RebelMouse squeaks to me

I’m getting a little bit hooked on RebelMouse.

A bit of hybrid–a little bit Pinterest, a little bit Paper.li, a little bit Flipboard, a little bit Tumblr–RebelMouse first squeaked this summer, and now appears to be breeding prolifically

Founder Paul Berry, the former CTO of HuffPo, calls this new curation/aggregation/newspaper publishing tool, your social front page. But for me, it’s more about my current awareness and knowledge management and sneaking a peak at what my colleagues are reading and learning.

It’s pretty.

At the end of the day my attractive page offers a visual review of my time online, sharing related media and content I often don’t remember I shared on my choice of a few understated design themes. At the end of the day I can also enjoy the visual histories of the growing number of friends I’ve chosen to follow.

Stories appear in boxes that may be moved around the page, frozen in a particular spot, edited, or deleted. Analytics are available for each box.

Confession: I am just beginning to play in this sandbox.

For me, the page is largely a Twitter picture, combined with whatever I discover during the course of my librarian day–my professional side. Other users may prefer to aggregate content from Facebook and Instagram.

An Add Story button allows you to add content while on the site. A Stick it bookmarklet offers a handy strategy for publishing newly discovered content on the fly.

On my Twitter Dashboard, I select the hashtags and @ signs I want to follow and I decide whether to publish only tweets and not retweets, to publish both tweets and retweets, to save tweets to drafts and decide on publishing them later, or to just show a timeline. Users may elect to receive email alerts when friends join, when they receive new followers, of engagement and traffic peaks, of RebelMouse updates.

RebelMouse recently added a story editor which allows users add blog posts from scratch or to add text to existing stories. The site recommends that if you choose to use the site for blogging, you freeze your own story on top of your page for maximum exposure.

While curation tools like Storify allow me to create multiple efforts representing a variety of my interests, RebelMouse requires you to sign in with your Twitter, Facebook, or Pictogram identities.

Libraries and schools with any of these accounts might create some pretty fabulous, vetted homepages of news.