Jeremiah Owyang makes a number of great observations in this post that he interprets as the end of the golden era of tech blogging. I strongly recommend reading it as it's indeed hard not to see a pattern after the sale of TechCrunch, of ReadWriteWeb or the departure of Ben Parr or Marshall Kirckpatrick.
Is this related to Tech only or is it a larger trend? Is blogging itself - and not just tech blogging - coming to an end?I think it's fair to say that a number of these observations are valid for the whole blogosphere: lack of attention span of readers, news and content remixing, fatigue of some personal brands, emergence of new business models, etc...
Blogging will not disappear but new forms of expression are definitely stealing the show from blogging platforms. Curation among them.
Curation & The Future of Publishing
"In order to benefit from digital media and the disruption created by the social web, content companies and publishers have to think differently about what they do, John Borthwick of Betaworks told attendees at paidContent 2012 in New York on Wednesday" Why? Because thinking about it as information puts more focus on the value or the service rendered to consumers. Interesting read. 
As Clay Shirky once observed, “There’s no such thing as information overload — only filter failure.” The addiction to not missing anything seems irrational but is part of our human nature. As any new medium of communication and expression, we will learn as we go as say Brian Solis. The internet is pretty young, and,we will step by step know how to use it for our own good. Curation is probably just starting to be necessary and curated the information we decide to access and digest a benefitial attitude that we have to make more instinctive. With heroes like the Scoop.it's community to lead the way 
This is a great post by Raymond Morin on how Social Influence and Curation are tightly interconnected. "The key to influence is based primarily on the quality and relevance of the content offered", he writes, "Only by adding value to the maelstrom of content on the Web can a blogger reveal themselves as an influence within their network". And he finishes with a precious tip: "always ask whether our contents are worth sharing". This is precisely one of the drivers we had for creating Scoop.it: creating Social Media for the rest of us. Not the celebrities or the movie stars (we like them too!) but the people who - in spite of not being famous - had expertise to share. Everyone has a favorite topic they care passionately about and that is worth sharing. What is yours? 
This is a podcast I recoded on Curation for Spark Tech Talk - "a regular podcast and a community of leaders discussing content in the areas of social media, technology, gaming, entertainment, business and more..." I had the privilege to be joined by Oliver Hsiang from StumbleUpon and Gary Griffiths from Trap.it. It was great to have a dynamic conversation with both of them on the background and evolution of Curation as we all brought our different perspectives. Enjoy! 
Mathew Ingram is having a skeptical look at the new Discover tab Twitter introduced in the past few days. He feels the company didn't yet crack it in spite of its recent acquisition of startups like Summify. As he points out "Curation and filtering are the holy grail for media". But the problem I see is that Twitter's fundamentally based on a people-centric model which makes it hard for interest-based filters to be put in place. His example of the Mexican food article shared by a NYT reporter is a good one: the Interest Graph can NOT be captured by people to people relationship. We need to filter by topic. 
The history professor and author of Too Much to Know tells us what researchers have been discovering about how earlier human societies collected, organised and used information... Amazing read and historical perspective about transmission. Knowledge and information are actually very different concept : "This book doesn’t actually focus on the term information but it talks about the institutions that made knowledge possible. Its first volume runs “From Gutenberg to Diderot" – in other words, mid-15th to mid-18th century. A second volume stretches “From the Encyclopédie to Wikipedia”, from the mid-18th century to the 21st century. Peter Burke is a great cultural historian who has worked on many different aspects of the transmission of knowledge – including, for example, how historians worked, or how ideas about good behaviour at court were transmitted. In this synthetic pair of books he explores the question: What were the institutions that were collecting, classifying, sorting and disseminating information?" In our world now where information is everywhere, how you make sure that knowledge is still accessible ? Curation is now not only a great means to express yourself but also an obvious path to become a gatekeeper and a qualitative filter. This article gives an awesome perspective on an universal and eternal inspiring mission : transmission. 
"Fact #1: You don't need to be a content producer to market with content. Fact #2: Not all curators work in museums and have elbow patches." Interesting analysis on the role curation can play in a content marketing strategy, coming from... a content creator. Sharon Hurley Hall is a professional copywriter & blogger who wrote this as a guest post on Unbounce's blog (and you can find her on Scoop.it here). While she makes a living creating content, she rightly shows how curation makes sense in a Marketing Strategy (which to me doesn't mean creation doesn't or that the two should be opposed when they actually complete one another as - I think - we both agreed in the comments). 
"Over the last couple of years, I’ve come to think of my role as a teacher as that of a curator of ideas" says Corinne Weisgerber who teaches Social Media and Communication at St Edwards Unniversity in Austin, TX (if you haven't yet, check out her great prez here). As she explained in this post, the Curation Project was about getting her students "to set up a network of online mentors using social media tools" and "to identify experts in their field and connect with them in order to build a personal learning network (PLN)." The idea behing the PNL is to help them discover valuable information through social search that they wouldn't have discovered otherwise. Interesting project and read. And great work by the students who used various curation platforms for the project, including Storify and Scoop.it (links in the post) 
A must read from Steve Rosenbaum. We know the amazing contribution of Steve on this topic (we had the chance to interview Steve at SxSW this year). He explains here very clearly why curation creates value for a corporate organization such as IBM, not only for its customers, but internally.
"Publishing is not evolving. Publishing is going away. Because the word “publishing” means a cadre of professionals who are taking on the incredible difficulty and complexity and expense of making something public. That’s not a job anymore. That’s a button. There’s a button that says “publish,” and when you press it, it’s done... The question isn’t what happens to publishing — the entire category has been evacuated. The question is, what are the parent professions needed around writing? Publishing isn’t one of them. Editing, we need, desperately." Clay Shirky already expressed interesting views on curation and the filter need. T his blog post is about the evolution of reading. Of course, how we read on the web, now that everyone can be a publisher change the area but not the mission. Clay Shirky explores also the notion of "social reading", where human curation has also akey role to play: "Social reading introduces the idea of text as a usable object. The idea that I’d read it and then do something about it" 
"Intel is funding a global events and artist showcase: The Creators Project. Can avant-garde artists help it it sell more microprocessors?" Tom Foremski - who's been watching curation as a trend for quite some time and who also started the SF Curators salon, a group where we contribute - reports on an interesting initiative by Intel to use curation to support its brand. Interesting read. 
Arabella Santiago is the founder of Startup Live and the Executive Director of the TechWeek conference in Chicago where I'm speaking in a few months. We had a discussion on the role of curation as an expression form in Austin at SxSWi a few weeks ago and we also touched upon the topic of the coming TechWeek session which is about the trend of remixing content to create something new: "No one wants to be duplicating content, but if you quote content and you put content in context then you can create something which has higher value than the original. It's something we have gotten used to in Music with DJ's and rappers sampling and remixing songs but that the Web makes possible for everyone to do with any form of content. Having been a music entrepreneur before, I like this analogy and I think it shows quite well how a whole creativity potential can be unleashed by new tools and platforms. 
"The creator of Brain Pickings on how to think outside the corporate box." An interview with Maria Popova : fascinating to see how her routine works for her. Unsurprisingly, it involves a huge amount of reading. It's also interesting to see the criteria she uses for what she'll just tweet vs what she'll pick up for her blog. |
"Media companies are in trouble because they have to compete against a multitude of companies producing media as a loss leader." This is an interesting analysis by Tom Foremski on ZDNet that shows how much companies have now invested in the Publishing space. Be it through Content Creation or Content Curation, Social Media makes every brand a publisher. And it's bad news for traditional media which have to reinvent themselves. Great read. http://www.ted.com How do we consume data? At TED@SXSWi, technologist JP Rangaswami muses on our relationship to information, and offers a surprising and sharp insight: we treat it like food. So if you think of your relationship with information like food, what will you do differently? I think it's a great analogy, and reminds me the Information Diet book by Clay Johnson. Because that's all about curation is. Taking care of what you are able to "digest", what "feeds" you. Good information allows you not only to feel well, but to feel better day after day and connect with others (food is one of the best social breaker in the world, don't you think?) But curation is not a diet to try, it could just be a tremendous lifestyle to adopt for good. 
"I Can Has Cheezburger CEO Ben Huh's day job may involve funny pictures of cats and other internet memes, but he also has some serious opinions about the future of journalism."
These are interesting points Ben Huh makes. To me they're good examples of the shift of value that impacts publishing. The objectivity-seeking, gatekeeping traditional media model is dead because in the age of information abondance, personnal opinions are what get content virally distributed.
Isn't that another way of saying Social Curation is changing the future of Publishing? Via lalorek 
This sketchnote was suggested to me by Dean Meyers. Maria Popova, creator, blogger and curator of www.brainpickings.org, talks about the creative process, how old ideas are used to fuel new stories, ideas and designs, and the creative process which relies on curation. Don't you also feel curation is part of the creative process? 
"Dave Pell writes what is perhaps the world’s best email newsletter" writes Hamish McKenzie on Pandodaily.
Interesting story that shows the power a human curator can have in the age of Twitter and technology domination. The interview is a must read as he goes on to describe his role. He concludes: "So we’re in this weird cycle now where we’re being overwhelmed by technology and we’re looking for a technological solution to that. Ultimately the solution for managing technology is going to be human. I don’t think technology can solve its own downside itself." Humans are back, aren't they? 
"How The Huffington Post ate the Internet..."
This is a long read but a worthy one: one that mixes entrepreneurship, publishing and the story of the Web itself. It's fascinating to see that the starting point for what became a controversial success but an undisputed revolution for publishing is the social web. Michael Shapiro does a great job at explaining how the HuffPost started from a network problem: how to connect people with stories. A problem that curators all feel sympathetic with. 
"Yesterday, 250 million photos were uploaded to Facebook, 864,000 hours of video were uploaded to YouTube, and 294 billion emails were sent. No wonder content curation is one of the most important jobs of our digital age. (...) Which means it's time to enlist the web's secret power: humans." I just love the way Steve Rosenbaum talks about curators, don't you? He coined the term when we interviewed him at SxSWi and Steve definitely knows what he's talking about, being the author of Curation Nation. He gives interesting guidelines to all would-be curators in this post: even if you're already one, you might find them useful. And if you're not a curator yet: "All you need is a web browser and a cape. The rest is up to you." 
Per TechCrunch's John Biggs, "The heart of Jeff Bezos' mission has always to circumvent the traditional "gatekeepers" of commerce. He started with books, an industry ripe for disruption, and moved onto, well, everything else. At this point, his vision has come true."
As Bezos wrote to his shareholders: "I am emphasizing the self-service nature of these platforms because it’s important for a reason I think is somewhat non-obvious: even well-meaning gatekeepers slow innovation. When a platform is self-service, even the improbable ideas can get tried, because there’s no expert gatekeeper ready to say “that will never work!” And guess what – many of those improbable ideas do work, and society is the beneficiary of that diversity." Interesting perspective that reflect my own previous experience in the music industry. Musiwave, my previous startup, built a great digital music mobile business working hand in hand with major labels and mobile operators. Starting right after the 2000 bubble explosion and after the Napster years, we took the legal way, signing deals for every innovation we had in mind to bring music to mobile. That worked to some extent and the company did well (it's now part of Microsoft) but I can't count the occasions I've been frustrated by the time we lost at launching a new product because we had to convince our gatekeepers - back then record labels and mobile operators - it was worth doing. So yes, innovation and gatekeepers rarely match. 
"Why legacy-newspaper media reporters get their own industry so wrong"
Interesting (but long) piece on why journalists shouldn't be trusted to report on the decline of print media. 
This is a great interview of David Carr, the well-known columnist at the New York Times where he publishes "The Media Equation" on the future of Media and Journalism. It was suggested to me by Serge van Oudenhove: thanks! Carr was a speaker at a recent SxSWi pannel named the Curators and the Curated and he comes back in this interview on his "yes, but" about curation: yes, he believes content curators have an important role to play, quoting Maria Popova who was at that same pannel, but also pointing out the importance of attribution and credits, a "form of compensation" in the sometimes too free-for-all Web. But his interview takes a step back looking at the future of publishing, including the business model challenges in the digital age. He gives interesting persepctives making it a great read. 
"On the Internet, we’ve reached a tipping point where more than 50% of all Internet traffic is no longer generated by humans – instead, it's generated by a motley mix of search engine spiders, bots, scrapers, scammers, hackers and, yes, spies. We are no longer talking about the Internet, we are talking about the Bot Net – a “bot-mediated reality” where algorithms and bots influence where we go, how long we spend there and with whom we communicate."
This great pick by Sakis Koukouvis goes on to list impressive facts on how the Internet is being controlled by robots.
Time to put Human Curation back into the game? Via Sakis Koukouvis 
"We've gotten used to the content industries arguing that what happens when people download or make copies is "theft." "
But as Mathew Ingram explains on GivaOm, when A downloads illegally B's content, B only lost a potential sale; nothing real yet. Interesting to read to understand what's at stake with copyright law. |
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I posted that blogging needed a big change two years ago. It has become over commercial/ marketed. It has lost most of the charm it once had. I think the new blogging will be a lot more interactive. I read about gamifying a site/ blog. It makes a lot of sense but it needs work. If every WordPress blog runs the same gamification plugin they will all be equally bland and it won't work.
You're right, Laura. And I don't think anyone is saying blogging will disappear: just that its golden era might be over. Jeremiah made that point for Tech Blogging and I was thinking it could also be true for blogging in general.
I always felt curation and creation were complementing each other and you're right: without content, there's no point in curation. But while Blogging (and creation) used to be the only and thus the dominant form of self expression, it's no longer the case: users also express themselves by remixing content, curating stories or creating virtual pinboards.
I don't see how blogging, or some form of self publishing, can disappear in favour of content curation. Curating content is not creating content. Someone still has to write and publish the content, in whatever format they use.
As the fascination and expansion for shared information increases, the time to manage becomes critical. Curation allows a different way to narrate: it won't replace blogging, though.
I believe curation will become one of the essential tools for "good" bloggers. There is still a place for personal expression in blogging.