As a major media figure on the Internet, I often find it difficult to manage all of my content outlets. I have a Twitter feed connected to my Facebook connected to my Tumblr. I also have a personal blog that I ignore and a few other things I shouldn’t ignore. The problem, then, is how to curate and post content I’d like to share almost everywhere at once or, barring that, focus in on one content outlet for my eager, content-hungry fan (Hi, Mom!)?
To solve this complex problem, founders Scott Jangro and Damien Arlabosse created Shareist, a tool for preparing and publishing posts from a central location.
There are two parts to the tool. First, you have an inbox that contains all of the items you’ve clipped from the web. These can be pages, images, or excerpts. Think of it as your scrapbook.
Then there are notebooks. These are pages or collections of pages that use a simple, easy-to-use interface to build HTML pages. You collect these pages in a notebook. Here’s one I made. Think of these as websites containing posts (like this one.)
The best thing about Shareist is that you can quickly export your posts to other services. For example, by logging into my WordPress install, I could publish this post with all the formatting intact from the WYSIWYG editor.
Arlabosse, who is a former chef, and Jangro both worked at Be Free/Commission Junction before coming together to work in ecommerce. This project is decidedly less about “performance marketing,” however, and more about content curation. The product is currently in beta but you can try it right now and test it out alongside 200 other users.
“Shareist is a publishing platform, but focuses not only on the publishing itself, but also the critical activities before and after the writing process,” said Jangro. He calls it “Evernote meets Hootsuite for publishers.”
“Tools exist in the market for all these activities, but they are either enterprise solutions or separate, disjointed tools,” he said. The tool grew out of their initial forays into niche publishing tools. “Shareist is a full workflow for capturing ideas, creating content, and publishing. It closes the gap between ideas and getting them published, helping publishers be more successful,” said Jangro.
I personally found it to be a very usable, very cool system for grabbing ideas and publishing them to various outlets. I really liked the easy-to-use interface – you simply add text boxes, images, and video by clicking one button – and the ease of publishing to both public notebooks like this one and the wide web is really cool.
While the product is a bit hard to figure out on the first try, it becomes simple enough when you understand the taxonomy. As a storehouse for blog topics, for example, it’s excellent and there are even controls to send posts out at a certain time so you don’t bombard your page with links.
The pair expect to generate revenue through affiliate partnerships and the like. However, right now the service is free. I plan on using it to post more memes and Lazy Town videos, but the founders assure me that their product can be used for more noble endeavors.