Social curation finds an audience: Pearltrees reaches 10M pageviews. With its slick visual interface for bookmarking content, Pearltrees is unique enough that I’ve been both impressed and slightly skeptical that a mass audience will actually use it.
But it looks like the site has found plenty of users. The French startup just announced that it crossed two big milestones in March: It has more than 100,000 users curating links, and it received more than 10 million pageviews. Not only does that show the concept is resonating, but it also suggests Pearltrees could reach the scale where it can build a real business around advertising or by offering premium accounts for publishers. Curation: Understanding the Social Fire Hose. As the tragic events of Oslo unfolded, so too did the importance of content curation in the social sphere.
Some interesting commentary on the reporting of the Oslo massacre by FastCompany further advances the vital role of content curators in piecing together time-lines of events as they actually unfold based on real-time tweets. Now this is nothing new. We know that social media channels, in particular Twitter, have been used for some time in contributing to ‘on the scene’ reporting by citizen journalist. It started to reach the attention of big media around the time of the student uprisings in Iran as a result of the government’s crackdown on media, and has continued ever since. The Mumbai terrorist attacks, the Arab Spring uprising and of course this latest tragedy are excellent examples of the role Twitter plays in journalism, and this type of reporting will continue to interact with mainstream reportage. Social content curation – a shift from the traditional.
The notion of content curation is one that has traditionally been associated with libraries, archivies, galleries, or organisations working with objects or data in some way.
For example, in the DCC Curation Lifecycle (UK) you will see a complex flow of the “appraise and select” activities which requires data managers to “evaluate data and select for long-term curation and preservation”. So ‘selection’ or ‘acquisition’ is then closely linked to a repository or institutional policy on collection development. Now the extraordinary thing is that the term ‘curation’ has become one of the latest buzz-words in the social online sphere, which has been transformed into an activity that is both about marketing and about organisation of the vast information flow that is delivered via social media.