| Robin Good's Latest News |
| What Makes A Great Curator Great? How To Distinguish High-Value Curation From Generic Republishing |
Today content curation is 'sold', promoted and marketed as the latest and trendiest approach to content production, SEO visibility, reputation and traffic building. But is it really so? Is it really true that by aggregating many content sources and picking and republishing those news and stories that you deem great is really going to benefit you and your readers in the long run? Is the road to easy and effortless publishing via curation tools a true value creation business strategy, or just a risky fad? How can one tell?
Let me clarify a few key points: 1. Curation can be effective only as much as it effectively provides a quality filtering mechanism that can replace my need to consult multiple sources. When such need is forgotten and a curation channel becomes another broad aggregation and republishing venue, the end result is more content to go through and little or no insight gained. 2. Shallow curation efforts, where the main goal is to republish selected content with the minimum effort and time, are going to be effective only for the very short term. As soon as quality, value-creation creators start to emerge and gain authority, the gap between them and the others will be very hard to fill. 3. Curation is an effective means to build a strong relationship with a niche audience of passionate people to engage, not a marketing strategy that caters to gain a broad audience of readers by virtue of quantity and breadth. 4. The key element that makes curation work is the competence and focus of the curator and of the topic he has selected. Repeated efforts to create curated channels that mix and match broad and highly competitive topics are bound to see a very short life. For these reasons, I think that much of the apparent new curation work being done is bound to be soon disappointed by the results it will gain. Though the apparent new curation 'leaders' are working around volume and breadth, I have a strong feeling that within a year this panorama will have already evolved significantly in its natural direction. Highly specific news and content channels, curated by passionate and competent editors will gradually become the new reference and models for curation work. This article is all about starting to identify some tentative reference points that can be used to anticipate these changes and position one's own curation channel in a way that it will guarantee the greatest return on investment, over-time, possible. My goal, is to help you understand how you can start to evaluate and distinguish value-creating content curation, from shallow aggregation, noise-making republication and pure content regurgitation before it is too late or someone else in your same niche will have done it before you. Here's is my official checklist, to identify value-creation curation, from everything else.
How Do You Recognize a Quality Content Curator
If I was asked to evaluate the curation work of different people, without being able to know who these authors are and for which reason they were doing it, I would use the following criteria to identify the best curators among them. In my personal experience a good, value-creating curator, can be easily recognized by looking at the work he does. If he does one or more of the following he is likely to be a true, value-creation, sense-making curator:
The more of these activities you incorporate in your content curation workflow, the higher the quality and the value that you will be creating. I myself strive to gradually master and integrate all of these actions in my daily curation work. It is not easy, nor fast, but it is something meaningful for me and it makes me feel I have truly contributed to 'make sense' of the information and resources available out there.
How Do You Recognize a Wasteland-Filler - Aggregator - Republisher?
Winning The SEO Battle Through Content Curation
Why Curation? by Idiocreative Duration: 8:50
A Word on Scoring SystemsFinally a word on 'scoring systems' that attempt to help readers identify supposedly better curation work. I am very skeptical that any such system can work, especially when the criteria it utilizes are kept secret, and when some of the users of the system have access to them. My advice is this: Beware of any system that attempts to “score” or rank your curation work unless it transparently states the criteria and formulas it uses. Use your head to look at any curator's work and evaluate personally its usefulness and ability to satisfy appropriately your information needs. Most of the reputation scoring systems now available online, tend to measure some parts of your activity and engagement online, with mixed results. In my humble opinion the only reputation system that has any value today is the public endorsement by other people, stating specifically why they do appreciate your work. It's easy to get thousands of followers, likes or shares, if like it is the case today, there are tons of people wanting to game such systems and many services selling such things for very low prices. On the other hand it is very, very hard to get someone that is reputable and respected to openly endorse someone else unless he/she has good very good reasons and motives to do so. The risk is in fact evident, as providing easy endorsements to people or work that is not of true value will only lower anyone's credibility and reputation. And you can't use or buy fake endorsements as even if you did, they are worth nothing. I look forward to social networks and curation tools to embrace more credible approaches to authority and reputation scoring soon.
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| Fri, 04 November 2011 0:00:00 GMT |
| Curated Content Delivery Formats: Beyond News Portals and Magazines |
The new frontiers for content curation tools and services are in a) providing advanced collaborative ('social)' features and in b) introducing and integrating new and effective, highly visual, delivery formats.
Curating content and news is not just about the selection, editing and contextualization of stories about a specific topic or theme, but it is increasingly about how these information items are (collaboratively) gathered, organized, grouped, displayed and in which ways they can be accessed and browsed by those interested in them. For me, one of the most fascinating aspects of this exploding content curation trend, is the speculative exploration of how 'curated' content collections could best benefit from alternative and more effective delivery formats than the classic linear, top-to-bottom, chronological, river-of-news sequence. Nothing wrong with this format, but it is a good format only if you want to give relevance to curated news stories in chronological order. Just like most news sources have done until today. The more recent, the higher in the list. But anytime you are working to curate content according to non-chronological parameters, you are off into a largely unexplored and uncharted land. At least for now. As a matter of fact, there are positively more content types than the 'breaking news' and the typical curated list, as much as there are a lot more ways to look at a curated set of information items beyond the habitual following of a linear vertical sequence. In this article I lightly explore some of the reasons why I expect an explosion in content curated delivery formats, and then provide an extended list of both existing and new, emerging curated content delivery formats, that I expect you will start to see and use more frequently in the near future. Here is what I see:
Is there a problem?
While there has recently been an explosion of content curation tools , 95% of them, deliver your curated collections as a linear stream of news or a typical top-to-bottom list of content items. Some of these new curation tools output content as a newspaper page, others in a magazine-like format, others as lists, with most delivery formats grouped around the generation of page dense of titles and links. Little or no options, besides changing the number of columns, fonts, the background or layout colors are available to the new curators when it comes to selecting an appropriate delivery format for their high-value hand-picked content. In other words, new content curation tools offer little or no features or options to help you highlight specific items or groups in your sets, nor tools to aide you in selecting the visual approach / design layout that could be most appropriate for the effective delivery of your curated collection. How about 'navigating' a curated collection? Are you offered options and alternatives that would help your readers explore and discover valuable items in your collection more easily? Oh yeah, you can sort and move around curated items in a few of these tools, a few have a small set of design templates to play with, but the overall visual paradigm through which the curated content is served, is basically always the same: A linear sequence of information items caged inside a newspaper, magazine-like or vertical list metaphor. The great opportunity for curation startups is in providing added value, features and premium options that would allow curators to choose and customize the delivery format of their 'curated' content collections in ways that would enhance readers ability to explore, browse and make sense of what is being accessed. This is why I anticipate that developers of curation tools will soon start paying much greater attention to exploring and designing new curation delivery formats beyond the popular newspaper-magazine feed we see most everywhere.
Alternative Views
Curated content collections do not need to be confined to the two-dimensional print-legacy of newspapers and magazines. The digital space provides so many more available dimensions, that it would be a pity not to put them to better use. For example, a simple consideration I want to make is relative to the fact that readers, rather than publishers of curated collections, could be the ones that could be placed in the position of choosing the type of visual metaphor through which they would prefer to navigate and explore any kind of 'curated' information space. Do I want to use an horizontal scrollable timeline (see Memolane) or a fancy and zoomable iPad-like magazine or flipbook, or do I prefer a slideshow (Qwiki and Storify) rather than a visually navigable and zoomable mindmap a-la-(Pearltrees or like I often do with Mindmeister)? It would be lovely if my readers could choose. Or take 'faceted search'. Couldn't this be one of the new ways of delivering a curated set of information units? ...for example, a collection of books might be classified using an author facet, a subject facet, a date facet, etc.' (Source: Wikipedia) Kipcast, a company who has been a pioneering leader in the real-time automated news curation space, is making some notable progress in this direction by working on multiple fronts to gather and interlink related information items inside large information streams. See the Toronto Inside Chronicle beta for an idea of what is to come on this front by exploring the tags inside specific news stories pages.
The Opportunity
The scope of curation work, can be seen as somewhat similar to the one of an artist: helping you discover what is not self-evident, obvious, accepted. The artist highlights unique elements in his artwork and shows familiar things from a new perspective. SHe guides you in seeing things through a new light. Curators have much affinity with some of these traits, and as soon as there will be more content curators outside of the news area, the need to utilize different and more effective curated delivery formats will be felt more intensely. Such curators do not need to pick and choose from the stream of a multitude of news sources what to put in their curated newsradars, but rather need to create finite 'bundles' or 'collections' of content items around a specific topic or theme, unbound from chronological, time-bound, sequential linear displays. Take for example the need to curate the best and most interesting written pieces of content that exist already on a certain topic to create some kind of an introductory digest-guide to it. How do I go about curating this collection in a meaningful format? An infographic? A map? A diagram? A mindmap may bring the best of all these three formats into one. A mindmap in fact allows me to group inside a small visual space a lot of information, as well as some of the relationships between the items in my collection. A mindmap also allows me to zoom in and out of information items and, in some cases, to add links and multimedia objects, such as images, maps or videos to each information node. But mindmaps, as they work now, are badly conceived to do this kind of work. I have tried to bend them to this need and to awaken those making them to look with more interest in this direction, but with no positive results so far. This is where the opportunity is. Making visual communication tools, such as mindmaps for example, serve as new curated content delivery formats, by integrating features that would specifically support both the curator's gathering and organizing tasks, the social-collaborative aspect, as well as the navigational and discovery features for the reader-viewer. Curators crave for the ability to search, collect, clip and edit content way before thinking about how they are going to organize it and deliver it. So this is an important aspect of any curation tool, and one that makes most mindmapping tools yet not mature for this task. ...but they are, like some other curation tools, getting closer... and this is where the opportunity is. Visual communication tools, like mindmaps or presentation tools, do not see themselves yet as potential vehicles for curation work, while on the other side, curation tools have not yet understood the potential of utilizing highly visual delivery formats as a key competitive edge in their future development path. P.S.: In strict theory, Google could be the one company whose mission and market perception could gain a tremendous boost from launching a service that helps its users organize and curate information and content sources in effective and useful ways. As a matter of fact, it has already developed several parts of this puzzle (Google Search, Google Books, Google bookmarks, Google lists, Google Maps, YouTube lists, G+, etc.) and I would not exclude the possibility that Google may indeed surface soon such a system.
The Expanding Universe of Curated Content Delivery FormatsTo help you see and explore what I am envisioning, I have spent some time exploring - beyond what I have already done here - the many different existing content curation formats as well as some of the possible new ones. Here below, I have listed some of the most popular content delivery formats, alongside some of thse that I think will be the new and emerging ones. I hope this list can serve as a starting inspiration point for anyone involved in exploring how to deliver curated content in more effective ways.
ConclusionsNew curated content delivery formats are rapidly emerging to support the increasing demand for collecting, organizing and republishing-sharing information collections of all kinds. Due to rapid surge in the amount of information available under all forms, from news stories, to photos, videos, reports and scientific info, it is only inevitable that new roles and tools will emerge to help us filter, organize, and make sense of all this information available to us. If you are a web publisher or author, I suggest you familiarize yourself with these new curated content formats as well as experimenting and introducing new ones. If you are a startup or a company developing visual communication services or tools to help people curate content and information of all kinds, I recommend you strive toward trying to integrate features that allow the delivery of such curated content collections in new and effective ways, by taking inspiration from the samples I have listed above. The above are some of the reasons why I expect a blossoming of new and innovative curated delivery formats, allowing a much broader application of the curator skills to many more content contexts beyond the typical curated news or link digest.
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| Tue, 06 September 2011 0:00:00 GMT |
| Web Design: The Emergence Of Page Apps |
A web designer creates beautiful layouts for the web content of his customer. The customer is happy at first, but as he grows more knowledgeable about the web and its possibilities, he starts asking new layout changes, integration of new features and more.
What happens next is that the designer grows angry to the customer instead of rejoycing for the new work, knowing that changes and adjustments are more of a pain in the ass than an opportunity for extra revenue. At the same time the customer slowly develops a feeling of frustration and imprisonement by having to depend so much on his web designer / agency to get what he wants. So, everyone loses in this equation. But then, how can the typical freelance web designer or small web agency scale itself if the complexity of the technology behind a web site then binds them to the customer for any little change or request? Small clients in turn, need to operate rapidly and independently and do not enjoy at all the idea of having to depend on someone else to make changes or improvements to their web site. Worse than this, they don't expect and don't easily accept the idea of having to pay extra money to get these small changes done. It's really a negative vicious loop. How can it be solved? Read on and see what I think is about to happen.
What Is the Problem?
Web designers can do less and less, while being stretched way too thin by their customer requests, so much so that the idea of having more customers becomes many times a dreaded problem. The paradox is that while many a web designer are more than 'willing' to help out his / her many customers with their small requests, on the other hand, accepting to work on these many little changes and revisions prevents them from being able to accept and handle new design work, which is the one that 'pays'. Customers grow frustrated and unsatisfied with their inability to control, modify and edit their own web sites, 'just in the time'. Even technically-savvy customers grow frustrated as well, because even though they can make adjustments themselves, they often result in less then optimally designed and usable results. It is a vicious loop that slowly kills the web designer and his passion, while leaving often a customer frustrated and unsatisfied of his inability to modify and improve independently his own web site. This is the problem. Web designers do not want to succumb under hundreds of small technical requests and their customers need to be able to create 'professionally designed' web sites, without having to depend constantly on them to maintain and edit them. How can this problem be solved? It may actually be that the solution is already well underway.
What Is The Real Need?
Let me step back for a second and analyze more specifically what the actual need of the user-customer really is. The problem-need of the user-customer / web publisher is the one of being able to create, and then then update / modify / review, specific content-application formats on his web site. He may have a home page, a landing page to sell a product, a subscription page, or a directory of services he maintains. There may be a small shop, a newsradar or even a blog. The list could go on extensively. The point is that most professional web publishers and entrepreneurs will want not just a container for text, or a simple blog, but something which integrates, several different content functionalities / formats and which looks outright 'professional', 'slick', 'usable' and 'user-friendly'. While the functionality part may be satisfied in many cases by the vast number of plugins, and add-ons for web sites and blogs available online, the simple addition / integration of these is not without pain and it often results in a 'patched-up' solution, where you can see that many new elements have been added without having been designed to be together. Even the many templates galleries available on the Web do not provide a solution to this issue, as the vast majority of them provide a pretty standardized approach to web site design, mostly based on blogs and traditional web site architectures. The functionalities provided in these templates are limited to providing the basic building blocks to integrate any video, audio, text, image or feed into a page, but much less on providing specific in-page functionalities, devoted to take on specific 'value creation' tasks. Let me give you again some examples of such type of 'page-apps', as I would tentatively call them:
These are in my opinion, just a small sample of the type of content value components that individuals and companies operating on the web are increasingly demanding. These individuals want better tools to produce 'professionally looking' valuable content, without needing to keep a web designer on their payroll and without needing to call the webmaster every time they want to make some little change.
Existing Solutions
The available solutions today, do go beyond standard web site templates, but without solving the issue. The possible alternatives to design a web site without using a web designer today include: a) Templates Themes (see my Top40 Templates Design Galleries map) Each one of these alternatives, provides some unique specific advantages, but as I have pointed out, none really solves the issue. Let's look at each one and see why:
What We Actually Need
What I think is needed is a new breed of tools and services that allows entrepreneurs, marketers and web publishers of all kinds to easily customize, pre-set, 'intelligent' design, which go beyond the aesthetics of creating a neat home page or article layout and into providing a very specific function. If web designers can invest their time into 'virtualizing' their skills into sets of functional templates / apps for very specific needs, then they can also provide, rent out or sell the tools, assistance or know-how required to edit and maintain them independently. In other words: designers should gradually become creators of design tools that 'enable' non-designers to produce effective solutions and to make them in turn distributors of design knowledge and skills to those that do not have it. Designers need to express higher-value through their skills while being able to scale themselves. That is: the publishing-communication tool without the design component is worth nothing. We need both the function and the design. Integrated into one.
From Static Content Pages To Page-Apps
Today, the name of the game for who wants to be effective in communicating and marketing online is engagement. To get your message across or to get people to support your cause you need to engage them. To have them discuss, to have them provide you feedback and ideas, to have them act as your best marketing agents, you need to engage them. This is why going beyond the traditional blog post or the basic article approach is so critical in today online ecosystem. Readers are looking for unique, high-value experiences, and especially for those where, beyond informing or entertaining themselves lightly, they can also contribute, share, participate deeply.
The Emergence of App-PagesThe good news, is that such new breed, as I would call it, of page-apps is already out there. In essence, 'page-apps' are web services or software tools designed to provide entrepreneurs, business people and web publishers with the ability to add, design, modify and integrate new content and web site functionalities, without ever needing to sacrifice on quality, precision, and without needing to hire a designer and a webmaster to do it specifically for them. To best describe such page-apps it would be good again to refer to the shortlist of web site building tools I have mentioned above, as these new apps combine some of the unique traits and features of:
while adding the characteristics of:
Characterizing Traits of Page-Apps
These new emerging page-apps are recognizable by these traits:
Examples of Page-Apps
Many of the 'Profile Page' services provide what I would consider a page-app. Here a few: Curation tools are a good example of page-apps that have a very specific function and which, in some cases, start to show some integrated design intelligence. Custom landing page builders, squeeze page and video-squeeze page building systems: But there are tons of examples in all possible areas: Here are some web site design tools made for designers which are already moving in the right direction: Tools and services to create elegant photographer or web designer portfolios. Shopping and e-commerce examples:
Benefits
Conclusions
I have a very strong feeling. The CMS and publishing tools we have been using over the last 10 years or so, are about to give way to a new breed of communication tools. These new publishing instruments and tools will differentiate themselves from the traditional CMS and blog publishing platforms by allowing non-technical individuals and non-designers to create professionally-looking content-pages-with-functionalities for their web sites. Specifically these new publishing tools: 1) will integrate a muh higher level of design 'intelligence' making virtually impossible for authors and publishers to create amateurish layouts and compositions. 2) will provide the ability not to be just'content containers' but to utilized for interacting and providing a specific function, app or service to the user such as showcasing a gallery of images, displaying a directory of services or tools, comparing different softwares, curating a thematic newsradar, and so on. 3) will be easy to use, highly interactive, will contain many great presets, and will be economically accessible to most web and mobile publishers.
a) We can't expect web publishing tools, however sophisticated, to solve all of our problems as such tools are not aware of our objectives, nor of the type of message we are trying to communicate.
Photo credits: |
| Wed, 27 July 2011 0:00:00 GMT |
| The Complete Guide To The Social Media Exchange: Empire Avenue - Part 2 |
Is Empire Avenue just a fad? Is EAv just another social network and maybe a fascinating new type of news reader (like Robert Scoble writes), or is it really - like I think - a whole new ball game?
And assuming one wants to start playing it, what are the best strategies and approaches to make it work? In this second part of my Complete Guide to Empire Avenue (Part 1) I have brought together some of the best resources, videos, articles and tools, that I would recommend you to look at if you want to get good at EAv. Find out:
Find out more about this new fascinating universe, at the crossroad between social media analytics, social network marketing and cooperative online gaming.
Will It Take Off or Is It a Fad?
Before deciding whether or not you will invest time into Empire Avenue, I guess you may be wondering whether my excitement and passion for it may not just be the fruit of my love for new technology toys and ego-stroking game mechanics. And you would be right in doing so. Given the shrinking amount of free time we are faced within our daily activities, any new addition, especially if of the game kind, should truly provide some tangible enjoyment, the opportunity to learn something valuable and to gradually build new relationships. My personal impression, after having played now for just over a month, is that EAv is a truly valuable and highly innovative mix of gaming, social networking and stock market mechanics. In my experience EAv does provide enjoyment, learning and social networking benefits well beyond what I have seen elsewhere online. I don't have a crystal ball, nor I am an official analyst for this industry sector but, while I may be certainly wrong on this, I have developed a strong sense that EAv is unlike the typical game for many reasons. EAv introduces the online public for the first time into a realm where the physically real influences the virtual and vice versa. This is a game in which winning is a highly collaborative effort, and where adopting low-level game tactics does not pay back over the long run. The key factor - and again I may not see this properly - in my humble opinion, that sets Empire Avenue completely apart from any other gaming and social networking experience I have been exposed to until now, is the fact that unless you truly master the art /science of helping, supporting and cooperating with others toward a mutually beneficial growth, you are doomed. Solo plays for the sake of having the highest stock value or dividends accrue much less overall return to those who play them, as this game provides so much more than the score or dividends you are able to rack up. At least, this is what I see. Given the many different opinions that exist on EAv, I think that the best think you can do to find out who is really right, is either to play it now or to wait a year and half and see what happens to it. Here, some interesting EAv mentions, thoughts and comments, which may help you further understand what this game is all about.
'The stock market aspect is a window dressing gimmick, to what could become a very valuable introduction to this diverse ecosystem of players and thinkers.
'Empire Avenue's getting traction I think because it has the potential to create a kind of contribution economy built out of social connectivity.
'While it's easy to compare to Facebook games like Farmville, EA is different in that it lets you continue growing in value without visiting the site.
'I've been on EA for almost a year now and seen it grow from a niche community to this point where it's gaining some sort of traction.
'There are many reasons to like Empire Avenue but I also have some concerns. I’m not crazy about the 'shop' as part of the monetization strategy... yet (but I understand you have to pay the bills, and I’m sure servers aren’t cheap). My thoughts are that EA should be focusing on building their user base first and the money will typically follow.' |
| Tue, 19 July 2011 0:00:00 GMT |
| The Complete Guide To The Social Media Exchange: Empire Avenue - Part 1 |
If you are curious to see what happens at the convergence between social networking, social influence and reputation, online engagement and gamification, I think it is about time you gave a good look, if you haven’t already done so, at Empire Avenue.
Empire Avenue is an online community game based on the idea of a stock market where you buy and sell shares in individuals and where their value is based on how active and effective they are in their use of social media. In other words, this is the best free social media training playground camp on planet Earth. It is a social media real-time bio-feedback machine... In fact, if you want someone to get a fast grip on how you use effectively social media, without being in an isolated vacuum, Empire Avenue is the perfect boost, motivator, monitoring dashboard and progress meter for any serious new buddying social media guru. Its pros?
But the most fascinating aspect of Empire Avenue, may be actually something that it is not there yet. I myself have a hard time distilling in a few clear words what this is, but the overall feeling is that Empire Avenue is ushering us into a new, unexplored and fascinating dimension. But notwithstanding it, here, in this curated multi-part guide to EAv, you can find all that you will need to know, to get on board and start moving your first steps in the right direction. P.S.: A really special thank you goes to Chris Pirillo - e(PIRILLO) on EAv, who has been the first to truly understand, appreciate, and then to embrace, support and evangelize Empire Avenue benefits and great potential. Here is Part 1: all you should know, see or check, before diving into Empire Avenue.
What Kind of Animal Is This?The Social Stock Market - Empire Avenue
I find this interesting, to say the least. Very interesting is in fact to analyze how Empire Avenue will evolve, to see how effective their business model already is, and to anticipate how the data EAv aggregates and makes visible could be used by advertising agencies or brands to select or identify great influencers or potential brand ambassadors in specific markets. If you are curious to learn and discover in more detail what Empire Avenue is all about, after spending three weeks on board as an actual player myself, I have decided to curate a Complete Guide to learn and invest inside Empire Avenue, by distilling and organizing the growing wealth of videos, articles, guides and resources are available out there. Since Empire Avenue may appear a bit overwhelming or confusing at first, the tutorials and resources listed in this guide should help you move much more swiftly through it.
How Does It Work
Empire Avenue is a social media stock exchange and the people who participate in this game have one common goal: to accrue the largest earnings and dividends as to produce wealth both for them and for their investors. Each EAv player, receives daily 'dividends' from those individuals that he has invested in. 'For example: You buy 10 shares in someone, and if that someone has activity that engages other people and is creating value in their networks, they will produce 'earnings'. Every morning you will receive a part of the virtual currency (Eaves) that they earned. You get to be part of their success. And the more you invest in them, the more you will earn as dividends from them.'
Fun Tracking System and Social Media Exchange
Pure Entertainment
A Social Network Too?
A Great Game
Recruitment Potential
Inside Part 2, you will find: - Who Can Play - How To Start Playing - How To Move On and Make Your Investments Soar - Will It Take Off Or Is It a Fad? - EAv Ultimate Resource List
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| Tue, 12 July 2011 0:00:00 GMT |
| Online Curation: The What, Why And How - An Interview With Micah Sifry |
Why is content curation so important? In this video interview, I recorded with Micah Sifry, co-founder and editor of the Personal Democracy Forum, you can taste one more viewpoint and explanation of why news and content curation are becoming so important. And not only.
Micah Sifry states it clear and without any hesitation: such abundance of content and of people producing it offers great business opportunities that are yet to be discovered. 'I actually think it's a market opportunity for entrepreneurs, as well as for editors, both in terms of building better tools for sifting through all of this information to tease out the signal from the noise.' Curation is not just a fad or the equivalent of sharing a few pictures and funny links with your Facebook friends. Yes, at some level that is content curation too, but what Micah Sifry wants to highlight is how relevant it is to understand that serving a market of 10,000 info-hungry specialists is going to increasingly be a business opportunity, unlike what has been happening in the past, with publishers / editors / bloggers all vying for 'traffic' and large, mass-like audiences. This is going to change. 'Niche media has absolutely got a healthy future' he says happily. And you don't need to depend or feel constrained by Google as there are several alternative avenues that you can use to make yourself be found. What you need to pay attention to, instead, is the fact that Google does have the power to define the world, to be the lens through which we see the world. The problem with this is that in effect the Googles and Facebooks of this world may be creating separate realities. My friend, Eli Pariser, who spoke at PDF last year, has a excellent new book about this problem. He calls it 'The Filter Bubble'. To fight this issue we need curation and we need to help the worst intellectual disease we have around today: a lot of people just want superficial information. They suck up what they are being served from the mainstream fire-hose without any critical awareness and in a totally passive way. Such profound lack of a new media literacy, it's probably stemming from too much of education devoted simply to forced memorization and regurgitation, instead of to the healthy intellectual development of analysis, critical thinking and questioning abilities. Here in full, Micah Sifry video interview on curation, including a full text transcription.
The Need for Curation
Micah Sifry: Now we have a wide open conversation with no real gatekeepers, and the result is cacophony. We have many people speaking at once, and our tools for listening have not caught up to our tools for speaking. The result is that many, many people experience social media as an overwhelming flood. They call it like drinking from a fire hose, which you can't do. The issue is that we need better filters. Clay Shirky has said, 'We don't have information overload, we have filter failure.' The old filters that we relied on to basically sort through all the news of the day and present to us what was important, they're broken. But we haven't built better ones. We're just beginning to learn how to do that. I don't think we want to silence people and say: 'You're not qualified to speak. You don't have a degree from the right university,' or 'You don't know the right person.' That was the old system where the gatekeepers were very arbitrary. The new system is wide open, but incredibly messy and noisy. I actually think it's a market opportunity for entrepreneurs, as well as for editors, both in terms of building better tools for sifting through all of this information to tease out the signal from the noise. We'll see editors or curators or people who act as aggregators: they pick a specific subject, and they know that subject very well. On the stock market, there are people who specialize in one stock, right, and they just do that stock all day. And it may be the same has to happen in media, where we will see lots of niche sites or niche curators, and you just trust that person to help you figure out one piece of the things that you're interested in paying attention to. But in the meantime, it's confusing, I'm sure, for some people very frustrating, because they don't know where to begin.
The Work of the Curator
Micah Sifry: There are a couple of ways that I do this [the curator] role. I edit a daily website called Tech President, which comes out of Personal Democracy Forum, the conference that I help run, and both of those are efforts to curate a conversation. Tech President is focused on how politicians are using the web and vice versa, how people are using the Web to affect politics. Every day on that blog you will see some handpicked news items pointing you to the stories that we think are interesting that day, in that space where politics and technology are colliding into each other. You'll also see a few articles where we are reporting and analyzing and trying to look at the larger picture. The conference is in some ways the analog version, where people are actually meeting and hearing many of the leading voices and the leading practitioners in that same space, where politics and technology collide into each other. My sense is that maybe there are - I don't know - 10,000 or 20,000 people on the planet who really need to know in an in-depth way about this place, where these two things are overlapping. And maybe there's a larger group that maybe has a lighter interest, occasionally, they want to know what does it mean, how Obama used the Internet, or they'll ask the most general questions, but I really see us as serving a core group of maybe 10,000 readers who would be regular, and they are contributing. They are, themselves, participating in that. The challenge for me as a media entity or as a publisher is: 'Is that enough to make a living? Can I sell enough tickets to my conference, get sponsors who want to be associated with this community, to keep the blog going the rest of the year?' That's the sort of world that we're in, but I think niche media has absolutely got a healthy future. I think are the big, older, expensive-to-run media organizations that have problems.
How to Be Found
Micah Sifry: We live right now in a world where search is the primary way that people look up information and Google is very trusted brand as a vehicle for learning things. So we have a challenge, which is you can't ignore Google and say, you know, 'I'm not going to pay attention to search results.' You definitely have to try to do well on the particular searches that relate to your core topic. We don't have any choice. A few years from now, maybe the situation will be different because there will be competition. The other thing is that it's clear that there are many pathways to being found. There's also Twitter. I think a high proportion of people who are interested in politics use Twitter as their main channel for news. We have a joke: 'I go on CNN to check to see what's on Twitter. They'll keep me up to speed.' So to some degree, it isn't just Google as your only avenue. Lastly, you're talking about a low-information user, somebody who just searches. For argument's sake, if you're working in a niche media, that's of less importance to you than making sure you're reaching your core audience. There are clear-cut ways of doing that where you can be very proactive:
The Personalization Danger
Micah Sifry: I would say that it's a double-edge sword. First of all, it's very hard to compete with Google, unless you have a few billion dollars. There are tools that are being developed to help people sift through the fire hose. For example, I use a tool called TweetedTimes, that takes my Twitter feed and selects for me, based on the people I follow, what stories they're most linking to. And so I get like a front page, based on the people I think are worth following, what they think is interesting at any given moment. It's very helpful. I don't only rely on it. It's one source. I also look a the New York Times front page. The double-edge sword - and this is really worth more attention - is this: The way that sites like Google and Facebook are dangerously crossing lines of personal information in their effort to either present the best search result or put the best advertising in front of you. The more serious concern I have about Google is not just that it has this big power to define the world, to be the lens through which we see the world, but that it is no longer the same lens. If I search on a subject on Google, and you do the exact same search, we will not get the same results. That's because Google actually is making other judgments. They will look at where you're searching from. They may think about what time of day. If they have your information because you are registered in Google as a user, then they have all kinds of additional information, and they are doing it because they think they're going to give you a better service by fine tuning the results to you. The problem is that in effect they are creating separate realities. My friend, Eli Pariser, who spoke at PDF last year, has a excellent new book about this problem. He calls it 'The Filter Bubble'. We all live in these separate bubbles created by this filtering mechanism, which is no longer uniform, and that worries me. The scary thing about some of the social media development is the degree to which a few platforms have tremendous power, and the degree to which consumers or users of those platforms don't realize how much of their own information they are willingly giving away. And then also how the results of how the platform companies use that information can actually separate us and make us no longer even experience the same information, the same basic facts about the world. I worry far more about that than I worry about the possibility that some search result will be a little not nearly getting to the best information. The problem is is that a lot of people just want superficial information. They are not intense news followers. The ones who are, the Internet is this wondrous blessing. I watch my son, who's almost 18, and he will just spend hours on Wikipedia. He's very happy jumping from reading article to article, and he's filling his head with information. He's not just reading the two paragraphs. Developing that taste for deep knowledge is a different problem. We're not going to solve it simply because we have the world's best library at our fingertips. That taste has to be inculcated I think much earlier in how we educate our children, and the challenge is to make our children learn how to search well, and how to pull information together well, as oppose to memorize. Too much of education is memorization and regurgitation, instead of analysis, think for yourself, ask questions, and then know how to find the answers.
The Complete Guide on News and Content CurationPart 1: Why We Need It
Micah Sifry is co-founder and editor of the Personal Democracy Forum, a website and annual conference that covers the ways technology is changing politics and TechPresident.com, its award-winning group blog on how the American presidential candidates are using the web and how the web is using them. In addition to organizing the annual Personal Democracy Forum conference with his partner Andrew Rasiej, he consults on how political organizations, campaigns, non-profits and media entities can adapt to and thrive in a networked world.
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| Wed, 29 June 2011 0:00:00 GMT |
| Content Curation And The Future Of Search: The Howard Rheingold's Interview |
Are content curation and the future of search converging? Who will you trust when it comes to find out what alternatives to a problem are out there and you have only an Internet connection? How much individual freedom do you want to sacrifice to an algorithm, no matter how accurate?
But why, you may rightly ask, to question Google or other search engines ability to sort and classify results when they have done it for so long already? The reasons could be many, but they key ones I see, can be summed up on this short list: a) Most Internet users believe that search engines are unbiased and that they do provide the most relevant results for what I need to find out. They do not question or doubt the secret system by which these information results are provided. The reality is that “More and more, your computer monitor is a kind of one-way mirror, reflecting your own interests while algorithmic observers watch what you click. (Source: Eli Pariser)” b) The quantity of information available online has grown and keeps growing at a tremendous pace. Classifying and organizing what is relevant becomes therefore increasingly difficult, given that ideally, what may be a valid set of search results for me may not be as relevant or useful to another person. c) Lists of text results are becoming less and less useful. Valuable context is missing. Google search results offer less and less of a comprehensive quality view on a topic and more and more a window on a few results, surrounded by commercial paid ads. d) Internet users like me increasingly want to make sense and understand deeply a specific topic rather than finding a set of short blog articles on it. e) To solve these issues, search engines and social networks have long been developing personalized results. Personalization, the one generated by invisible filters on Facebook, Google and elsewhere, predetermines what is relevant for you, based on history, preferences, and the choices your online friends. But you as a user have little or no way to tweak this or to establish which friends to trust and which not. f) Information personalization may be good to suggest what to buy next, according to what your friends have liked or bought before you, but it may not be the best choice when it comes to making informed decisions or understanding an issue by analyzing different viewpoints. These, are the first, quite evident reasons pointing to a growing problem we have not paid much attention to until now: Centralized and secretive information filtering, for which you have never consciously opted in. What are the ways and solutions around it? Content and search curation, done by humans for other fellow humans, may be the best solution of all. In this recent video interview that Howard Rheingold recorded with me, I introduce some of the basics of content curation, its role, importance and the characteristics, traits and tools required to do it properly. From there, I also explain the great opportunity and potential 'trusted content and search curators' may have in the future of the Internet, as they may become our most trusted gateways to the information and sources we are looking for.
The Forgotten ChoiceThe greatest danger in all of this, is the thing we all see the least: our forgotten choice. As Eli Pariser clearly points put in his Filter Bubble, I never chose to enter the information bubble, but the bubble is so pervasive that it never gets questioned. If I chose to watch a specific TV channel or to read a newspaper I can actively decide what kind of critical perspective to adopt to look through it. But when it is Google or Facebook, invisibly suggesting me what is most relevant, or important for me, something else is now shaping the way I perceive the world around me. 'Personalised filters come to you �' and because they drive up profits for the websites that use them, they'll become harder and harder to avoid.' 'The You-Loop and Its Dangers
What Is Content Curation?
Robin, I loved your series of articles on curation. I highly recommend them. And I just wanted to get directly from you a few thoughts about curation online, starting with, what do you think the importance and the place of curation is today for anybody who's online?
We have reached, somehow, the limit of understanding and making sense of information just by going out to Google, typing out a query, and getting a listing of things that could be relevant to us. I think this is like being hungry and going to McDonald's. It's fast-food information. But I want something more. When I go to a restaurant, I can choose the type of restaurant, the type of foods, the quality, the level, the type of customer service and so on. I am looking for a new level of accessing information, whereby I'm not just trying to list and rank information but I'm trying to make sense of information. This is what people want more and more. One article by itself, or a link or a resource or a video, sometimes is just a little opening hole into understanding that topic, while if there was some kind of intermediate layer, whether done by an algorithm or by people contributing and working with an algorithm to collect things that make sense on a certain topic, I think we would be in a position to inform and learn much faster and much better than we can do now.
The Qualities of a Curator
Howard Rheingold: What qualities do you think a curator ought to have?
I don't think you can just go about curating a topic because you wake up and that's something you want to do. You certainly can, and gain confidence with it with time, but it would be best that you go and curate something that you're already very passionate about, that you have been exposed to, so that you have some sensitivity, some antennas, that allow you to understand what is good, what is better. ...also because then it becomes a point of, who are you doing this for? Are you just an artist painting something for yourself, or are you curating something for a specific audience, trying to intercept a specific need and resolve it with that channel of information? I would think that knowing the audience and being an expert on the topic helps someone curate whatever type of information items he has at his disposal. Those, I think, are the key elements. Then you've got to be very transparent, and give full credit to whoever you're gathering in, and expose actually, the best qualities of these sources and people. And then add something of your own. That is, the ultimate quality of the curator is like the one for a DJ. I mean, what's the difference between putting on a mixtape or having a live DJ? I think those same qualities apply somewhat to a content curator. That is the ability to listen closely to what type of audience, at the moment, he's serving, and then providing a proper 'context' so that the type of information he or she is collecting makes sense to them. You may have to change titles, descriptions, images, order, how you juxtapose things. But you have to customize the flow for the purpose, theme, and public you're doing that for.
The Curator Position Should Stand Out
Howard Rheingold: So who you are should come through, to some degree. Your sensibility and your point of view ought to not be completely suppressed when you're curating.
I wouldn't be so sure that all the time you would have to bring out your personality, but there is no way that you cannot somehow stand in some position. So it would be a generic position, and maybe more defined positions for those who have to take political stances or research things where there are opposing views. But again, there, you may be a great curator by just standing out for your position, or maybe even a better curator by curating all the positions that are out there and allowing people to discover which one speaks best for them. Both of them are valid to me.
The Curator Workflow
Howard Rheingold: What is your advice to people about how to go about content curation? I know you have a very detailed workflow. If someone wants to go ahead and start curating and they've got a passion for a subject and some knowledge about it, how do they go about it?
Anything, especially that is capable of producing an RSS feed, is very useful for curating and creating channels of information dedicated to a specific topic. You want, then, to become familiar with something that is key. Technically, before, it was difficult to understand: It's what I call a 'persistent search'. That is the ability to set out a search for a topic and be alerted anytime something comes up so that you can discover new things, but you can discover also new sources for information that you may not have been aware of until then. When you bring together different sources, the ones you know plus the ones you're going to discover gradually, the core part of your job is to select, to pick those that really count, and again to customize them, personalize them for your audience, for the specific communication objective you have set up for yourself with that channel or stream of information you are creating. The news curator job to describe is as simple as that. You may want, then, to share this information, to package it up and distribute it in different ways, but the core elements are basically those ones there.
Easy Content Curation Tool: Scoop.it
Robin Good: Many people just worry about: 'What is the tool that can do all this stuff in a simple way without needing me to know HTML, RSS, tags, persistent searches, and so on?' Let me get right to that. If I were to advise a tool that I'm not associated with commercially that I think helps anyone who is a novice to get on good grips on what curating information can do and how it can be done, this is the one you are using yourself since a few days, and that's Scoop.it. Scoop.it is a very simple-to-use, free tool that allows you to aggregate, filter, search, put together information, even lay-out and publish it, within a workflow that is extremely easy and almost intuitive to pick up.
The Universe of Curation Tools
Robin Good: There are actually very many tools. If you recall, on 2005 - I think in March or April - I was in San Francisco with you on Mount Tamalpais. We were talking for the first time - while looking at that beautiful scenery - about what we're discussing now. That is, news curation, and you were looking at me and wondering whether that made any sense. I'm so glad that this time has passed and this 'curation' thing - at the time I was calling it 'newsmastering' - has become a reality. I was so excited last year and in the last few months, when about 60 different content-curation tools have come out. I've created a newsmaster toolkit map you've probably seen, which I update every week. And what is most surprising is to see now all these different areas for content curation... because we started thinking RSS, curating content and news, creating newsradars as I call them, specific thematic channels. But now there's a universe of other possibilities. There is video curation, product curation, fashion curation - which is fantastic. Go and see this site that's called Polyvore, and see what people can do curating together different fashion elements, like shoes and jewelry and other gadgets, and create curated sets that are really interesting and visually appealing. I think the horizon is in understanding that, basically, anything can be curated. It doesn't have to be only news. You can curate stuff that doesn't have to be connected to Twitter or stuff that happens right at this moment. Even collecting and curating what is out there for the past, ...the idea of curation from the beginning until now, it's something useful.
The Future of Search
Robin Good: I think the direction of the future is - if not for Google, for us - to create an alternative type of Google where we can collaboratively curate the information that is out there. Think for a moment if, instead of depending on secret algorithms to decide for us what is relevant, we could choose individually, each one of us, which are the ranking elements we want to use, or tap into your ones and the one of my friend and the other friend and create our own ecosystem of curated algorithms, curated collections of information, of how to make sense of reality, instead of depending on somebody who depends on profits and exclusively on its own earnings to decide what's best for us - that's absurd for me. The world now lives in an economy of information. We depend so much on it that it's not just a matter of doing a business online; it's a matter of allowing each one of us, like to breathe or get water, to be able to access information and make some good use of it. I don't know if you agree with this or not, but to me it's a planetary question that people should start addressing.
Just like there are websites that get a lot of traffic, there are also many, websites that may not get the huge amount of traffic, but we wouldn't have the really rich ecosystem online if we didn't have so many contributors. I really like your vision, which you present so enthusiastically and passionately, of, really, a population of curators. It's not just for the individuals; it's for the whole system. Make it much richer than it is already.
Crowdsourced Content Curation
Robin Good: We want to have different points of view. Should information ranking be fundamentalist religion? Because what is that? If there is one entity that secretly knows what is true or not, isn't that religion? I don't want to depend on some religious organization to decide what's out there, and I want to be able to tap in different points of views. I want to be able to contribute to help other people understand what I've discovered, and the system we have now does not allow me to do this. More and more, I'm looking for people who can be gateways to the information I need, and these must be trusted people, so we need a Google of the people for the people, an army of individual curators doing this for ourselves. That's what we need.
The Complete Guide on News and Content CurationPart 1: Why We Need It
Howard Rheingold is a critic, writer, and teacher; his specialties are on the cultural, social and political implications of modern communication media such as the Internet, mobile telephony and virtual communities (a term he is credited with inventing). Howard Rheingold is a visiting lecturer in Stanford University's Department of Communication where he teaches courses on Digital Journalism and Virtual Communities and Social Media. He is also a lecturer in U.C. Berkeley's School of Information where he teaches Virtual Communities and Social Media. Among his most influential books are Tools for Thought (1985), The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (1993), Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (2002). In 2008, he was a winner in MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning competition and used my award to work with a developer to create a free and open source social media classroom. In 2008, he was a winner in MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning competition and used his award to work with a developer to create a free and open source social media classroom. |
| Tue, 21 June 2011 0:00:00 GMT |
