Think about when disaster strikes. An earthquake. A tsunami. News and information online generally appear very quickly in a variety of ways - through Facebook, blogs, tweets, YouTube, news feeds and web sites. The result? Atomisation.

How users can go beyond these 'atoms' to build 'molecules' - information packages that have relevance, context, selectivity - is a question posed by Robert Scoble in his post The Seven Needs of Real-Time Curators.

In re-presenting information gathered online, Scoble argues people need tools to select, re-order, editorialise, bundle, distribute, update and track the audience of these information bundles, and also offer ways for audiences to add to bundles, comment on them, and so on.

Josh Stearns, another blogger, takes up these issues in The New Curators: Weaving Stories from the Social Web, and examines some tools, such as Storify, curators can use to try to achieve Scoble's aims.

As more and more information appears online, good tools to curate information emerging from disparate streams are obviously needed. See more tools.