Curation is becoming the next hot buzzword online, which isn’t terribly surprising. Thanks to the internet’s low barrier to entry, we’re faced with a need to curate the biggest (and fastest growing) storehouse of information we’ve built since people started grunting at each other. Fortunately, some of this rapidly accumulating information actually is useful.
For all we know, cave paintings were meant to impart: “Tasty mammoths found here. Approach with caution. Bring big rocks and sharp arrows.” That’s curation — gathering information (based on education and experience), filtering it to surface the useful parts, and presenting it in a clear, organized format.
Curation has been a fundamental part of human communication since the global population numbered two people. As soon as there’s more information out there than one person can remember, we need curation. And, as importantly, we like doing it. People get a lot of satisfaction from sharing what they know. (Plus it has traditionally been very helpful with that whole “survival of the species” thing…)
We also tend to gravitate toward other people rather than just black and white data when there’s information we need. Certainly a quick Google search or peek at Wikipedia can answer most basic questions, but when we need deeper or more nuanced information, or recommendations from credible sources, we tend to approach it from the angle of “Who knows this?” Fortunately for those of us in need of information, a lot of those resource people are easily accessible via the web and have their useful information (curated by them) available there.
Steve Rosenbaum recently published an excellent article: Can ‘Curation’ Save Media. His definition of media strongly leans toward mainstream media and corporate content. I’d have placed the quotation marks around ‘Save’ rather than ‘Curation’, since, while older forms of media are seriously struggling, media online doesn’t need saving. It continues to grow by leaps and bounds; it just needs to be harnessed and managed better. It needs curation.
Mr. Rosenbaum opens with:
There is a trend evolving at media companies both big and small that promises to have a remarkably positive impact on what you read, watch, and share on the web: Curation.
This is quite true, and extends beyond media companies. All kinds of companies, developers, and individuals (especially the AideRSS crew) are exploring ways to better manage the content we consume online. There’s just too much to keep up with, and people have become accustomed to extensive choice. We don’t read/watch/play just because it’s there anymore. We gravitate towards what interests and engages us, but often we need help finding out that that content exists, and where.
From a corporate perspective, Mr. Rosenbaum notes:
The old model was “one to many” (NBC -> viewers). The new model is “one to a few” (YOU -> your friends and followers). That means there is an overwhelming explosion of content being created (Twitter feeds, blog posts, Flickr photos, Facebook updates) and most of it is interesting to a very small number of people. But, mixed in with this cacophony of consumer content, there is contextually relevant material that needs to be discovered, sorted, and made “brand safe” for advertisers.
Curation is the new role of media professionals.
Professionally, many of us have ongoing monitoring and research responsibilities, which we need to keep abreast of to be effective at our jobs. We are also tasked with corporate curation — synthesizing and reporting on this information to management, teammates, and clients. Good curation certainly provides value, but also interestingly, is a way to build trust. As Mr. Rosenbaum explains:
Strangely enough, curation shifts the balance of power back to brands and publications. While anyone can make content, the decision to gather it, and present it by trusted content curators has more risk, and therefore more value.
Until now, however, the best we’ve been able to do is cobble together various tools to help us curate. Each tool provided some of what we need, but not all. The other issue we face is balancing tools with that aforementioned human input. “Just the facts” rarely gives us the whole picture or a sense of sufficiency in knowing both what we need to know and its relevant context. That is why I regularly hear from people who love using PostRank, but who are also concerned about missing the “hidden gems” out there.
As Mr. Rosenbaum elaborates from a journalistic standpoint:
Separating the wheat from the chaff, assigning editorial weight, and — most importantly – giving folks who don’t want to spend their lives looking for an editorial needle in a haystack a high-quality collection of content that is contextual and coherent. It’s what we always expected from our media, and now they’ve got the tools to do it better.
Yes, that’s right, the future of media is better, not worse. It’s more detailed, multi-faceted and nuanced. And, just more.
As any Twitter user can tell you, other people are the best curators of hidden gems — interesting articles, handy resources, especially droll lolcat pictures, you name it. Curation is a big part of Twitter, and the source of much of its value. Millions of people finding information that’s useful and interesting to them, reading and synthesizing it, and sharing it with those in their networks.
So really, the ideal tool would combine people and technology to streamline curation. Finding, organizing, and sharing the best content with technology’s precision and high-speed access to resources and and humans’ opinions and feel for nuance. And, of course, given the speed at which the online world moves, the content we curate would have to be constantly up to date, supplying the best results for right now.
Such a tool would be quite a Discovery, no? Something as valuable to the modern online citizen today as practical mammoth hunting instructions would have been 10000 years ago.
Stay tuned…