Liz Gannes writes:

Marissa Mayer’s Yahoo is in the process of acquiring a startup to help its efforts to become a destination for content.

Yahoo is expected to announce this week that it has acquired Snip.it, a Pinterest-like site for article curation, according to sources familiar with the deal.

Snip.it was founded by Ramy Adeeb, who was formerly a principal at Khosla Ventures, and has funding from Khosla, True Ventures, Charles River Ventures and SV Angel.

Yahoo is paying “mid teens” of millions of dollars for the company, according to a source.

It’s unclear what will now happen with Snip.it, which helps users share and discuss news articles and videos, both on their own and in groups.

As I wrote when the site first launched in Oct. 2011, “Adeeb is an Egyptian living in San Francisco who built his company’s bookmarking tool after experiencing his home country’s revolution from afar earlier this year, when all his friends were interested in hearing his perspective on what was happening in Egypt.”

Kara Swisher yesterday described Yahoo’s new approach to content:

While one might argue that Google is already the Google of content, the plan is to make Yahoo more relevant by tailoring it to the individual and make the site a “trusted destination to get them to where they want to go and keep going back.”

Thus, the thinking goes, while Google is the place people come to search for links, Yahoo then becomes the place users come to find content. That means more partnership deals from third-party sources, with an additional social component layer and synced across a number of devices and platforms, especially video.

“Google will find links for content,” said another source. “Yahoo will put the content right there.”

If it all sounds a bit like a turbocharged Twitter, you’re right. It’s especially important since the old big-traffic deals that Yahoo could strike based on their portal power have become supplanted by marketers looking for mobile, social and other solutions.

Yeah baby yeah!!!

This is sweet for three reasons:

1. It validates Interest Graph companies as interesting to Yahoo.

2. It validates Curation Services as an important part of the Internet going forward.

3. Going forward, there's a wide open playing field for Yahoo and Google to create demonstrable value for their consumers in a space that Reddit, Pinterest, and Tumblr currently dominate: PUBLIC INTEREST-BASED CONTENT.

PandaWhale believes in this market. This makes me VERY excited about where we can go.

So, as content portal.. basically like the old Google IG, or like a Feedly Dashboard?  In regards to individualized content/threads as shown on Reddit/Pinterest/Tumblr, it's actually PRIVATE interest content, no?  People creating their own personal forks as only the human brain can tangentially create. Maybe that's just semantics.  

I wrote some thoughts on Curation Culture in like 2010 - http://rizen.tumblr.com/, and some of my sentiments still relate.  Just like how we were talking about the shift from text to images, on the web, the flood demands organization.  Hamsters and Rabbits separate their food from their poop quite naturally...

It's interesting that more than a few clipping services originate/live here in San Francisco.

USED to originate/live here. As far as I know, Snip.It is dead, and so are Bolt and Clipboard.

Only Pinterest remains.

On curation, I believe you're right. The flood demands organization.

See also: Yahoo Acquisitions 2013.

Interesting commentary, thanks.  Two additional points/posts that have really intrigued me in the last two days:

1.  http://www.pbs.org/idealab/2013/06/vourno-the-crowdfunded-news-network

JOURNALISM AS A PUBLIC GOOD

Vourno was born out of a disappointment with the current state of the news media. Verdirame, his brother, some friends from college and some developers invested in the project when they saw news media bogged down by corporate business interests.

“We love the news, and we dislike where it’s at…Journalists are getting screwed. The public’s getting screwed,” Verdirame said.

By letting the public decide which stories to publish, he said, journalists would not be compelled to let stories die based on corporate interests.

“We have no hidden political or corporate agenda,” Verdirame said. “If it gets funded, it gets published.”

“It’s a great thing for the public,” Verdirame said later. “People want change. People want to see stories told that aren’t told. This is, to me, the ultimate platform to be able to do that.”

HOW IT WORKS

The idea behind Vourno is simple.

1. Video journalists (“vournos”) propose a video story they want to create (“Video is where everybody’s going,” Verdirame said).

2. Members of the public (“pubs”) browse the stories they want to fund and help publish it by donating. They can also pitch their own stories they want to see published for a vourno to pick up.

3. Vournos gather enough funds from pubs to pay for their salary, equipment, travel expenses and any extra team members they may need (editor, videographer, etc.)

4. The vourno gets a certain amount of time to complete the story and publish it on Vourno’s website for all to watch and share for a week before selling it elsewhere.

5. More popular, original and in-depth reporting will get more play on the website, and more sharing means more revenue through advertising — which eventually will be shared by vournos and pubs.

“Everything that everybody needs is built into this platform,” Verdirame said. “It’s very easy to share. It’s very easy to promote.”

2. http://blog.keeeb.com/post/53748673170/keeeb-high-five-howard-rheingold

Marc: In your Youtube interview you spoke with Robert Scoble about the fact that “curation is becoming an important participation/collaboration skill for digital citizens”. How important is content curation in 2013? Is this still only some kind of trend or has it reached a point where everyone needs to curate?

Howard: Curation is important and is growing more important both for the individual and for the entire digital commons for a number of reasons. First, the amount of crap, spam, misinfo, disinfo, horribly incorrect info that is pumped into the Web every second has to be addressed and the best way to do that is to not only train people to recognize quality — and know what they recognize it — but to provide platforms for them make their judgements available to others. Individuals become more informed consumers of information — which could be life-saving and certainly would be life-influencing — and their individual filtering can add up to aggregated collective intelligence (similar to the way Google uses people’s decisions to put links on pages to build a very smart search engine).

Fascinating. I thought for sure Yahoo would go into Curation but so far they haven't.

Building a foundation and giving people the tools to do it themselves = enabling/empowering people with choice and control.  I think this is probably better and more mass-efficient than being the actual publisher of content.  ahem - dunno why but I suddenly think of Huffington Post.

Huffington Post is all professional editors.

Tools for users to organize their own stuff -- that's revolutionary and it's up for grabs.

Right now Pinterest is a clear leader, but I believe that Yahoo could motivate Tumblr to steer in that direction a lot more than they do now. Reblogging IS repinning, after all.

Sure now they are... Wasn't the running joke that Huffington was a news aggregate? 

Not really -- MSN and the Yahoo home page were always much better aggregators.

which makes the joke even funnier!