The Content Strategist as Digital Curator 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?
Consuming News in the Age of Curation There is a lot of noise online at the moment and finding good content is tough. We all have about 3 or 4 sites where we stop to reade news and entertainment every day but increasingly our media consumption is coming to us via curated sources like our own personal networks. There has been a huge shift from the old model where “gatekeepers” dictated what content we consumed and how we accessed it a new model in which curation plays the primary roll. Caught in the cross hairs are the old media institutions, but as consumers we are winning because not only do we have access to larger amounts of content in real time but the smart people are curating it through a variety of sources to match their needs and they are doing so largely for free. Tastemakers I recently tried to explain Twitter to a fairly media savvy young professional and was met by the usual “I don’t want to know what you had for breakfast” response. Professional Curators Crowd Curation Good Journalists Need To Be Paid
Content Curation Is Listening and Engaging Content curation is the organizing, filtering and “making sense of” information on the web and sharing the very best pieces of content that you’ve cherry picked with your network. But finding and organizing the information is only half of the task. As Mari Smith points out in this video about why curation is important and some tools for doing it. By sharing the information and giving credit to the source where you found the link, you build relationships and a network. I used to describe this process as “Listening and Engaging” but really like focusing it the process around a content strategy – makes listening and engaging much more actionable. Last week, I helped launch a peer exchange for Packard Foundation for Children’s Health Insurance grantees with Spitfire Communications (creators of the SMART chart). Bruce Lesley is one of a growing number of nonprofit executive directors and senior leaders that use Twitter. What do the experts say?
First Meeting Of SFCurators Salon... Posted by Tom Foremski - April 15, 2011 Last Thursday was the inaugural meeting of SFCurators Salon in North Beach and I couldn't be more happier about the turnout (see below). I set up the group with my colleague Oliver Starr as a place where like-minded people could discuss the topic of curation, which has become a hot topic this year as search falters, and as curation tools and services come out of beta and into more mainstream use. (Please see: Pearltrees Reaches Key Milestones: Largest Curation Community - SVW) The meeting was held in Specs', a bar that happens to also be a funky museum. This was the stomping ground for the Beatnicks, and some myths even locate the origin of the name to Specs'. As people started to arrive we sat around one of the large round tables at the back of the bar and got straight into a fascinating discussion of curation and what it means. I liked the format: instead of listening to a guest speaker we got to listen to each other. Here are my co-founders:
Curated Social Media Comes Of Age During Oslo Attacks This past year, social media replaced traditional news outlets as an unrivaled source of information for at least a few era-defining stories: Twitter broke the Osama Bin Laden story and YouTube became the window into the Arab Spring. Backed by a compelling history of performance, journalists rushed to their Twitter accounts over the past few days to speed up the painfully slow unraveling of the Norway massacre news. The problem is, the fire hose that is an unfiltered hashtag feed such as, say, #osloexpl, provides quality journalism embedded in a haystack of foreign languages, unlinked comments, and even the odd Star Wars quote (see below). So a few technically savvy outlets, including The Washington Post, found that by editorially curating quality social media channels, they could cut out the noise associated with a raw Twitter feed and still relay key information at Internet speed. Raw social media feeds are not without merit.
News curation: finally, social media's killer app? FORTUNE -- Even the most casual social network user will admit that the Facebook or Twitter experience can be overwhelming -- that merciless stream of status updates and shared content, which sometimes feels less like a stream and more like a deluge, waits for no man, woman, or Web crawler. Of course, there's good reason to feel that way: Facebookers share 30-billion plus pieces of information each month, and Twitter users output 1 billion tweets weekly. There's a tremendous amount of digital information floating around and few great solutions for filtering it, making sense of it, and consuming it. That's changing. Nicholas Negroponte foreshadowed the current state of things back in 1995 with the "Daily Me," a customized news experience, but it's only been over the last 18 months that his idea has manifested itself via mainstream products and services. They all work differently. That same concept is at the core of the Twitter-focused start-up Sulia. More from Fortune:
Conscious Curation « SweetMedia Thanks to Tom Foremski and Oliver Starr for inviting me to share my thoughts on curation at last night’s salon, and to the group for a lively discussion. This article is an expansion on the bullet points in my remarks. There is a prior post- What is Curation? Does all curation have a viewpoint? Two different curators can create vastly different views on a topic by how they frame it. In any curation, what is omitted is as if not more important than what is included. How is curation different than a mere filter or editorial slant? Yet, the word curation has a higher bar: it implies a sense of care over the longterm, of preserving and assembling a special group of items or content or speakers. What’s different in Live versus Digital curation? With live events, versus the self guided tour of digital media, we have at least 2 additional dimensions to work with. The interplay between Live Events and their Digital Artifacts Expansion of forums for curation- digital and otherwise
Is This the World’s Best Twitter Account? Yesterday morning NPR’s Andy Carvin took a break from running one of the world’s best Twitter accounts to explain what it’s like to be a living, breathing real-time verification system. “All of this is more art than science,” he said. In truth, it sounds equal parts exhilarating and exhausting. As has been repeatedly detailed in other places, Carvin is the NPR senior strategist who transformed his Twitter feed into a must-read newswire about the changes taking place in the Arab world. There are few established rules or journalistic policies for what he does. Yet, when following his work on Twitter, Carvin seems in total control of the onslaught of information. Prodding his followers to help him understand the context of a video: Sharing information while noting its unconfirmed status: Asking his followers to check in on the status of a fellow Twitter user: Challenging a report in order to move towards verification: Passing along a report from one of his sources on the ground: