Curators: who are they? Humans vs. automated search: Why people power is cool again. Pete Cashmore thinks human-powered decision-making may increase the quality of search results. Google is broken, say some technologists, and people-power is the best fixSpam is the big problem with Google search, critics sayOne expert proposes a human-powered solution, says "curation is the new search" Editor's note: Pete Cashmore is founder and CEO of Mashable, a popular blog about social media. He writes a weekly column about social networking and tech for CNN.com. (CNN) -- What's the best way to find great links on the web? This has been the perennial question online ever since Yahoo's human-organized directory of web links lost the battle to Google's automated crawlers.
What's the problem with Google search? This Google-fatigue began as early as December 2009, when venture capitalist Paul Kedrosky remarked that using Google to search for a new dishwasher delivered nothing but spam results. Others have come to the same conclusion. Online Content Curation: The Key To Building Visibility, Authority And Value. As you are increasingly submerged by an endless flood of information, online content curators may provide a new, valuable service to anyone looking for quality information online: a personalized, qualified selection of the best and most relevant content and resources on a very specific topic or theme. Curated in real-time. When I first wrote about this, six years ago, I called this type of work newsmastering and newsradars, but now that the real-time element has come into play, as much as social media, video, Twitter and other new content sources, the original idea of what a newsmaster / content curator is and what tools and features are really needed has certainly started to change.
Photo credit: Erkin Sahin Robert Scoble has recently posted on his blog a fascinating article entitled: Seven Needs of Real-Time Curators. But let's hit on the brakes for a minute and clearly point out what content curation is and why a "new media guide" like Scoble felt the need to make things clear. Humans vs machines: Aggregation vs curation. 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 So what is curation? Here is my definition: Curation is a person or persons, engaged in the act of choosing and presenting things related to a specific topic and context.
An example of curation: the San Francisco De Young museums is exhibiting post-impressionist masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay’s permanent collection. Aggregation is the collection of as many things that can be found related to a topic. - Pearltrees is dynamic. Silicon Valley Watcher - at the intersection of technology and media: Pearltrees Archives. "Is Online "Curation" the New "Aggregation"?" by PBS News Blog | PBS News Blog.
December 1, 2010 at 4:42 PM EST Is online "curation" the new "aggregation"? In Tuesday's , veteran media analyst Bob Garfield blogs about online curation as the source of much of the vital information he comes across (if one considers viral videos and political gaffes "vital information"). Bob writes: "The nearly infinite supply of content demands that we rely on others -- either the crowd as a whole, or tribes with which we identify, or individual experts we've come to trust... For backup, Bob quotes Magnify.net CEO Steven Rosenbaum: "Aggregation without curation is just a that seems related, but lacks a qualitative organization. " (Who didn't encounter the Dewey Decimal System as a kid and think, "Hey, that's some cool qualitative organization! "?) Curation isn't exactly a new concept -- though it's still unrecognizable by Microsoft spell-check.
Of course there's no bigger or more relied-upon curator than PBS. How do you assess the value of credible curation versus auto-aggregation? What is a Curator in Chief? Neil Sanderson is the Chief Curator at Eqentia--a software platform service that enables professional users and organizations to easily aggregate, curate and republish the news that's important to them. Eqentia's sites are both public and private--with some of the more public ones including Visability Marketing (visabilitymarketing.com) and Slices of Boulder (slicesofboulder.com) which is a local news website for Boulder, Colorado.
More than 50 of the portals can be found at portal.eqentia.com/channels. I asked Neil what a 'Chief Curator' does. "It's much like being an Editor, except that I do not commission original reporting or writing. " And while technology is critical for his job--the key component of curation is human--as Sanderson explains: "I provide human curation of our customers' portals during the final stages of development when we are optimizing the system and training our customers to take on the curation role themselves. "I can only see it growing in the next decade.