SocialCuration
But until now, there was no automated guidance for art lovers seeking discoveries online — no “If you like Jackson Pollock’s ‘No. 1,’ you may also enjoy Mark Rothko’s ‘No. 18.’ ” Enter Art.sy , a start-up whose public version went live on Monday. An extensive free repository of fine-art images and an online art appreciation guide, it is predicated on the idea that audiences comfortable with image-driven Web sites like Tumblr and Pinterest are now primed to spend hours browsing through canvases and sculpture on their monitors and tablets, especially with one-click help. After two years of private testing and with millions of dollars from investors, including some celebrities in the art and technology worlds, the site aims to do for visual art what Pandora did for music and Netflix for film: become a source of discovery, pleasure and education.
Art.sy Is Mapping the World of Art on the Web
Every day, thousands of stylish women upload pictures of their outfits, their hair, their nails — essentially, expressions of their style — to personal blogs. Those images are viewed, collected and spread across aggregation sites like Pinterest, Tumblr and Lookbook.nu — and soon, on the website of Lucky magazine. The Conde Nast-title is planning to launch a vertical powered by user-generated content in mid-August.
'Lucky' Mag Plans User-Generated Section
Government Unveils First Map Of All The Germs In The Human Body
From the journal Nature, a map of the human body's microbes Today, in two of the world’s top medical journals, scientists are publishing the results of a $173 million government-funded project to sequence the vast bulk of bacteria, fungi, and viruses in and on the human body. The results might at first seem anticlimactic. There’s no news about which germs cause or prevent disease, or even a clear message about how they make people different from one another. What we know is there are a lot of them. We have ten times as many microbial cells in our body as human ones, and though they are tiny, that still means that a 200-pound man is carrying two to six pounds of microbes, mostly bacteria.
There are still a lot of elbows being thrown in the squabble about “creation” versus “curation,” and it seems to be getting worse. As humans tend to do, we’re talking past each other and pretending to simplicity in the face of the complex and the weird. Here’s what I think is going on. I think we’re getting tripped up by two things: clumsy language and a misapprehension about competition for limited resources. Earlier this spring, two well-known bloggers—Maria Popova of Brainpickings and Tina Roth-Eisenberg of Swissmiss —introduced the Curator’s Code , a proposed convention for attributing credit to bloggers and other link-finders. The initial discussion that followed mostly skipped over rational critique and went straight for sneering and overheated bluster : it was, apparently, intolerable cheek for these “self-proclaimed curators” to want their efforts as digital gravediggers to be recognized when others passed their work along.
Bloggers and Bowerbirds - Incisive.nu
In today’s noisy, overpopulated world, we often talk about the art of curation in terms of the process of selection, narrowing down and choosing objects fit for presentation. When we think of curators we think of gallery owners, DJs, Michelin starred chefs and boutique clothing stores. Curiously, the word curate stems from the Latin “crtus” meaning spiritual change and refers to a cleric, especially one who has charge of a parish. The word has traveled quite a long ways since its original meaning, but those who consider curation a primary focus of their job can relate to its commanding origins. To learn more about the importance of curation in today’s fashion industry, we spoke to 5 American girls who run 3 emerging fashions startups in New York City and Los Angeles.
Crazy about Curation: 5 American Girls, 3 Fashion Startups
"Our users are early adopters, the kind of individuals that have to be the first to know.. Our users are the type who love to share that information with people; they’re evangelizers." Sounds like human nature in a nutshell. This is a basis for the importance of curation. Great Call! by Oct 25
What We Talk About When We Talk About "Curation"
by Maria Popova On creative restlessness, the art of context, and the contagion of intellectual curiosity. First things first — “curation” is a terrible term. It has been used so frivolously and applied so indiscriminately that it’s become vacant of meaning. But I firmly believe that the ethos at its core — a drive to find the interesting, meaningful, and relevant amidst the vast maze of overabundant information, creating a framework for what matters in the world and why — is an increasingly valuable form of creative and intellectual labor, a form of authorship that warrants thought . My friends at Percolate and m ss ng p eces ( ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ), who share that belief, produced this fantastic short film on what “curation” really means, in which I was humbled and honored to join far worthier minds like my wonderful studiomate Tina Roth Eisenberg of Swiss Miss , the inimitable Edith Zimmerman of The Hairpin , Peter Hopkins of Big Think , Anthony de Rosa of Soup Soup , and more.
1940 US Census becoming fully searchable online through volunteer effort
Today the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) released images of the 1940 Census, and a project is already underway to ensure that the information becomes easily available to anyone who wants to know a bit more about the Great Depression. The NARA has teamed up with leading genealogy groups like Archives.com, FindMyPast.com, and FamilySearch.org to create what's being described as a "high quality, searchable database" of the more than one million pages contained in the Census. You can already browse through the Census images , but the process is cumbersome — for instance, you can't search by a person's name, but instead can only browse by location or enumeration district.
Steven Rosenbaum is the CEO of Magnify.net , a real-time video curation engine for publishers, brands, and websites. He's also the author of Curation Nation . You've heard the buzz word — curation — being thrown around like it's a gadget we all know how to work. In reality, good content curation isn't as simple as pushing a share button. It's actually a combination of finding great content and following some simple best practices on how to successfully share that content.
5 Tips for Great Content Curation
This post is part of “How We Will Read,” an interview series exploring the future of books from the perspectives of publishers, writers, and intellectuals. Read our kickoff post with Steven Johnson here . And check out our new homepage , a captivating new way to explore Findings . This week we were extraordinarily lucky to get some of the precious time of Maria Popova , the Internet’s most awesome curator.
- How We Will Read: Maria Popova
The Verge interview: David Carr on curation, crowdsourcing, and the future of journalism
207 in Share Jump To Close David Carr has written about media for over 25 years, from his early days in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to Washington, D.C., to his current post at The New York Times , where he’s been for almost a decade. His weekly column, "The Media Equation," covers all aspects of journalism and culture, especially the always-evolving world of online news; his recent work has questioned the rise of Twitter activism, investigated the failure of Tribune media, and mused on Louis C.K.'
How to Make Images Stand Out on Pinterest [INFOGRAPHIC]
Do you want your Pinterest images to stand out and get repinned? With more than 12 million users posting pictures to the image-based social network, it's important to make sure images grab the attention of fellow Pinterest users. A properly optimized pin can make all the difference between 50 repins or no repins. This infographic from Pinnable Business gives you information to optimize every pin you post — it includes best practices for sizing, linking, sharing and repinning. Give these tips a try and let us know if they make a difference on your Pinterest boards.[Infographic]: Check Out This Flow Chart to See if Your Business Belongs on Pinterest
By now you probably know that Pinterest is one of the fastest-growing social communities around. Aside from sharing those cute cat pix, it can also be an attractive proposition for small businesses who want to get the word out about their products, particularly very visually-arresting ones. How do you know if Pinterest is right for your business? The folks at Intuit put together this flowchart. I liked the no-nonsense decision points represented here, and in general agree with their recommendations.For some time now, the hot new buzzword for Web services has been “curation.” Whether it’s Pinterest or Tumblr or Flipboard or News.me, everyone wants to ride the curation wave . What does it mean and how do you do it properly? And what makes it different from aggregation?