Curation versus aggregation represents human web versus machine web... Curation is becoming an increasingly important term and for good reason: the online world is increasingly messy, muddled and full of blind alleys.
Search used to be the best way to navigate online but today it is only one part of an Internet user's dashboard. Finding things is fine if you know what to look for, but search is increasingly less effective in judging the quality of links, or putting those links into a context. Blekko, the recently launched search engine tries to provide a context for search terms but it's still not curation but aggregation. Blog Archive ? The Web?s third frontier. Everyone realizes that the web is entering a new phase in its development.
One indication of this transition is the proliferation of attempts to explain the changes that are occurring. Functional explanations emphasize the real time web, collaborative systems and location-based services. Power Tools for Content Aggregation and Curation. Maybe you don't have the resources to develop a lot of content, or maybe you're a professional association that wants to serve its members better by being super helpful.
Add that there are many more content creators, inside and outside organizations, and you see how curating information as content strategy could be a very elegant option. Noting the evolution on the World Wide Web quickly to show you a pattern that went in lockstep with use. You had forums and discussion boards, many still very active, Web sites, then journals, which evolved into blogs with RSS (real simple syndication) capability to package and read feeds, social bookmarking and networks, and then media sites to upload and view videos, photographs, etc.