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Media Curation Is Now Consumer-Generated

Media Curation Is Now Consumer-Generated

Can 'Curation' Save Media? ‘Controlled Serendipity’ Liberates the Web - Bits Blog - NYTimes twitter.com/nickbiltonAtul Arora’s Twitter stream shows a constant flow of breaking technology news links. When I finish writing this blog post, I will Tweet it. I will copy this link, go to my Twitter account and spend a minute writing an abbreviated (yet hopefully catchy) description of this piece. And I’ll follow the same actions on Facebook and other social networks. Then off I go to scour the Web looking for more news to sift through and ration out to my friends and followers — a natural course of action in my day. I spend a considerable amount of time each day looking for interesting angles about technology, news, journalism, design or just the latest comic video to pass along the daisy chain. Most of us do this to some degree. More important, I couldn’t conceive of a world of news and information without the aid of others helping me find the relevant links. Mrs. Sharing has become a reflex action when people find an interesting video, link or story. We are all human aggregators now.

Why Social Beats Search That's a controversial post headline and I don't mean that social will always beat search, but there's a rising chorus out there about "content farms" and search optimized content creation that is worth touching on. Arrington started it when he posted about "the end of hand crafted content". Richard MacManus penned a similar post the same day called "Content Farms: Why Media, Blogs, and Google should be worried". And over the weekend, Paul Kedrosky addressed the issue of search spam in his quest to find the perfect dishwasher. When a web service like Google controls a huge amount of web traffic (>50% for many sites), it's going to get spammed up. Google has thousands of employees working to combat that spam. What's worse, and what Mike and Richard are talking about, is the act of search engine driven content creation. I left this comment at the end of a very long comment thread on Arrington's post: The Internet is a massive content creation machine.

Content Farms: Why Media, Blogs & Google Should Be Worried I've been writing a lot about so-called 'content farms' in recent months - companies like Demand Media and Answers.com which create thousands of pieces of content per day and are making a big impact on the Web. Both of those two companies are now firmly inside the top 20 Web properties in the U.S., on a par with the likes of Apple and AOL. Big media, blogs and Google are all beginning to take notice. Chris Ahearn, President of Media at Thomson Reuters, recently published an article on how journalism can survive in the Internet age. I started my analysis of Demand Media in this August post. In November I explored more about how Demand Media produces 4,000 pieces of content a day, based on an interview I did with the founders in September. Low Quality, High Impact The bottom line is that the quality of content produced by these 'content farms' is dubious, which has an impact on both publishers and readers. Can Quality Survive? Google Needs to Wake Up and Smell the Coffee See also:

Content farms v. curating farmers Tweet: Content farms v curating farmers: Deeper insights in Demand Media’s model & finding opportunity in finding quality. I spent an hour on the phone the other day with Steven Kydd, exec VP of Demand Studios, to understand their model—using algorithms to assign content creation based on search and advertising demand and to minimize cost and maximize revenue—because I wanted to learn a deeper layer of lessons than I think we’re hearing in the discussion of Demand’s allegedly evil genius. The talk thus far misses their key insight and the opportunities they create. Much of what I see online is fear that Demand Media—with the slightly rechristened “Aol.” following fast behind—will cheapen content and flood the internet—that is, search results—with crap that’s just good enough to fool algorithms. They may be right. This is why, when I proposed an X prize to solve media’s key problems at Yale symposium, Clay Shirky responded with a call for work on what he called “algorithmic authority.”

Needs of Curators I keep hearing people throw around the word “curation” at various conferences, most recently at SXSW. The thing is most of the time when I dig into what they are saying they usually have no clue about what curation really is or how it could be applied to the real-time world. So, over the past few months I’ve been talking to tons of entrepreneurs about the tools that curators actually need and I’ve identified seven things. First, who does curation? Bloggers, of course, but blogging is curation for Web 1.0. But NONE of the real time tools/systems like Google Buzz, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, give curators the tools that they need to do their work efficiently. As you read these things they were ordered (curated) in this order for a reason. This is a guide for how we can build “info molecules” that have a lot more value than the atomic world we live in now. A curator is an information chemist. So, what are the seven needs of real time curators? 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 1. 1.

World's Biggest Blogging Platform Adds Curation Feature WordPress, the biggest blog software platform on the Web, has added a "reblogging" curation feature much like the smaller innovative service Tumblr has offered for years. It's another chapter in the race to decrease friction in sharing your favorite Web content with friends. If the previous era of innovation on the Web was fundamentally characterized by the democratization of publishing and content creation, the next era may be based on finding solutions for building value on top of all that newly published data. Much of that value capture will be performed by machines, but tools for humans could be a game changer as well. As we wrote yesterday, Google VP Marissa Mayer says the average person uploaded 15 times more data in 2009 than they did just three years ago. The gap between the value that's made possible by all this data, and the power of the tools available to consumers to capture it, is so great that it simply must be filled. Can Curation Catch On? What do you think?

The iPad in the Eyes of the Digerati - Room for Debate Blog - NY Spencer Platt/Getty Images Apple said it sold more than 300,000 iPads on Saturday, the device’s first day on the market. Apple iPad users downloaded more than one million apps from the company’s App Store and more than 250,000 electronic books from the iBookstore. Some reviewers said the iPad could challenge the primacy of the laptop. Does the iPad offer designers and users a new medium, or is it merely an iPod Touch on steroids? Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly MediaDavid Gelernter, computer scientistLiza Daly, software engineerCraig Mod, programmer and designerSam Kaplan, iPad app creatorEmily Chang and Max Kiesler, designers and Web consultants The End of the PC Era Tim O’Reilly is the founder of O’Reilly Media, computer book publisher, conference producer and technology activist. If you’re old enough to remember the original 128K Macintosh, underpowered, not expandable, and soon-to-be obsolete, you know that the iPad doesn’t need to be perfect to be the harbinger of a revolution. Accept it.

Hi Tom - you're into curation, so you are included in our conversation about it. My interest as an Educator is in the curation of resources as an alternative to traditional content creation for units of study.There is however, something more profound happening - with the combination of a relational Web and discretionary curation, we get surprising emergence. For instance, from one NASA astronaut we can instantly relate to 61 atstronauts who have been in space; but a curatorial positioning of this group into those who saw UFOs and those that didn't adds a lot of spice to the information. by pauljacobson Mar 5

Paul:
I have three words for this pearl: Learn, Like and Share.
Later I will had more details. Thanks.. by multicoaching Mar 4

Thanks for this site. As an educator, content creation is prohibitively expensive and starts to become obsolete as soon as it's published. The curation process is a definite solution (and resources are so easy to find). Learning takes on a research pattern that may be daunting to students who expect rote learning; but is now necessary in a world of emergent complexity. by pauljacobson Mar 3

Curation, whether accidental or intentional, is rapidly becoming the future of media and publishing. by nicolas Mar 6

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