Media Curation Is Now Consumer-Generated. ‘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.
TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington also riffs on this theme, mentioning AOL's "Toyota Strategy of building thousand of niche content sites via the work of cast-offs from old media" and quoting a Wired piece on Demand Media from October. 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. See also: 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. Like this: Curation to save media.
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. Robert Scoble: @laetSgo Pearltrees is one... Something went wrong, but don’t fret — let’s give it another shot. Firefox’s Enhanced Tracking Protection (Strict Mode) is known to cause issues on x.com. 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. But others said the device, though gorgeous, simply doesn’t fill an obvious need. Does the iPad offer designers and users a new medium, or is it merely an iPod Touch on steroids? How much does the form factor of a device drive the creation of new kinds of content and how that content is read, heard and watched?
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. iPad. HTML5 vs flash: the controversy. Web curation trend.