PJA Radio Content Is No Longer King: Curation Is King Too Big to Know In an edited excerpt from his new book, Too Big to Know, David Weinberger explains how the massive amounts of data necessary to deal with complex phenomena exceed any single brain's ability to grasp, yet networked science rolls on. Thomas Jefferson and George Washington recorded daily weather observations, but they didn't record them hourly or by the minute. Not only did they have other things to do, such data didn't seem useful. Even after the invention of the telegraph enabled the centralization of weather data, the 150 volunteers who received weather instruments from the Smithsonian Institution in 1849 still reported only once a day. How will we ever make sense of scientific topics that are too big to know? This would not be the first time. In this excerpt from my new book, Too Big To Know, we'll look at a key property of the networking of knowledge: hugeness. In 1963, Bernard K. If science looked like a chaotic brickyard in 1963, Dr. Second, the economics of sharing have changed.
Clay Shirky and Accountability Journalism NYU Professor Clay Shirky published an essay, “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable“, that suggested that journalists needed to radically rethink the assumptions that have made market-supported newspapers possible. It was a bombshell, cited and commented on thousands of times. Today, Clay outlined the arguments of the essay at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School and filled a room with journalists, scholars and others interested in his views. Clay’s focus is the future of “accountability journalism”, the sort of serious investigative journalism that prevents corruption and keeps the powerful in check. He references the reporting done by the Boston Globe to expose abuse by Catholic priests under the leadership of Cardinal Law and his attempts to shuffle and cover for abusive priests. His fear is that the model we’ve had through the 20th century to produce this accountability journalism is irretrievably broken. Third, “the coherence of newspapers is no longer logical.”
A Marketer’s Guide to Content Curation There is an elephant in the online marketing “room,” and the elephant’s name is Curation. Curation is the most important part of online marketing that no one is talking about. With the rise of inbound marketing, content has become front and center in the minds of marketers. This focus on content as an important marketing tactic creates two extremely important problems. First, content creation is difficult. Applying Curation to Our Problems As marketers, how do we solve these two problems? Curation has become a fixture for many successful news blogs on the web today. Examples of Curation Some of the most popular posts on this blog have been from curated content. 3 Rules for Great Curation 1. 2. 3. Integrating Curation Into the Content Mix Curation has many applications. How do you use curation for your inbound marketing efforts? Photo Credit: joyosity
Why Social Media Curation Matters - Technorati Blogging Over the past few weeks I've raved about the current raft of social media curation start-ups. I've rambled on and on about all of the new features that are being added to sites like Curated.By, Storify and Keepstream. What I haven’t explained to my friends, family, Twitter followers and just about anybody I engage in tech conversation with for more than a couple of minutes, is why it all matters. With registered Twitter users numbering somewhere in the region of 150 million, their fire hose is pumping out tens of millions of tweets a day. Granted, not all of this data is worth capturing. So, how do you decide what’s worth keeping?
The Collapse of Complex Business Models I gave a talk last year to a group of TV executives gathered for an annual conference. From the Q&A after, it was clear that for them, the question wasn’t whether the internet was going to alter their business, but about the mode and tempo of that alteration. Against that background, though, they were worried about a much more practical matter: When, they asked, would online video generate enough money to cover their current costs? That kind of question comes up a lot. There are two essential bits of background here. Here’s why. In 1988, Joseph Tainter wrote a chilling book called The Collapse of Complex Societies. The answer he arrived at was that they hadn’t collapsed despite their cultural sophistication, they’d collapsed because of it. Early on, the marginal value of this complexity is positive—each additional bit of complexity more than pays for itself in improved output—but over time, the law of diminishing returns reduces the marginal value, until it disappears completely. Dr.
Content Curation: Why Is The Content Curator The Key Emerging Online Editorial Role Of The Future? What is content curation and why is it so important for the future of web content publishers? The content curator is the next emerging disruptive role in the content creation and distribution chain. In a world submerged by a flood of information, content curators may provide in the coming months and years a new, tremendously valuable service to anyone looking for quality information online: a personalized, qualified selection of the best and most relevant content and resources on a very specific topic or theme. Photo credit: Luna Vandoorne Vallejo In other words, a content curator is someone "who continually finds, groups, organizes and shares the best and most relevant content on a specific issue online". The most important component of this job is the word "continually." This is how marketing expert Rohit Bhargava defines what he thinks is one of the key emerging online editorial roles of the future. But don't take my word for it. Intro by Robin Good by Rohit Bhargava About Rohit Bhargava