Facebook and the Age of Curation Through Unsharing. Facebook’s Open Graph is ushering in a monumental shift in how we curate what we share. Curation used to mean opting in to sharing. You found or did something you thought your audience would care about, and you went to the trouble of sharing it. This worked when we didn’t have so much content at our finger tips, but as more news and media consumption moves online, the friction of constantly opting in exhausts us and we don’t bother to distribute what others might enjoy.
That’s why I believe we are entering the age of curation through unsharing, and it will force us to change. Some believe “frictionless sharing” via Open Graphs will be the death of curation. Users still expect to have to actively share something in order for it to reach their audience. I love listening to music and reading news, and I love helping my friends discover songs and articles. This granularity allows for more curation, not less. This isn’t natural. Google's Search Algorithm Has Been Ruined, Time To Move Back To Curation. 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 Neil went on to explain that his job has three main tasks; finding, managing filters, and providing human curation. So, what kind of background does it take to be a Curator in the new world?
Today--Sanderson says the man / machine mix is critical. Machines may evolve, but they'll never have a human sense of relevance. Curating the Content Overload. If I were a venture capitalist, I’d invest in applications and companies that attack the problem of curating content. Content used to be king. The best content attracted attention, consumption and dollars. The quality of your content determined your success. But today, our brains are in a state of constant cognitive overload.
Likewise, now that content creation and delivery systems like Blogger, Flickr or Wordpress are free, diverse and accessible, content creators find their videos, photos, writing and ideas lost in the content sea. The struggle to curate pervades our personal and professional lives. How do we sort it out? And how do we enable our colleagues to sort it out? As learning leaders in enterprise environments, we must push for the tools that strengthen our learners’ ability to curate their learning environment.
OpenSesame Has Your Tools for Curating eLearning Content OpenSesame gives you the tools to select the elearning content you need. Photo Credit: Paul Lowry on Flickr.