List.ly co-founder Nick Kellet maintains that list making is universal. After all, Moses came down from the mountain with a list of fundamental laws, Don Giovanni kept a list of his amorous conquests, and a list of last-minute shopping items are often thrust into my hand on Saturday mornings.
List.ly allows users to easily add tweets, web pages, videos, and images to a list, which can further be added to by others, curated, and voted upon by others. A toolbar button is available for your web browser, enabling you to add items to lists while you browse the web. "Curation" was a buzz word only a year ago - yet it is still a key part of a marketing endeavor centered around the creation of valuable content.
The kicker for me is that I can easily embed a list into my own website easily, and unlike other curation tools, in HTML format as opposed to javascript or iFrame. This means that I'll receive the SEO juice of the additional content on my website. Once this content is embedded into a blog post, users can interact with that content - adding items to the list, or even voting on the relative merits of your ideas.
Whenever you curate content using List.ly or one of the other curation tools, you have the opportunity to reach out to people to let them know that they've been included on the list, or to others with an invitation for their ideas. The list can be kept going for an extended period of time, too, meaning that it can be a basis for ongoing engagement.