A few weeks back I had the opportunity to talk with Garrick Van Buren ^[1] – Founder of the Cullect ^[2] reader and pick his brain on social media, blogging, and Cullect.

Anyone that has spoken with Garrick will tell you: Garrick is passionate about what he does, a deep thinker, and an all around great guy. If I covered everything we talked about in just over an hour this would be a 12,000 word rollercoaster of a post. Instead, I’m going to focus on his reader software Cullect.

What is Cullect? ^[3] Cullect is a web based reader that pulls together all of your favorite sites in one place and ranks them on 14 attributes which he calls “gestures” to determine importance. Or as as Garrick calls it “Separating relevance from timeliness”. His theory is that people with many feeds are often overwhelmed and mark the unread feeds as “read” while with Cullect,although you can sort by most recent, the optimal ranking is by importance ^[4]. Also you can add Curators to your feed and they can tag and recommend posts and add other people’s reading lists to your reading lists, it’s sort of building an online library.

Who is Cullect best suited for? Web publishers and people that read a lot of web sites in any given day, but it’s also a great tool for those that want to share feeds.

The Details/How it works: The free membership comes with two reading lists which can each contain as many feeds as you’d like to add.  There’s a series of paid options ^[2] that allow you to do things like name your lists,have private reading lists, and increase the number of reading lists. As a bonus you can dedicate up to 50% of your subscription fee to whichever website you think is worthy. Talk about social media!

What is your favorite band/music site right now? JungleTrain.net, a 24/7 drum and bass radio station.

In summary: if you’re a online publisher it’s time to ditch that Google Reader and switch to the most important reader, Cullect. If you’re looking for some good Bass/Drum music Jungle Train is for you, if you want to talk the future of social media, good beer, great coffee, and software; Garrick Van Buren is a conversationalist extraordinaire.

Many thanks to Garrick for the interview and keep up the great work; you’re a credit to our fine state.

Related: 
Here’s my Cullect feed ^[5]
Cullect Wiki ^[6]
Cullect big rules ^[7]
Culld.us ^[8] 
MinnPost.com’s Branded URL Shortener Powered by Cullect ^[9]