I've just published Matt Langer's rant agains the curator code which opens up interesting questions but this is another must-read on the whole curator code debate; this time by Instapaper founder Marco Arment - someone I've read many interesting pieces from and who's been an amazing entrepreneur building a great App in the new Content space.

Marco says the curator code is tackling the wrong problem when it comes to curation, link sharing or whatever you want to call it.

By the way, we're still investigating what the Curators Code means for Scoop.it users and how to deal with it. So please send us feedback if you have ideas on it.

On the previous posts, I've listed some of the questions that we have but let me repost them here too: "Is the curator code redundant with the Web's fundamentals such as the hyperlink? Does it add complexity for readers? Will it make sense if only a minority use it?"

The other observation I'm starting to make is that this makes 2 posts by smart people that I would consider curators (at least part of their time) and that have reacted to Maria's initiative by saying they didn't want to be called a curator because of that. So another question is "will the curator code bring standardization or will it devide people who are great at discovering and sharing content?".

Love to hear your thoughts!

Much of Buddhist philosophy centers around this same idea, this balance between what’s being phrased as “intention” and “attention” – our intentional curiosity about knowledge and growth, and our choice of where to focus our awareness, what to pay attention to.

So that, I think, is the role of information curators: They are our curiosity sherpas, who lead us to things we didn’t know we were interested in until we, well, until we are. Until we pay attention to them — because someone whose taste and opinion we trust points us to them, and we integrate them with our existing pool of resources, and they become a part of our networked knowledge and another LEGO piece in our combinatorial creativity.

So if information discovery plays such a central role in how we fuel our creativity and thus in our creative output, then information discovery is a form of creative labor in and of itself.

An absolute must read, from Maria Popova, master curator. Curation is not only a necessity to make sense of the web, it is the path to explore your own creativity :

How we choose to pay attention, and relate to information and each other shapes who we become, shapes our creative destiny

Truly inspiring. 

Great Blog post from Christopher Butler on the importance of  content that matters as a valuable marketing strategy : 

"there are instances in which written content marketing works quite well. At the product end of the business spectrum, those manufactured for businesses, rather than consumers, are typically heavily researched by buyers—who make active use of search engines to do so—before purchase. Case studies, white papers, blog posts, and other articles can satisfy the researcher’s need for sharable, decision-reinforcing information, especially if they are enabling a buying decision that will ultimately be made by someone else. And obviously, the same dynamic exists within any “knowledge industry” service. For professionals in design, advertising, marketing, public relations, law, or finance, the essential intangibility of their expertise must be carefully described in-depth in diverse ways to qualify the specific nature of what they do and for whom they are best suited to do it (...)

Congratulations, you just became a publisher. Who is your editor? "

Christopher mentions the need to respect a process as any publisher will do. Without compromise with the qualities of content you share, if you have great platform to help you doing so without spending hours on it, it's even better.... 

"Major brands are slowly discovering that e-commerce may not be the only revenue stream the digital world has to offer them."

Andy Nibley wrote this guest post on Wired.com; he's the CEO of Yieldex.

His take is that major retailers have such a big trafic they're now starting to make money not just by selling products but by selling ads to other retailers orbrands: "So here’s a fresh example of the internet’s law of unintended consequences: Corporations who never had an interest in publishing may find that there is money to be made by sharing their customers with other brands."

The rationale being  that ad margins can be higher than retail margins.

What I feel this all means is that, in our noisy Web, catching the consumer attention becomes the greatest asset of all.

"One thing that becomes clear from the latest Pew report on the state of media is just how big a role aggregators -- both human and machine-powered -- are playing in news consumption." comments Mathew Ingram on GigaOm.

He goes on to analyze what this means for the business models of media outlets that weren't built around the assumption that as high as 30% of their trafic would come from news agregators or human curators.

I'd love the study to make a better difference between news readers such as Flipboard or Zite, agregation sites such as the Huffington Post and the work of human curators on platform such as Scoop.it. But it's great to have a measure of the huge impact curation already has.

NB: the whole report is available here.

Yesterday at New York’s fMC, the Facebook Marketing Conference, the company echoed that very sentiment as it argued that following brands on Facebook is no different than following friends and family. Introducing a suite of new advertising tools--enhanced brand Pages, premium offers, mobile ad placements--the social network reasoned that users would appreciate the additional avenues advertisers now have to reach them, because advertisers share "quality" content. "

Our main objective is to make sure that over time, the advertising is as good as the content you would receive from your friends or family," said Carolyn Everson, Facebook’s VP of global marketing solutions. "It’s very similar to your own Facebook experience. There are certain friends that you probably love getting updates from--they are witty and interesting--and that’s really what we’re trying to do with brands: Stop thinking about brands over here and people over here, but actually [think of] brands as people

Facebook is definitely trying to push brands to use the social network to create more engagement, as it seems more and more difficult on the crowded platform. But we know now that content is king and context is god. Nothing is more powerful than publishing your content where you have a chance to be heard. 

Being a publisher not only give you control on what you share but from where you share it. How to get more visibility than that? 

Because the more visible brand on Facebook will always stay facebook itself.