in WordPress. If you still have the old one, we recommend you read this detailed post and update it in WordPress. If you are new to this, please read on…
The Cronycle Content Plugin enables you to create news feeds on your website, using the content you curate on your Cronycle boards. Curated content includes articles, videos, Twitter conversations and Story Arcs (grouped content), with or without your commentary.
Our plugin has two features:
Board Content as Banner – Provide functionalities to generate a newsfeed banner on your website with certain Cronycle board content. It applies your default font.
Board Content as Draft post – Provide functionalities to fetch Cronycle board content and insert into the WordPress as draft post which can be edited and published to your website.
Create a free Cronycle account today to try it out, and follow our dedicated WordPress plugin guide.
In an age of exponential content production and social sharing, finding relevant content can feel like painstaking work. Among the options available for your audience to navigate information, curation has grown and is now standing out. Most people trust a few hand-picked curators to do at least some of the work for them. If you are reading this post, you are probably a curator (or a curator-to-be). And that’s what Cronycle can help you achieve, alone or with your team.
In this post, we’ll look at newsletters.
Newsletters are powerful tools to raise awareness of your brand and expertise. But until recently, connecting a myriad of tools to select, create and distribute issues made it a time consuming task many of you could not afford. And any change with one tool made this card castle crumble.
But this has changed, Cronycle made it simple – mostly because we integrate discovery, curation, organization and publishing in our integrated workflow.
Choose Topics of interest from over 50k Topics (and many more sources) and create feeds
Filter feeds with keywords to only get what is potentially relevant within the feeds
Pin content from the feed onto boards, or clip to your board from anywhere on the web using our Content Clipper extensions
Collaborate with your team to enrich the best content on your boards
Drag & drop the best articles within custom sections into our newsletter templates
Import & manage your newsletter distribution list, then send or schedule your issues.
Use the same board content to publish to your WordPress website, social media (via Buffer), RSS, Cronycle Curated feed, or to Slack.
Give it a try! You can sign up for free and you will get 28 days free pro trial to curate, assemble and send newsletters.
The Cronycle Content Plugin enables you to create news feeds on your website, using the content you curate on your Cronycle boards. It publishes to WordPress your curated content, includes articles, videos, Twitter conversations and Story Arcs (grouped content), with or without your commentary.
Plugin has two features:
Board Content as Banner – Provide functionalities to generate a newsfeed banner on your website with certain Cronycle board content.
Board Content as Draft post – Provide functionalities to fetch Cronycle board content and insert into the WordPress as draft post which can be edited and published to your website.
Installation
Download, install, and activate Cronycle Content plugin from WordPress plugin store. You need a version of PHP of v7.2.8 or higher. If you have a free account on WordPress.com, you need to upgrade to business in order to install plugins, or transfer to WordPress.org. See how to do that here.
Login to your Cronycle account. Create board and pin content to it.
Then, click on Publish near the top of that board.
Switch on Publish to WordPress.
It will ask you to connect and generate a token. Copy the token.
Now, in WordPress, go to Settings / Cronycle Content, paste the token in the input field and press Save Token to connect the account.
Now you will be able to see your board content in WordPress (continue reading “How to Use?” below).
Back in Cronycle, on the Board Publish panel, you can adjust the type(s) of content you want to go through to WordPress, per board.
If you want to copy your token again, go to your profile page, in the Integrations section.
To send the content from several boards, you will need to switch on WordPress for each board, in its publishing settings.
When disconnecting, we recommend disconnecting from the WordPress Plugin Settings page.
How to use?
Board Content as a newsfeed banner
This enables you to include a newsfeed banner on your website, with content from one of your boards. To do so, you can generate a shortcode from the banner shortcode generation options under the Banner tab in the plugin settings. Make sure you have switched on Publish to WordPress for the corresponding board in Cronycle.
Copy the shortcode and paste it into your page content.
You can also use menu options in the Classic editor block to generate and embed shortcode on to your page content.
Here are few examples of generated banners on our website. The banner is responsive, adapting to small screen sizes.
Board Content as Draft post
This feature allows you to pick board items and add them as draft blog posts. In WordPress admin dashboard, you can find your Cronycle board(s) content as draft posts under the ‘Cronycle Content’ menu option. From there you can edit and/or publish any type of board content as a regular WordPress post. You can retrieve content from all the boards you have switched on in Cronycle, in the boards publishing settings.
From the draft post tab in the plugin settings page, you can assign default categories for the content from each board, and turn on & off the transfer of tags used on your boards.
Note that the content from your Cronycle boards is imported only once to the WordPress plugin. If you modify the content on your boards (e.g. add an article to a Story Arc, or edit a summary), the modifications will not appear in WordPress. This is why we recommend using “editor approved” to filter content ready to publish. It lets you collect and refine your content on your board in Cronycle before sending to the WordPress plugin (or other publishing methods). To use it, you need:
A Pro or Enterprise account
To tick the Editor Approved box when the content is ready
To use editor approved as a filter in the publishing settings.
Tick the Editor Approved box
Use Editor Approved to filter
Troubleshooting
I get error messages on the WordPress login page
Although rare, it happens that there is an error following an update and interplay with other plugins. The solution is to:
Deactivate the Cronycle Plugin
Uninstall the Cronycle Plugin
Reinstall the Cronycle Plugin
Reconnect the plugin with the token provided in your Cronycle account
Set up again your preferences in Settings (default categories, tags, and / or banner shortcode)
Reading Time: 2minutesCronycle is an information workflow application, powered by Right Relevance (subsidiary of Cronycle), which is a topical information search and relevance platform. Topics and Influencers (per topic) form the backbone of the search and relevance technology.
Topics (over 50 thousand) including metadata like related topics & semantics like synonyms, acronyms.
Topical influencers (over 2.5M) with score and rank.
Topics are identified by algorithmically mining over 10M unstructured documents on the web and leveraging Wikipedia and Right Relevance topical graph neighborhood techniques. Relationships and semantics are derived from this process with manual corrections and injections for the last mile.
Topical Influencers mining is fully algorithmic and primarily graph based. The methodology leverages ML, semantic analysis and NLP on unstructured data at scale and involves a 2-level proprietary people rank (custom page rank for social graphs):
Stage 1. Global PR to reduce a ~300M nodes graph to ~6M (for now) globally ranked influencers. This is a first level reduction and we don’t expose the scores. It doesn’t have topical context.
Stage 2. Graph partitioning of the ~6M connected nodes from stage 1 across our ~50K structured topic space using unstructured data assigned to each node. This leads to ~50K per topic sub-graphs, where a secondary PR is applied to determine the topic score for each node in each topical sub-graph. This secondary PR score is normalized to calculate the Right Relevance topic score and rank influencers for every structured topic in our platform.
Our custom PR algorithm is derived from google pagerank but is specialized for social graphs (instead of links/webpages) with many important differences applicable to social networks.
The RightRelevance score of an expert/influencer for a TOPIC represents the authority within the topical community say for e.g. ‘machine learning’ of that influencer. This measure of influence per topic is termed as ‘topical influence’ and the topical communities formed are termed as “Tribes“.
Once we have the scored and ranked influencers’ community for a particular topic (e.g. machine learning, behavioral science, big data, emergency medicine, oil and gas, angularjs, social media marketing etc.) we mine the web for content. The numeric influence from topics and influencers is inductively applied to this content for measuring relevance and forms a critical part of the search. We download ~600K articles daily from ~2M websites every month. Topical content and information are available in the form of articles, videos and conversations.
Points to note:
We dampen followers count, tweet count etc. noisy signals and lay much more focus on the topical network itself.
Each influencer can be part of multiple topical sub-graphs aka communities and have a different score, and rank, within each. This is exposed in our apps via scored tags.
Other, non structured, topics work via free-form search but the relevance may not be of the same quality. This can be seen by the score ’10’, which, probably poorly done, means we didn’t find a community for the topic.
Both topics and influencer graphs are mined and built algorithmically at scale with ever-increasing quality after every iteration.
We are hosting an event at the Century Club (61-63 Shaftesbury Ave, London) to discuss how Twitter is gaining importance in financial markets. We will show you how hedge fund managers and analyst are using Cronycle (www.cronycle.com) and RightRelevance (https://www.rightrelevance.com/search/articles?query=crude%20oil – on crude oil for example) to keep ahead.
