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. Old media frets over blogs and aggregators that summarize content and link back to the original source. For our part, we throw a party when someone “steals” our content and links back to us. But even then, companies like ours can find a way to compete.
Content Curation & Fair Use: 5 Rules to being an Ethical Content Curator
* Update: I have a much lengthier updated post that incorporates the material below: Content Curation: Copyright, Ethics, & Fair Use Recently, Kimberley Isbell of the Nieman Journalism Lab cited a Harvard Law report and published an extensive post on news aggregation and legal considerations. From a curation perspective, the whole article is interesting, but what was the most surprising was that her recommendations for being an ethical content aggregator, were the same as being an effective content curator. The five recommendations are below. 1. Marketing reason: The more you link to third parties, the more likely they are to link back to you – which ultimately improves your SEO. 2. Marketing reason: A good content curator is selective an only links to the most relevant content on a specific topic or issue. 3. Marketing reason: Demonstrating that you have curated content from a wide variety of sources, and content from some very reputable sources, makes you more credible as well. 4. 5.
Social content curation – a shift from the traditional |
The notion of content curation is one that has traditionally been associated with libraries, archivies, galleries, or organisations working with objects or data in some way. For example, in the DCC Curation Lifecycle (UK) you will see a complex flow of the “appraise and select” activities which requires data managers to “evaluate data and select for long-term curation and preservation”. So ‘selection’ or ‘acquisition’ is then closely linked to a repository or institutional policy on collection development. Now the extraordinary thing is that the term ‘curation’ has become one of the latest buzz-words in the social online sphere, which has been transformed into an activity that is both about marketing and about organisation of the vast information flow that is delivered via social media. Social networking has definitely provided us with main channels for information flow. It comes down to organizing your sources, knowing which of them are trust worthy, and seeing patterns.
New content and better access = content curation |
It seems that the latest buzzword around the web is ‘content curation’. There are literally millions of posts about this already, and new tools and new marketing strategies are being deployed to meet this new demand. Even the kids are curating, and in so doing are learning that Curation is the new search tool. Take a look at Content Curation, Social Media and Beyond. Content Curation: Definition and Generation, raises a few essential points: Finding the best content. Adding value. Crediting. So in a way, a content curator is continually asked to assume stewardship responsibility for digital content in ever increasing number, size, and diversity of type. Just as I rely on information discovery to push my own thinking, I also rely on content curators to add value and credibility to the information that they share with me. Content curation is part of an overall strategy to tame information chaos. In a socially connected world, it’s amazing what a difference a few months can make.
Don't just move the information, curate it! — The People Equation
I recently attended a local art competition called ArtPrize. The free event is billed as “radically open”, meaning any artist, venue and citizen can participate. The openness creates a pretty random experience: grab a map, walk around downtown and check out the art. The positive vibe was due to something else. My experience with this art venue had me wondering: does curation have a role in the workplace? Normally, we don’t think of the word “curator” and “workplace” in the same sentence. The word curator is derived from the Latin word cura meaning “care”. Now, you may be wondering, “Isn’t curating just a fancy term for filtering information?” Not exactly. Sharing. Filtering is a higher level of information transfer, where the person doing the filtering sorts the content a bit, paying attention to what parts should be left out. Curating. Thinking you might want to add “curator” to your skill set? Decide who needs to hear your message. Determine the best way to communicate.
Editors as Curators: What's Taking So Long?
These are tough times for editors. Senior editors are being forced to make deep, painful cuts in their newsrooms. Assignment editors are being phased out at some papers, seen as extraneous layers in the production process. Copy editors are seeing their jobs consolidated or even outsourced. And many reporters, by their nature, never had much use for editors of any stripe to begin with. But the news judgment skills of editors should be more valuable now than they've ever been before to newspapers and other news organizations. The buzzword for this is "curation," and that's a good way to think of it. The buzzword for that is "aggregation." On the Web, you're not limited only to the content you own. This sort of picking, choosing and assembling from a wide range of sources—curation and aggregation—is precisely what modern editors should be doing online, not just regurgitating the limited content they get from their parent organization. PS: Must be Curation Day.
