Micro Persuasion: The Digital Curator in Your Future

untitled The Clip Report: An eBook on the Future of Media In the early 1990s when I began my career in PR there were clip reports. These were physical books that contained press clips. It seems downright archaic now but that’s how I learned about the press - by cutting, pasting up and photocopying clippings. My fascination with the media never abated. Today my role is to form insights into how the entire overlapped media landscape - the pros, social channels, and corporate content - is rapidly evolving and to help Edelman clients turn these learnings into actionable strategies. Today I am re-launching my Tumblr site with a new name, a new focus and a new format. It all kicks off today with a 15-page installment of The Clip Report.

The Content Strategist as Digital Curato The term “curate” is the interactive world’s new buzzword. During content creation and governance discussions, client pitches and creative brainstorms, I’ve watched this word gain traction at almost warp speed. As a transplant from museums and libraries into interactive media, I can’t help but ask what is it about this word that deserves redefinition for the web? Article Continues Below Curation has a distinguished history in cultural institutions. For a long time, we’ve considered digital objects such as articles, slideshows, and video to be short-lived. Consider some examples: NYTimes.com Topics employs content managers who sift through The Times’ archive to create new meaning by grouping articles and resources that were filed away (or distributed to library databases). More commercially, NBC Universal’s video site Hulu takes videos sourced from multiple networks and then rearranges them into collections that give a new perspective to the collection as a whole. What’s the payoff?

The End Of Hand Crafted Content Old media loves nothing quite so much as writing about their own impending death. And we always enjoy adding our own two cents – the AP not knowing what YouTube is, the NYTimes guys reading TechCrunch every day, etc. Speaking broadly, I like what Reuters, Rupert Murdoch and Eric Schmidt are saying: the industry is in crisis, and the daring innovators will prevail. Personally, I still think the best way forward for the best journalists, if not the brands they currently work for, is to leave those brands and do their own thing. But as one of the innovators in the last go round, I think there’s a much bigger problem lurking on the horizon than a bunch of blogs and aggregators disrupting old media business models that needed disrupting anyway. The rise of fast food content is upon us, and it’s going to get ugly. Old media frets over blogs and aggregators that summarize content and link back to the original source. But even then, companies like ours can find a way to compete.

Search and the social graph cdixon.org – chris dixon's blog Google has created a multibillion-dollar economy based on keywords. We use keywords to find things and advertisers use keywords to find customers. As Michael Arrington points out, this is leading to increasing amounts of low quality, keyword-stuffed content. The end result is a very spammy internet. (It was depressing to see Tim Armstrong cite Demand Media, a giant domain-name owner and robotic content factory, as a model for the new AOL.) Some people hope the social web — link sharing via Twitter, Facebook etc — will save us. On Twitter you have to ‘game’ people, not algorithms. These are both sound points. Searches related to news, blog posts, funny videos, etc. are mostly a loss leaders for Google. This is not to say that the links shared on social networks can’t be extremely valuable.

Des "commissaires d'exposition" du web pour organiser l'informat Internet est un gigantesque musée, mais il faut accrocher les tableaux soi-même. Une nouvelle fonction est en train d'émerger, pour palier ce problème: on les appelle "digital curator", "content curator", ils sont l'équivalent d'un commissaire d'exposition dans le domaine de l'art et des musées. Sur Internet, il y a du contenu, toujours plus de contenu. Des textes, des vidéos, des images, du son. On peut faire un parallèle avec le monde des musées. Un musée, c'est un ensemble d'objets d'arts, accumulés au fil du temps, et réunis en un lieu. Ils réunissent tous ces objets en sous ensembles cohérents: des collections, des expositions temporaires, etc. Les sites Internet sont devenus tellement touffus, avec une telle masse de contenu, qu'il est nécessaire d'organiser ce contenu. Voici quelques exemple de sites web dans lesquels le contenu est traité à la façon d'une exposition, par des "curators": New York Times Topics: Listes Twitter: Blog: Pearltrees: Netvibes (pages publiques):

Content & Curation: An Epic Poem : Incisive.nu If you follow the discussion about content strategy and new-school publishing, you’ve probably seen at least a piece of the “content curation” tussle that’s been heating up on the web. Here’s the 30-second version: NEWSPAPERS: “The youngs say they’re curating things, even though they do not work in museums.” SOCIAL MEDIA/CONTENT MARKETING PEOPLE: “Content curation is the new old newness. You must pure-play some content curation to leverage your thought leadership. It has good info-molecule and is lemon lemon easy thing. NEWSPAPERS: “THIS will save newspapers. CONTENT STRATEGY PEOPLE: “So, you know, this ‘content curation’ thing with the content is sort of what we already do. EDITORS: “Wait, isn’t that just—? 10,000 BLOGGERS: “Controversy! Names were called. Since I blog in geological time, I went off to the woods and wrote a five-part series on content curation, which I’ll post every business day or so for a week starting on Monday morning. Edited to add: links! Apéritifs

Blogueur, curator et barde Un blogueur, c’est deux choses: un curator et un barde. C’est quelqu’un qui choisi du contenu, le réordonne à sa guise et le diffuse par tous les moyens appropriés, pas seulement son blog: c’est un curator, autrement dit un commissaire d’exposition. C’est aussi un être inspiré, qui exprime avec sa voix personnelle les mythes de notre société moderne: c’est un barde, ou plutôt un héritier des bardes, ces poètes de l’antiquité celte. Sa fonction, presque sacrée, remonte à l’origine des temps. Encore une enquête au titre alarmiste: « Les blogs ont-ils un avenir? Et le lecteur de se demander: « Et si c’était vrai? En fait, quand on parcourt cet article, on apprend qu’il n’y a jamais eu autant de blogs. Et les réseaux sociaux? « Opposer les blogs, Twitter et Facebook n’a pas de sens », estime Julien Braun. S’il reste un doute, dans cette étude, c’est en ce qui concerne le mot « blog » en lui-même. Le blogueur est un « digital curator » Le mot « curator » vient du monde de l’art.