Twitter histories of events are vanishing. Pearltrees with iPads – Learning Continuity By @kristenswanson | Information Services : Emerging Trends & Future… Content Curators Are The New Superheros Of The Web. Yesterday, the ever-churning machine that is the Internet pumped out more unfiltered digital data. Yesterday, 250 million photos were uploaded to Facebook, 864,000 hours of video were uploaded to YouTube, and 294 BILLION emails were sent. And that's not counting all the check-ins, friend requests, Yelp reviews and Amazon posts, and pins on Pintrest.
The volume of information being created is growing faster than your software is able to sort it out. As a result, you're often unable to determine the difference between a fake LinkedIn friend request, and a picture from your best friend in college of his new baby. Even with good metadata, it's still all "data"--whether raw unfiltered, or tagged and sourced, it's all treated like another input to your digital inbox.
What's happened is the web has gotten better at making data. In 2010 we frolicked, Googled, waded, and drowned in 1.2 zettabytes of digital bits and bytes. Which means it's time to enlist the web's secret power--humans. 1. How Long Customers Will Stay On Hold. How Geniuses Think Differently. SXSW blog, day three: Meet the curators. A TWEET that recently got quite a bit of traction (over 100 retweets), including among the SXSW audience, was this one: @robinsloan The way to cover big news in 2011 is not "here's what happened. " It's "here's how to follow the story" At one level, this comment just looks silly. The page at the Atlantic that it links to, which is a list of useful resources for following the Japan earthquake,doesn't "cover" the news.
The sources it links to do that. If nobody wrote "here's what happened", nobody would be able to say "here's how to follow the story". But the serious point is that "aggregation" or "curation" of other people's coverage is becoming recognised more and more as one of the indispensable elements of journalism. You might say that you don't need to be a journalist to cobble together a list of links.