"...aggregation of the kind the Huffington Post does is the way things work now, and complaining about it (or trying to sue over it, as the Hollywood gossip blogger Nikki Finke did earlier this year) is like complaining that since the car was invented, it has become really hard to find a good buggy whip. Your content will be aggregated, so the challenge , is to add more value than sites like the Huffington Post do. Publishers like the Herald might want to start with links...."

Very interesting blog post from Mathew Ingram, gigaOm's writer. Fighting against aggregation is not only a lost battle but also the wrong one. Aggregation is a natural evolution of the web, where a huge amount of content is produced every day. The next question is how to create more value that just collecting content from others. Curation will never be aggregation: it cannot be automatized and implies an angle, a unique point of view and choice you offer to your audience. There is no curation vs. creation debate. Seeing yourself as a trusty resource to point out the best sources just serves both of them.  A curator is by definition someone that respects not only his/her readers but the material/piece he/she works with and give access to. Aggregation comes from the latin word "aggregare", "add". The web is full. We do not need more adding.

Curation comes from "cura", meaning "to care". That will always be necessary. 

"We created this infographic to depict how “full” the internet is. While it’s technically impossible for the web to fill up, it is very clear that web surfers are well past our limits of time and patience it takes to find the best information on the topics that interest us."

Very interesting infographic that explains a real problem: the internet is becoming this infinite source of "information", but when you don't have any filter, it's just become a (stressful)  noise. How many times you just have the feeling you can never ever follow "everything" that happens on the web even if you spend hours on it. The web should be this medium that helps us to find faster what we are looking for and not the opposite. Curation is not only a trend, it's just a necessity. We know "how important human curated content has become. Curation is truly a valuable service to web surfers who have neither the time nor the patience to sift through mountains of links and data"

Curation is a means to make the web meaningful again. Publishing your curation work is a great way to control and create a new identified resource of info. Context and Content can't be disconnected anymore.

This is an interesting study by Technorati commented by Brian Solis on the state of blogging.

The study doesn't show whether blogging is on the up or down trend but it gives interesting perspectives on how people blog, what influences them on who bloggers are.

While micro content has certainly been the major change in social media in the recent years, the appeal of long-form media as a publishing format still exists.

This a great blog post from Rian van der Merwe , describing the noise you can find on the web now, and especially content just created for SEO purposes or advertisers. As many, Rian is tired of it.

"I used to believe that if you write with passion and clarity about a topic you know well (or want to know more about), you will find and build an audience. I believed that maybe, if you’re smart about it, you could find a way for some part of that audience to pay you money to sustain whatever obsession drove you to self-publishing"

The Scoop.it team can't agree more with this vision...