There’s a new Web curation tool on the block – meet Bundlr

Over the past year or so, a number of curation tools have emerged that make it easy to group diverse collections of online content around themes. Journalists in particular have taken to tools like Storify, Curated.by and Pearltrees as a way of making sense of information around the Web as they put news stories together – sometimes event incorporating their curated bundles into their actual reporting.

With a number of tools already available, is there room for another? The people behind new kid on the block Bundlr clearly believe so.

Like its rivals, Bundlr offers a bookmarklet which allows you to quickly ‘clip’ any web page into a themed bundle which you can then share online. However, the Portugese development team believe that their app can stand out thanks to a combination of real-time updates, collaboration features and the ability to embed pages – none of the other curation tools currently offer all three of these together.

In practice, Bundlr is quick and easy to use and creates attractive-looking collections. The bookmarklet automaticaly grabs certain content, such as YouTube videos, meaning that there’s no need for any embed codes. On other pages, it’s easy to select the text and images you’d like to grab for your bundle. Anyone watching your bundle will see it update in real-time and it’s simple to embed the results elsewhere, as I have below.

I personally prefer the stylish presentation of Bundlr’s collections to the plainer look of Storify or Curated.by. Pearltrees’ ‘mindmap’ approach has its charms but its use case is slightly different.

Bundlr currently lets you switch behind a list view or grid-based display for bundles, and new options, including a slideshow view and a map view, are on the cards for the future. An API is also on the way, allowing developers to create new ways to visualise content, and a suggestion engine to generate ideas for bundles will be built using metadata from existing content on the site . A mobile app is also planned.

Funded by €15,000 seed investment from Portuguese venture capital firm SeedCapital, Bundlr was founded by Sérgio Santos and FIlipe Batista, who met at the university while studying Computer Science. They’re hoping it will appear to a broader audience than just journalists, turning it into ‘a social network for content’, rather than just a tool.

Bundlr is free to use and you can sign up using your Twitter account here. Below, I’ve embedded a bundle I created around a big news story from the UK yesterday, the death of Roy Skelton, who provided voices for a number of popular TV characters.

UPDATE: Some readers using Firefox with Windows are having trouble seeing the embed below, although other OSes and browsers seem fine – we’ve passed this on to the Bundlr team.