Content Is No Longer King: Curation Is King

Why Content Curation Is Here to Stay Steve Rosenbaum is the CEO of Magnify.net, a video Curation and Publishing platform. Rosenbaum is a blogger, video maker and documentarian. You can follow him on Twitter @magnify and read more about Curation at CurationNation.org. For website content publishers and content creators, there's a debate raging as to the rights and wrongs of curation. The debate pits creators against curators, asking big questions about the rules and ethical questions around content aggregation. In trying to understand the issue and the new emerging rules, I reached out to some of the experts who are weighing in on how curation could help creators and web users have a better online experience. The Issues at Hand Content aggregation (the automated gathering of links) can be seen on sites like Google News. But all that changes with curation — the act of human editors adding their work to the machines that gather, organize and filter content. Who are curators? Where We Stand Now

The Three C’s of Social Content: Consumption, Curation, Creation inShare180 Over the years, social networks have lured us from the confines of our existing realities into a new genre of digital domains that not only captivated us, but fostered the creation of new realities. As George Bernard Shaw observed, “Life is not about finding yourself, life is about creating yourself.” Such is true for social networks and the digital persona and resulting experiences we create and cultivate. On Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, et al., we were attracted by the promise of reigniting forgotten relationships and enamored by the sparking of new connections. With each new connection we wove, we were compelled to share details about ourselves that we might not have divulged in real life. Our concerns of privacy or the lack thereof, now require education. The Social Genome The activity that defines the social web is as diverse as the personalities of its inhabitants. Two and a half years ago, Forrester introduced Social Technographics. I call this “Social Graph Theory.”

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. Some also fear that while putting content creators to work they will put better content creators out of work: the dreaded deprofessionalization and deflation of media. They may be right.

To be or not to be a curator ? Brian Solis en parle dans son livre « Engage », en évoquant le compte Twitter de Google. Ce compte poursuit depuis sa création une stratégie de curation, avec 304 abonnements et 2,6 millions d’abonnés. Voici comment Brian Solis en parle : I recommend that companies use this (cf. curation) for information collected from customers and influencers, as well in order to truly curate the best, most helpful content from around the Web while building good will in the process. Curator, un mot valise, un buzzword ? Lorsque je pris connaissance de ce concept via la pyramide d’engagement d’Altimeter, j’avais des difficultés à cerner le périmètre du concept et de son champ d’application. La pyramide de la marque engagée, Altimeter La curation représente-t-elle le chant du cygne de l’agrégation ? Curator = courtier en information = maven En anglais, le curator est un conservateur de musée. Le curator filtre et in fine aide

Why I have faved 18,456 Tweets (why Twitter is dominant in tech In just the past year I’ve clicked to fave 18,456 Tweets. It’s a stunning number, if you think about it, and I don’t know of any other tech blogger who has done more faves. What am I learning? Well, for one, there’s important stuff that gets written that doesn’t get on Techmeme. Yes, the important stuff does, like when a blogger for Gizmodo gets his house broken into by the cops. That’s big time on Techmeme, but page through my faves and you’ll find lots of other stuff that Techmeme doesn’t touch. Even for things that get on Techmeme, I’ve seen that stories break first on Twitter. But I’ve come to realize that curating great tech tweets is one thing I love to do and one way I can add a lot of value to the tech industry. Tonight my boss, Rob La Gesse, agreed and — in a redesign of my blog that he worked on — we added a widget that displays my latest favorite Tweets on my blog. So, why do I fave tweets? 1. Anyway, I hope you all get some value out of my Twitter favorites. Why is that?

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. And while technology is critical for his job--the key component of curation is human--as Sanderson explains: "I provide human curation of our customers' portals during the final stages of development when we are optimizing the system and training our customers to take on the curation role themselves. 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.

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 Curation Economy and The 3C’s of Information Commerce Brian Solis inShare1 Several years ago I had the privilege of working with Steve Rosenbaum, author of Curation Nation. Back then Steve was already vested in the future of online curation and his grande conquête was playing out with Magnify.net, a realtime video curation network. At the time, he was also a staple at some of the tech industry’s most renown conferences sharing his vision for social, video, and curated content. As Steve was completing his new book, he asked if I would write the foreword. At the time I was finalizing the new version of Engage! I share this digital foreword with you here… The Curation Economy and The 3C’s of Information Commerce I always appreciate when a very complex and important subject is simplified to ease understanding. Forrester Research tracked how people adopt and use social technologies through its Technographics research. Creating original content, consistently over time, is daunting. The Rise of Short-form Content Creators Let me explain.

Google Says That Employees Change Search Rankings Posted by Tom Foremski - July 13, 2010 Richard Waters in an article at FT.com (Subscription required): Groups magnify chances of Google hits Companies with a high page rank are in a strong position to move into new markets. By "pointing" to this new information from their existing sites they can pass on some of their existing search engine aura, guaranteeing them more prominence. This helps companies such as AOL and Yahoo as they move into the low-cost content business, says Mr Bonnie. I've known about this for several years but wasn't able to get anyone from Google on the record. This admission is potentially a very large problem for Google because it has maintained that its index rankings are unbiased and are computed from a natural pecking order derived from how other sites find a specific site important. The Google algorithm is a mathematical expression drawing on the PageRank patented method (named after Larry Page, co-founder). It's a huge can of worms.

Why Content Curation is the new Blogging « (clicca qui per la traduzione in italiano) During these days I’m questioning myself about today’s online media industry recurring topic of discussion: the so-called content curation. The term itself can be identified with the concept of “caring about content.” This concept, obviously, can be investigated from a variety of viewpoints: it revolves around manipulating information, news, contents available online to a new form with sensibly higher ambitions in terms of vision, lifecycle and usefulness. It’s about producing contents that, on average, are well worth an enhanced amount of attention respect to the so-called “world buzz,” the avalanche of information micro-bits, we receive daily from the Internet through social media, blogs, online newspapers, and sometimes and unfortunately from content farms. On a more operational level, an interesting definition that you can find online follows (from here) Will this newsroom see his fate in an editorial room of a newspaper agency? Like this: