News curation: finally, social media's killer app? FORTUNE -- Even the most casual social network user will admit that the Facebook or Twitter experience can be overwhelming -- that merciless stream of status updates and shared content, which sometimes feels less like a stream and more like a deluge, waits for no man, woman, or Web crawler. Of course, there's good reason to feel that way: Facebookers share 30-billion plus pieces of information each month, and Twitter users output 1 billion tweets weekly. There's a tremendous amount of digital information floating around and few great solutions for filtering it, making sense of it, and consuming it. That's changing. They all work differently. "One of the biggest challenges is how do you make that content more easily discoverable, easily consumable, easily digestible," says Flipboard CEO Mike McCue. That same concept is at the core of the Twitter-focused start-up Sulia. Instead, McCue argues that better content curation should come without what he views as superfluous user input.
Is This the World’s Best Twitter Account? Yesterday morning NPR’s Andy Carvin took a break from running one of the world’s best Twitter accounts to explain what it’s like to be a living, breathing real-time verification system. “All of this is more art than science,” he said. In truth, it sounds equal parts exhilarating and exhausting. As has been repeatedly detailed in other places, Carvin is the NPR senior strategist who transformed his Twitter feed into a must-read newswire about the changes taking place in the Arab world. Carvin sends hundreds of tweets a day that, taken together, paint a real-time picture of events, opinions, controversies, and rumors relates to events in the Middle East. There are few established rules or journalistic policies for what he does. Yet, when following his work on Twitter, Carvin seems in total control of the onslaught of information. Prodding his followers to help him understand the context of a video: Sharing information while noting its unconfirmed status:
Can 'Curation' Save Media? First Meeting Of SFCurators Salon... Posted by Tom Foremski - April 15, 2011 Last Thursday was the inaugural meeting of SFCurators Salon in North Beach and I couldn't be more happier about the turnout (see below). I set up the group with my colleague Oliver Starr as a place where like-minded people could discuss the topic of curation, which has become a hot topic this year as search falters, and as curation tools and services come out of beta and into more mainstream use. (Please see: Pearltrees Reaches Key Milestones: Largest Curation Community - SVW) The meeting was held in Specs', a bar that happens to also be a funky museum. The location in North Beach, just across the street from City Lights Bookstore and Vesuvio, always conjures up for me the great intellectual and literary traditions of the area. This was the stomping ground for the Beatnicks, and some myths even locate the origin of the name to Specs'. I liked the format: instead of listening to a guest speaker we got to listen to each other. Here are my co-founders:
Tweet First, Verify Later? Real-time web, Social Media Curation and Verification « nicoblog maggio 5, 2011 alle 1:28 pm | Pubblicato su Il nuovo mondo | 11 commenti Here it is the research project I’ve worked on during my fellowship at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism in Oxford Download PDF Summary by RISJ Nicola Bruno, an Italian journalist specialising in digital media and technology and its effect on journalism, has written a fascinating research paper on how mainstream media used social media in the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake in January 2010. How is the Twitter effect changing the coverage of crisis events around the world? Nicola focuses his attention on the online coverage of the Haiti Earthquake in three mainstream online media outlets: bbc.com, Guardian.co.uk, and cnn.com. Mi piace: Mi piace Caricamento...
The Role Of Curation In Journalism Jay Rosen points us to an article out of France that takes a stab at presenting what a modern internet-era newsroom should look like. The point that I find most interesting, that helped clarify a few different ideas for me, is that it splits "journalism" into three distinct categories, all of which have a role in the newsroom: Reporters -- who go out and do first person reporting -- creating original stories, not just reposting rewritten wire copy. Columnists -- who "start conversations and give stories another perspective." Unfortunately, for the most part, newspapers seem to look down on "curating" as if it's some sort of lesser form of journalism, and this is a sticking point that they're going to need to get past if they want to understand how people engage with the news today.
Say hello to Encyclo, our new encyclopedia of the future of news Today, the Nieman Journalism Lab unveils Encyclo, an encyclopedia of the future of news. We’ve put a lot of work into it, and I hope you’ll check it out. So what is Encyclo? It’s an attempt to figure out who the most important players and innovators are in the evolution of journalism — and to provide a centralized source for background, context, and the latest news about them. As of this writing, Encyclo is 184 entries on online news sites, newspapers, magazines, broadcast networks, technology companies, and more. If you’re a regular Lab reader (or if you follow us on Twitter), you know that every day we’re producing reporting, analysis, and commentary on how the world of journalism is changing. But our main work emphasizes new developments and the latest news. Anatomy of an entry For each entry, you’ll find the following: — A narrative entry that explains what this organization does and why they’re important. — A collection of key links about the subject, from around the web. Thank yous
Consuming News in the Age of Curation There is a lot of noise online at the moment and finding good content is tough. We all have about 3 or 4 sites where we stop to reade news and entertainment every day but increasingly our media consumption is coming to us via curated sources like our own personal networks. There has been a huge shift from the old model where “gatekeepers” dictated what content we consumed and how we accessed it a new model in which curation plays the primary roll. Caught in the cross hairs are the old media institutions, but as consumers we are winning because not only do we have access to larger amounts of content in real time but the smart people are curating it through a variety of sources to match their needs and they are doing so largely for free. So what role is curation playing and what are the implications for the media world at large? Tastemakers Professional Curators Crowd Curation Good Journalists Need To Be Paid What Is The Future Of Curation?
The article as luxury or byproduct A few episodes in news make me think of the article not as the goal of journalism but as a value-added luxury or as a byproduct of the process. * See the amazing Brian Stelter covering the Joplin tornado and begging his desk at The Times to turn his tweets into a story because he had neither the connectivity nor the time to do it in the field and, besides, he was too busy doing something more precious: reporting. (It’s a great post, a look at a journalist remaking his craft. Highly recommended for journalists and journalism students particularly.) * In Canada’s recent election, Postmedia (where—disclosure—I am an advisor) had its reporters on the bus do nothing but reporting, putting up posts and photos and videos and snippets as they went, keeping coverage going all day, maximizing their value in the field. * At South by Southwest, the Guardian’s folks talked about their steller live-blogging. * Of course, I need to point to Andy Carvin’s tweeting and retweeting of the Arab Spring.
Maria Popova: In a new world of informational abundance, content curation is a new kind of authorship Editor’s Note: Maria Popova is the editor of Brain Pickings, a curation of “cross-disciplinary interestingness” that scours the world of the web and beyond for share-worthy tidbits. Here, she considers how new approaches to curation are changing the way we consume and share information. Last week, Megan Garber wrote an excellent piece on whether Twitter is speech or text. Yet despite a number of insightful and timely points, I’d argue there is a fundamental flaw with the very dichotomy of the question. I, of course, make no claim to using Twitter as it “should” be used. Twitter as discovery Like any appropriated buzzword, the term “curation” has become nearly vacant of meaning. When it comes to this curatorial, directional model of Twitter as a discovery mechanism, applying the conventions of speech or text to it is largely moot. And lest we forget, text itself is an invention, a technology. Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows is the contemporary equivalent of these Socratic fears.