Curation & The Future of Publishing

As those of you who read the Scoop.it blog have seen, we've started to invite guest bloggers to share with us ideas on how knowledge sharing was evolving. Knowledge is at the core of everything we do, be it marketing a company, selling a product, raising awareness for a non-profit,  developing our personal brand and of course in education per se. 

Lindsay Brunner is an accomplished creative writer and Creativity Curator for Delivering Happiness, the new company by Zappos' founder Tony Hsieh. Here's her take on what are the tools and ways to make the most of the online opportunity to share knowledge.

When it comes to content, the form has always mattered: from what makes a book or a movie not just interesting but great to the implicit or explicit reasons we favor this or that news site.

As Laura Brown explaines in this post, this doesn't apply just to content creation but perhaps more importantly to content curation as well.

Austin Powell comes back on the recent announcement by Tumblr to shut down Sotryboard and lay off the editorial team that was highlighting and curating Tumblr's best content.

He makes a point that it's been extremely hard for most social networks - with the notable exception of LinkedIn with its influencer program - to add value by curating its users' best content.

I wonder whether that's actually such a big deal. Yes, it's hard and maybe impossible to curate Facebook's, YouTube's or Tumblr's content in a way that makes sense for all. But isn't the point of the Web 2.0 in general and social networking in particular to offer personalized streams?

We're now seeing the rise of user-driven content curation through platforms like Scoop.it that enable anyone to add value to their own social network publishing activities. Let's put them to good use!

Of course we need curated media: we had that with newspapers and TV and we still need it. I'm glad more and more people realize that now. But we don't need to replicate the old 1-to-many 20th-century-broadcast-media model where a small number of gatekeepers decide what's good to consume for everyone.

Isn't it time social networks trusted their users to become their best content curators?

Interesting post by Andrew Chen on the demise of RSS and what we can expect to see after that. As a blogger, he decided to move all his RSS subscribers to email (as yes, email is alive and kicking). 

Beyond observing this trend, he also makes interesting comments on why this is ultimately good for content creators (though he also got angry comments for his move): alternatives like social curation, integrated readers and email offer better feedback loops for content creators helping them iterate their content based on measured engagement.

Devon Glenn from the Social Times picked up our infographic on the role email plays as part of a content marketing strategy, specifically for small businesses. Just like email is one of the secret weapons of social networks and media outlets, it can and should be leveraged to engage and develop an audience.

As Google shuts down Google Reader, Flipboard introduces user curation to its App and we see our own Read.it App being immeditately picked up and featured by Apple upon launch, we can definitely say content aggregation is losing battles against social curation in the fight between robots/algorithms and people to organize the Web's content.

The vision we had for what we call humanrithm is taking shape. And as Clair asked in this article, are you up to it as readers need you? 

This is a guest post Ally wrote for business2community.com where she comes back on what makes the difference between popular and relevant and how we've been forced to make a choice between the two before.

The good news is that with content curation becoming not only mainstream but also interest-based this is no longer the case (as Nick Peachey also recently explained in an interesting comparative analysis).

We can now have our cake and eat it.

There are a lot of posts now on how and why it's efficient to engage in content curation but Cendrine Marrouat took the angle of why it's great to be a content curator.

That's right: being efficient, having fun and and feeling good are not mutually exclusive objectives.

Nicely argumented post on why content curation is not a marketing fad in these days of opportunity and challenge created by social media. By reminding us of key facts and data points from surveys showing the importance of content curation in a content marketing strategy, John Bhrel does a great job putting together this guide. 

Great summary of the (smart and legit) ways of developing your online visibility by Genevieve Lachance. Content curation is one of them and the post and infographic also touches on repurposing content, commenting and other interesting social media publishing techniques.

As Clair tweeted "a single twitter handle (AP's) is hacked and the Dow tumbles 150 points."

Why? As she explains through a combination of automated trading and lack of social media usage by the traders.

Technology is great. But I'm a firm believer that the best way to leverage it is not to let it go on auto-pilot but rather have its output curated by humans - a concept we like to call Humanrithm which we apply at Scoop.it, for instance when our discovery algorithm only makes content suggestions but lets users decide what gets published and what is not.

Did we get lucky this time? Some people probably weren't and lost something in that story. But if we don't want SF movies to become real one day, we have to start educating and empowering everyone to curate social media.