Market research and analysis these days is mostly conducted off the web. The internet is more efficient, more cost effective and more readily updated.

Whether you’re a novice or a pro in internet research data and analysis, chances are you’re going to suffer from information overload in different ways. Beginners struggle with too much data; they don’t know where to start and how to filter “junk” info from relevant data. Pros struggle with too much worthwhile data, which leads to new problems with organizing, prioritizing and accessing that data.

Free to use, Pearltrees comes along and offers a solution for just these problems. Though it was perhaps not designed for marketing research and analysis, it is perhaps a perfect tool that might as well have been designed for just that. It lets you share just about anything you find on the web, organize it in place, access it from anywhere, use a simple interface for quick access and use the already sourced data from more than 200K Pearltrees users.

The platform also makes it easy to collaborate on team projects, especially market research projects. Because Pearltrees is designed for the individual user to first set up his own network and data structure, and then for multiple users to share that data together, it becomes a great tool to share information and bounce ideas off each other.

For example, user “Vasilis” has a tree called “Marketing Research Companies,” and each “pearl” on the tree is a part of the overall subject. (Note: make sure you opt out of the iPad app download to be directed to the page). Whether Vasilis is on your team, in your company or not, he’s already done a lot of the work. You can save time by using the information he’s already sourced, build on it and share it with others. Imagine if your tree was networked with more “pearls,” you could guide other team members to it and allow them to access your data.

Curated.by works differently but has the same benefit to the research-oriented user. The site lets you “collect and organize topics based on content (including media, links, tweets) into bundles.” Each bundled is defined by a keyword, like “marketing” or “social media.”

The site is as personalized (work alone or with a team) and as broad (either way, see what other people are sourcing) as you’d like it to be. A standard curated.by user homepage gives you a good idea of how the website functions. You can source topics by either searching for bundles, see a newsfeed of what like-minded people are stumbling across, and you can browse through popular topics based on your interests.

Some people are saying Curated.by is a lot like Delicious, but Delicious is a sunken ship, albeit one of the pioneers of content curating. Still, it wasn’t adaptive nor did it evolve in the way that curated.by has to offer its growing user group a way to engage with both content and users.

Content curation is the new trend in web and information analysis, and especially content marketing. Just like any other platform, its use can be tailored intelligently to meet your marketing needs. And just like any other good idea that pops up in the digital sphere, you can be sure that plenty of copycats pop up in its trail – some good, some useless.

Our journey in exploring content curation and its possible applications for your marketing goals is just about midway through. Stay tuned in the weeks ahead for a spotlight on the brightest stars in content curation and how you can use them to give your business a competitive edge in the upcoming new year.