Curation Revolution

Robin Good: Amber Naslund, at Brass Tack Thinking blog, has a great article touching on the importance of curation and on the danger of easily selling personal self-expression and serendipitous re-sharing of other people's content with true content curation.

An she is so damn right about this.

Here a few key highlights from her article:

" 1) To me – and by definition – curation requires conscious thought with the purpose of adding value, context, or perspective to a collection of things.

It’s deliberate work, gathering things together for a reason and lending a keen editing eye to those assets, whether it be pieces of art or pieces of writing.

...

2) Turning your Twitter feed into a clockwork-scheduled stream of all the stuff you find in your RSS feed is not curation, it’s distribution.

And since collecting and redistributing content is arguably easier than creating it, everyone does it.

Which serves to create a great deal of noise, and as we’ve lamented for some time now, it becomes increasingly difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff and home in on information resources that are consistently valuable, and favor mindful selection and sharing over optimizing a feed to populate a bunch of links and drive traffic or gain fans and followers.

3) Can curation be accomplished online? I think so.

But it’s rarely what we actually see happening when we immerse ourselves in social networks, and it’s not what we’re doing when we click the “share” button over and over again.

...

4) The business case for curating content has long been that you can become an expert resource for others, a trusted source of information or expertise that sets you apart.

But becoming a trusted source of information implies a willingness and ability to apply filters, to have exacting standards, to discern the good from the simply popular, the valuable from the gimmicked and hyped.

Which requires work. A lot of it.

Not just an app and the ability to put your collection and distribution on autopilot."

Thank you Amber, you are so damn right. 

Insightful. 9/10

Full article: http://www.brasstackthinking.com/2012/02/curation-saturation-and-why-we-might-need-information-friction-after-all/  

(Image credit: http://Streetfilms.org) 

Via Robin Good