Readin', 'Ritin', and (Publishing) 'Rithmetic

I'm still not convinced that curation is all that new or different than blogging or other online publishing activities. (Blogging is not dead.) Nor am I convinced it is the most important thing you can do in terms of marketing. (And just because "everyone is doing it" doesn't sway me either; like momma always said about if so & so jumped off a bridge...) But I don't think curation can be overlooked much longer. Curation needs to be evaluated for several major factors:

a) can it fit within your scope (Do you have the time & skill set? Can you do this in house or should you hire?)

b) purpose (to maintain existing clients/customers, to reach new ones?)

b) where would it fit? (Not all curation sites are the same; some are more suitable for products, brands, B2B or B2C reach, demographics, etc.)

While B2B marketers are beginning to adopt B2C best practices when it comes to e-commerce, B2B marketers have traditionally invested more of their budgets into content marketing than their B2C counterparts, making it interesting to see how both sides measure up in this rapidly-growing area. There are many more similarities than one might expect.

Robin Good  of Content Curation World breaks the findings down thus:

a) what people curate as relevant is not generally among the top ranked results according to popular metrics. Good stuff is not the same as what is considered normally popular or authoritative stuff.

b) content curation allows a community to synchronize around specific issues and subjects (as anticipated by Clay Shirky)

c) better and more appreciated curation is of the "structured" kind, providing additional info, meta-data and categorization.

d) curators that are highly appreciated are characterized by consistent activity and by a variety of interests (or viewpoints under the same theme) that they are capable to cover.

This is rather my experience; however, I usually explain it to my clients this way:

a) You can be doing an excellent job, but never receive the recognition, popularity, or traffic you deserve.That doesn't mean you won't be appreciated greatly by the smaller group of people who do find/read your curated works.

b) No matter the popularity of your curation, you can build and have conversations -- but remember, community cultivation not only requires additional time, but a different skill set.

c) If you're going to do it, do it well. Use tools, such as labels and tags, and *always* provide context as well as proper credits and links.

d) Consistent activity is nearly as important as showing some personality along with your knowledge. Your topic may be narrowly focused, but offer additional topics and information about you personally (not just professionally) so that people get a sense of you.

A research paper by Zhong, Shah, Sundaravadivelan and Sastry, King's college London, 2013

See the excellent notes from Robin Good below. Interesting to see more work emerging in this field.

What can happen when you are a sloppy writer/publisher, when you are a lazy reader.

These aren't necessarily detective stories, but my mother remembers mentioning   detective novels as a literary genre in her Stanford 1955 English class, and was completely shut down.  Now there is a whole class at the university devoted to the dective novel.  She feels vindicated.  You never know the jewels you may find in the past!

Makes sense to me.

Curating - how to manage it. And curation experts already exist - they're called Librarians!

This is good that they are helping

Perma.cc is an upcoming web service that aims to help authors and journals create permanent archival copies of their online published content.

Way too often in fact, due to a multitude of reasons, not only content gets moved and relocated to new sites, becoming more difficult to find but in many others it is permanently deleted or lost.

To comfort your doubts that this is a true and tangible issue, you should check the work being carried out by Kendra Albert, Larry Lessig and Jonathan Zittrain, who are completing a study of link rot, available at http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2329161. ;

Link rot is the phenomenon by which material we link to on the distributed Web vanishes or changes beyond recognition over time.

Believe it or not half of the links in all of the Supreme Court opinions, don't work anymore.

In this context "the Harvard Library Innovation Lab has pioneered a project to unite libraries so that link rot can be mitigated.  We are joined by about thirty law libraries around the world to start Perma.cc, which will allow those libraries on direction of authors and journal editors to store permanent caches of otherwise ephemeral links."

The Internet Archive has provided its powerful archiving engine to support this effort and Cloudfare its distributed CDN.

The official tagline of the upcoming site reads: "perma.cc helps authors and journals create permanent archived citations in their published work"

Here is essence what you should expect from it: "Perma.cc allows users to create citation links that will never break.

When a user creates a Perma.cc link, Perma.cc archives a copy of the referenced content, and generates a link to an unalterable hosted instance of the site.

Regardless of what may happen to the original source, if the link is later published by a journal using the Perma.cc service, the archived version will always be available through the Perma.cc link."

N.B.: While anyone will be able to go to Perma.cc and archive any web page this resource is designed for researchers, authors and journals. In this light Perma.cc downloads the material at the designated URL and provides a new URL (a “Perma.cc link”) that can then be inserted in a paper. 

After the paper has been submitted to a journal, the journal staff checks that the provided Perma.cc link actually represents the cited material. If it does, the staff “vests” the link and it is forever preserved. Links that are not “vested” will be preserved for two years, at which point the author will have the option to renew the link for another two years.

My comment: Can't wait to test it. We need these type of archival tools like oxygen. It's not only important that we organize and curate what is important from the web, but it is essential that we also take care in preserving it for the longest possible time.

Free and open to all (soon).

Request beta access here: http://perma.cc/ ;

More info: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/futureoftheinternet/2013/09/22/perma/ ;

Similar Tools: www.Permamarks.com

Essential, if the Internet is our all-time library resource...

Curators will have a different opinion about curating great content but this point of view is worth reflecting upon.

Guillaume Decugis offers a valuable perspective on curation, the impact of Google algorithm changes on SEO and side references of course to Matt Cutts. In a phrase:  "Add value!"

Anytime Matt speaks about SEO we should listen. In this video he specifically discusses SEO and content creation. He recommends a separate website page for old blog posts. I assume Google can identify the old content as separate and, therefore, acceptable rather than someone trying to game the system by throwing up a bunch of old or curated content in hopes of improve search engine results on the back of other people's content.

Media Coordinator

So many people are on Pinterest, that it only makes since that teachers and librarians try to use these resources. This article talks about how to use Pinterest to organize information, so that is can easily be found by students, and since it is through a site most teens use, its an engaging tool. 

Jut because it's relevant to this unit.

Maybe ebooks aren't killing publishing after all? Weird huh? 

Weird is beautiful. ...Profitability, well... Perhaps the beautiful worry less about such things.