Curation: Creatively Filtering Content

Curation as Digital Literacy Practice I have been writing my PhD so haven’t updated this blog for a while. Thesis writing is taking up a lot of my mental space as I get the ideas, storyline and contentions to ‘coalesce’ and cohere in a manner suitable for such a piece of work. I’ve been mulling over a series of ideas in my analysis of digital literacies, and one of them is the concept and practice of ‘curation’ as a digital literacy, and what the implications are for curation practices to be better understood, theorised, and subsequently harnessed for educational purposes. My PhD thesis (Bhatt, forthcoming) is not fully completed yet, but some ideas are worth throwing out to collide with others as part of what I believe is a public conversation (#impact #engagement). [Aside: see this brief lecture by Steven Johnson on the ‘collision’ of ideas and the sharing of half-baked hunches] Back to the topic: Source: References: Bhatt, I. Tufte, E. Like this:

Curation & School Librarians School Library Monthly/Volume XXIX, Number 1/September-October 2012 Curation by Joyce Kasman Valenza Joyce Kasman Valenza, Ph.D., is a teacher librarian at Springfield Township High School in Erdenheim, PA. The Internet firehose analogy rings even truer today, twenty years after Internet access saw its beginning. Human Filters Help Digital curators can prevent oversaturation by filtering and diverting the onslaught and by directing what is worth sharing into more gentle and continuous streams. Blogger, author, and NYU professor Clay Shirky, in Steve Rosebaum’s Mashable post, "Why Content Curation Is Here to Stay" on May 10, 2010, describes the problem with traditional search and identifies the issue of filter failure: Curation comes up when search stops working. Human filters make a difference. Curators make sense of the vast amounts of content that are continually produced. Perhaps Albert Barnes was the ultimate curator for the pre-digital world. Why Must School Librarians Curate? SLANZA.

Flipboard Acqui-Hires Visual Storytelling Startup Ultravisual To Boost Content Curation Features Flipboard, the app that lets you make a personal magazine by aggregating your favourite online publications, blogs and social feeds, has acqui-hired the Technicolor-backed visual storytelling startup Ultravisual to boost its content-curation functionality. Terms of the deal remain undisclosed, though this is a pure talent acquisition, for stock only, that sees seven of the Ultravisual team, including its founder, Neil Voss, join Flipboard. Noteworthy, Ultravisual will continue to operate for at least the “next six months,” under the management of investor Technicolor, according to a blog post by Flipboard. In classic PR-speak, the official announcement makes mention of Flipboard and Ultravisual’s “shared vision” of beautifully presenting content, organised around interests, and says Ultravisual’s team will bring “insights and expertise” to that vision. Photo credit: Flipboard

A Comprehensive Guide to Content Curation Depending on your point of view, content on the internet can be a vast collection of treasures, a cesspool swimming in filth, or a big pile of gold specks mixed in with an even bigger pile of dirt. My guess is that most people lean towards the last one, giving rise to content curation, the process of finding the gold among the dirt, as a very popular online activity. At its most basic, content curation is the process of finding, organizing, and presenting content from the flood of information and media that inundate the web by the second. Similar to museum curators, content curators sift through a seemingly never-ending amount of digital objects to unearth individual items worthy of being showcased for a specific audience. Once the selection is finished, the curator presents those assembled elements under a cohesive theme, just like museum curators do for specific exhibitions. It helps to think of a content curator as someone who’s editing a print magazine. Social Media Curation Tools

Startup of the Week: Rormix Rormix is a music video platform that aims to support independent artists. The website -- and accompanying iOS and Android apps -- only publishes curated content from unsigned musicians and future profits from advertising will be split with them. The point? To help the public tune out the tumult of cute animal videos crammed in between the world's best-selling artists on YouTube, to hopefully find something new. Founders: Emma Owens, Chris Farrell, Mark Wheeler, Amman Ahmed Launched: April 2014 Headquarters: Manchester Staff: Nine Funding: AXM North West Fund (VC), Andrew Crossland and Tim Langley (Angels) and a loan from Creative England, all totalling $350,000 (£210,000). What problem do you solve? How do you plan to make money? Who do you view as your competitors? Where did you get the idea for the business? How would you sum up your company ethos? What's the biggest misconception about your business? What has been the most challenging time for the company?

Media Curation Is Now Consumer-Generated The Busy Person's Guide to Content Curation : A 3-Step Process 841 Flares Filament.io 841 Flares × Museums curate works of art. We digital marketers curate blog posts. Though our link shares may not be artistic contributions, the idea of curation is at least the same at museums and online: We’re all seeking only the best material to pass along to our patrons, customers, fans, or followers. Finding and sharing exquisite content has never had more value than it does today. What is content curation? I’ve got a short definition for you and a long one. Content curation is sorting through a large amount of web content to find the best, most meaningful bits and presenting these in an organized, valuable way. For the slightly longer definition, I’ll paraphrase Mike Kaput’s great analogy on Content Marketing Institute about how curation has evolved to its place of prominence on today’s Internet. For a long time, our preferred method of consuming content was to visit blogs and websites that provided content specific to a niche or topic. All this is changing. 1.

6 Facts About Content Curation and SEO You May Not Know If you struggle with providing a steady stream of fresh, relevant content for your website, you’re not alone. Perhaps one of the best ways to overcome this challenge, while also increasing the value you provide to your audience, is through the process of editorialized content curation. But while we know that this process (when done right) is beneficial in terms of driving traffic, extending reach and providing interesting and valuable content, what does Google think about content curation? Following are 6 facts about content curation and SEO you may not know – but that you really should if you’re going to use content curation as part of your own content strategy. 1. In tests performed over the course of several weeks, internet marketer Bruce Clay and his team decided to test various combinations of curated and original content to see how curation affected search engine rankings. The lesson here? 2. 3. An important part of curating content is including links to your original sources. 4. 5.

Content Curators Are The New Superheros Of The Web Yesterday, the ever-churning machine that is the Internet pumped out more unfiltered digital data. Yesterday, 250 million photos were uploaded to Facebook, 864,000 hours of video were uploaded to YouTube, and 294 BILLION emails were sent. And that's not counting all the check-ins, friend requests, Yelp reviews and Amazon posts, and pins on Pintrest. The volume of information being created is growing faster than your software is able to sort it out. As a result, you're often unable to determine the difference between a fake LinkedIn friend request, and a picture from your best friend in college of his new baby. Even with good metadata, it's still all "data"—whether raw unfiltered, or tagged and sourced, it's all treated like another input to your digital inbox. What's happened is the web has gotten better at making data. In 2010 we frolicked, Googled, waded, and drowned in 1.2 zettabytes of digital bits and bytes. Which means it's time to enlist the web's secret power—humans. 1.

An Interview with Oliver Starr on Content Marketing with Content Curation There’s no doubt that content creation and content marketing will play an integral role in the marketing strategies of most brands in 2014, but what you probably didn’t know is that content curation can be an equally successful venture. If you’re struggling with creating original, unique, or shareable content, then content curation can be a perfect alternative. With these great tips from Oliver Starr, Chief Evangelist for Pearltrees and one of the earliest contributors to Techcrunch, you’ll be well on your way to becoming a content-curating master. I recently sat down with Oliver to find out what exactly “content curation” entails, what the best practices are, and what he recommends for running successful content marketing campaigns in 2014. What is content curation and how can it be used for content marketing? If you are using curation to market content it’s still pretty much the same concept. What are some examples of it in practice? What tips would you give?

What Marketers Say About Content Curation Most marketers (57%) say they should share 10 or more pieces of content per day to properly engage with their customers, according to a recent report by Trapit. Asked how many pieces of content a company needs to share/curate, survey respondents suggested numbers ranging from 0 to 135, with the most common response being 10 pieces of content (19% of respondents). Nearly half of marketers surveyed (45%) say they are unable to meet their curation goals and admit their companies do not share as much content as they should. Below, additional key findings from the report, which was based on data from a survey of 131 US marketers. Content Curation 74% of marketers surveyed say curation is an important part of their content strategy.54% agree automation is important for effective content curation.53% believe content curation is becoming less effective because of content saturation. Content Marketing Trends Time Spent on Content Marketing

Content Curation-Content Marketing : trend & tools Content curation services, which had been one of the choice tools of marketing experts for some time now, are finally entering the mainstream. Some research done by the guys over at LikeHack showed that this service is now often used not by marketing consultants but by ordinary people. This is due to information overload and the rising need for content filtering. For this reason, content curation is evolving from not being only a professional tool but a tool that saves web surfers time as personal service. The demise of Google Reader is only going to accelerate the use of these tools as people switch to these emerging technologies to filter their content to save them time and increase content relevance. What is content curation? A content curator is a service that uses algorithms to show the user only the most relevant and appropriate content with respect to a specific niche or topic. The changing trend Paper.li traffic: What does this mean? Why is this happening? 4 Content Curation Tools 1. 2.

Five ways curators can improve user experience Most people curate for the benefit of themselves or their organisations. What if we considered content curation from a user centered design perspective? What would audience centered curation look like? Here are some ideas 1. No we don’t (unless perhaps you actually work in marketing). 2. 3. 4. 5. There you go – five things, three of which are simple steps we can all take when curating anything.