Social Media Content Curation

Giuseppe Mauriello: I read this interesting article on GigaOM by Jim Hornthal that published an excerpt from his TED ebook “Haystack Full of Needles: Cutting Through the Clutter of the Online World to find a Place, Partner, or President.”

Here are some points that they caught my attention:

"What happens when data is huge? We get lost. Discovery, not search, will produce the next data-exploration breakthrough.

In the modern era, information overload has become an even larger problem than information scarcity. Data is generated by the ton, and most of it is not remotely relevant or useful. The way we search has even created a gray market in this thin veneer of content, often referred to as “faux content.”

Estimates vary but all point to evidence that a great percentage of the web today is simply manufactured sites created specifically to scoop up visitors in search of ad dollars. The effect isn’t just a nuisance, and makes sifting through the ever growing tons of online data even more confounding.

The back-link game, or the process by which websites can purchase inbound links — Google’s original secret sauce that generated results based on the “authority” of a web page — has become vital to generating superior search results, and the multibillion-dollar search-engine optimization industry is built on reverse-engineering the actual search algorithms for commercial gain.

Rich Skrenta, the CEO of the spam-free search engine Blekko, frames this de-evolution in an interesting way: “Today, the Web has become a tragedy of the commons, a social system ruled by spam — over 90 percent of URLs today are pure junk!”

Fortunately, there is a growing band of innovators who have taken up the challenge and are tackling those issues — with startlingly similar approaches. Their universal mission is to employ relevant, expert-based pattern recognition to generate a useful consumer outcome.

For these passionate discovery engineers, the goal is not to find a needle in a haystack, but instead to present a haystack of needles, an array of potential valuable answers to a growing list of useful and impactful questions..."

Read full original article here:

http://gigaom.com/2012/10/20/creating-order-from-digital-chaos/