Question: What is curated content - is it useful?

So I'm still a little shaky on Curated Content and its benefit to a blog. I read that it doesn't get hit with a duplicate content penalty, but I'm not sure I understand why or how.

Can anyone enlighten me?

Conforming to wikipedia definition: Content curation is the process of collecting, organizing and displaying information relevant to a particular topic or area of interest.

What i noticed most people (bloggers) do is quoting blocks of content from some sites they follow or which they find relevant to their niches and then comment on it. This way you can have double content with half effort (copy 200 words, comment 200 words)

I guess such content can avoid duplicate penalty, but can also be hit by it. Depends how you do it. If you mix together copied content with own notes and explanations, the end content will probably be considered different enough not to be penalized. If you just add together 2 blocks of 200 words from 2 different articles and post it, it may be penalized..

Content Curation means gathering of content from different sources and then presenting it to the reader in a unique style. You can see examples of content curation everywhere like feed submission sites, social sharing sites, social bookmarking sites, and links etc. Feed submission sites and social sharing sites do not get hit by the curated content but I am not sure about the blogs. I think too much duplicate in a blog whether it is from a single source or different sources can alert Google and if you are using any part of content from any source then do not forget to mention about the source in the article.

bloggersjoy said:

Content Curation means gathering of content from different sources and then presenting it to the reader in a unique style. You can see examples of content curation everywhere like feed submission sites, social sharing sites, social bookmarking sites, and links etc.

Click to expand...

Yes, exactly. These sites gather various information from other sources and present it in some uniformed useful format (something like this: http://www.manpinner.com/) BTW, Google is the biggest curation site in the Net

You should be fine with curated content as long as you put a backlink to the original source AND put some other unique & useful content...
A website that contains 100% other site's content will definitely not google friendly.