Inside Top TellMe Engineer's New Startup SnipIt. What do you do after you travel across the world to help build a big enterprise, tech-heavy, company that gets acquired by Microsoft for $800 million? If you're Egyptian former TellMe senior engineer Ramy Adeeb, apparently you start a new social bookmarking service. Social bookmarking or curation is a long-saturated market, but the New Delicious and several other companies are making a big go at it again. Someday, somebody is going to nail it. Probably more than one somebody. Adeeb's new startup Snip.it is a service aimed at that market. Ramy Adeeb was a teenage tech prodigy in Egypt in the 1990's, then came to Harvard to study Computer Science.
He stayed at Microsoft for less than a year, then got an MBA from Stanford and then joined leading Venture Capital firm Khosla Ventures as a Principal. Snip.it is all about saving collections of links: for yourself or to share with others.
3 Reasons Curation is Here to Stay. Perhaps you won't believe me since it's my job to spread the gospel of curation as the Chief Evangelist of Pearltrees, but I think curation is here to stay. These are the reasons why I believe this is the case. This year there has been a tremendous amount of buzz in Silicon Valley about curation. Magnify.net CEO Steven Rosenbaum recently published a book, Curation Nation that has sparked a tremendous amount of conversation on the topic. Likewise a post by Brian Solis has been retweeted thousands of times. Oliver Starr is the Chief Evangelist for Pearltrees. With all the attention curation has suddenly received, people are probably wondering if this is just another fad or is it something bigger?
First, curation is one of the underlying principles of the Web. Allow anyone to access any type of documentAllow everyone to disseminate his or her own documentsAllow everyone to organize the entire collection of documents The graphic above illustrates this process of democratization. Blog. DST’s Milner: Founders’ Exit Is Cue For Investors’ Exit - Venture Capital Dispatch. Why Content Curation Is Here To Stay | brandpilgrim. In a labyrinth of content, consumers have always looked to opinion leaders who could edit content for them and direct them towards relevant information. Oprah‘s book club moved masses of people towards her recommended list of books and authors. The web is facing the very same crisis today. A plethora of information that is strenuous to navigate through, we rely on peers and opinion leaders to direct us to safe ports, where we can find the supplies that we seek. In every market research that I have conducted, recommendation by peers is the single largest influencing factor.
These would be relatives, neighbours, colleagues, even the odd celebrity endorser. I believe the definition of ‘peer’ has changed drastically. This is the environment that has made space for the Content Curator. Conventionally, a search would be performed in a search engine like Google. On the other hand, a content curator collects the best of information and showcases it at a single place.
Google Says That Employees Change Search Rankings. Posted by Tom Foremski - July 13, 2010 Richard Waters in an article at FT.com (Subscription required): Groups magnify chances of Google hits Companies with a high page rank are in a strong position to move into new markets. By "pointing" to this new information from their existing sites they can pass on some of their existing search engine aura, guaranteeing them more prominence.
This helps companies such as AOL and Yahoo as they move into the low-cost content business, says Mr Bonnie. "They can use their Google page rank to make sure their content floats to the top," he says. I've known about this for several years but wasn't able to get anyone from Google on the record. This admission is potentially a very large problem for Google because it has maintained that its index rankings are unbiased and are computed from a natural pecking order derived from how other sites find a specific site important. Google is currently being sued by several companies claiming bias in Google results. World's Biggest Blogging Platform Adds Curation Feature. WordPress, the biggest blog software platform on the Web, has added a "reblogging" curation feature much like the smaller innovative service Tumblr has offered for years.
It's another chapter in the race to decrease friction in sharing your favorite Web content with friends. If the previous era of innovation on the Web was fundamentally characterized by the democratization of publishing and content creation, the next era may be based on finding solutions for building value on top of all that newly published data. Much of that value capture will be performed by machines, but tools for humans could be a game changer as well. As we wrote yesterday, Google VP Marissa Mayer says the average person uploaded 15 times more data in 2009 than they did just three years ago. Much of the innovation built on top of that explosion of data will be driven by machines, but not all of it.
Can Curation Catch On? Will curation truly become a substantial market, capable of sustaining itself? What do you think? Why I have faved 18,456 Tweets (why Twitter is dominant in tech. In just the past year I’ve clicked to fave 18,456 Tweets. It’s a stunning number, if you think about it, and I don’t know of any other tech blogger who has done more faves. What am I learning? Well, for one, there’s important stuff that gets written that doesn’t get on Techmeme. Yes, the important stuff does, like when a blogger for Gizmodo gets his house broken into by the cops. That’s big time on Techmeme, but page through my faves and you’ll find lots of other stuff that Techmeme doesn’t touch. Even for things that get on Techmeme, I’ve seen that stories break first on Twitter. But I’ve come to realize that curating great tech tweets is one thing I love to do and one way I can add a lot of value to the tech industry.
Tonight my boss, Rob La Gesse, agreed and — in a redesign of my blog that he worked on — we added a widget that displays my latest favorite Tweets on my blog. So, why do I fave tweets? 1. Anyway, I hope you all get some value out of my Twitter favorites. Why is that? Content farms v. curating farmers. Tweet: Content farms v curating farmers: Deeper insights in Demand Media’s model & finding opportunity in finding quality. I spent an hour on the phone the other day with Steven Kydd, exec VP of Demand Studios, to understand their model—using algorithms to assign content creation based on search and advertising demand and to minimize cost and maximize revenue—because I wanted to learn a deeper layer of lessons than I think we’re hearing in the discussion of Demand’s allegedly evil genius. The talk thus far misses their key insight and the opportunities they create. Much of what I see online is fear that Demand Media—with the slightly rechristened “Aol.” following fast behind—will cheapen content and flood the internet—that is, search results—with crap that’s just good enough to fool algorithms.
Some also fear that while putting content creators to work they will put better content creators out of work: the dreaded deprofessionalization and deflation of media. They may be right. Why Content Curation Is Here to Stay. Steve Rosenbaum is the CEO of Magnify.net, a video Curation and Publishing platform. Rosenbaum is a blogger, video maker and documentarian. You can follow him on Twitter @magnify and read more about Curation at CurationNation.org.
For website content publishers and content creators, there's a debate raging as to the rights and wrongs of curation. While content aggregation has been around for a while with sites using algorithms to find and link to content, the relatively new practice of editorial curation — human filtering and organizing — has created what I'm dubbing, "The Great Creationism Debate. " The debate pits creators against curators, asking big questions about the rules and ethical questions around content aggregation. In trying to understand the issue and the new emerging rules, I reached out to some of the experts who are weighing in on how curation could help creators and web users have a better online experience.
The Issues at Hand Who are curators? Where We Stand Now.
What is curation? Content Is No Longer King: Curation Is King.