The Next Big Trend? It's All About Curation

Fact: Information sources are exploding. More information will be created in 2009 than all prior years.

Fact: Attention is finite. We're becoming media agnostic, but when we're interested in something we dig down into our interests.

This is why I and others like Robert Scoble are really excited about digital curation. Facebook and Twitter lists are one level of curation. However, there are others. Posterous and Tumblr are fantastic platforms for soliciting contributions from groups of people around a shared interest. And they're platforms that will enable all of us to curate together.

Here are a handful of places where you can see curation at work (more in the gallery below as well) ...

• My Parents Were Awesome is a group-contributed tumbelog that honors our elders. It has received national recognition.


• PopURLs Brown by UPS curates information all around business news (UPS is an Edelman client but we didn't build this site)


• Microsoft and Nissan have built entire brandstreaming sites that showcase conversations around their brand (Edelman built the Nissan site)


• Sawhorse Media is creating a next generation media company by curating tweets in different topics like pets and now lists too


• IBM is using Tumblr to curate ideas for a smarter planet

Do you agree that curation - both automated and human-powered - is the next big thing? This isn't just aggregation. As I wrote in my initial post on the subject it's about separating art from junk online.

See the full gallery on posterous

Comments

[Jeroen de Miranda]

Steve, I agree with you; excellent example for me is Robert's Twitter list http://twitter.com/#/list/Scobleizer/most-influential-in-tech - Robert is curating this list; gives an excellent selection of tweets of movers and shakers in (IT) industry - interesting to see is that this list already has some 2700+ followers; validating the value of this curated list!

[Scott Gould]

Steve certainly this is where things are going. I was at #1pound40 in London on Wednesday discussing this and the curation of news on Twitter.Like Jeroen above says, the hand-picked curation of lists as an example brings back a lot of the personal and relational elements that are lost through automated mass-customisation and mass content distribution.I view you, for instance, as my own personal innovative curator, picking out the best stuff. I think that's a helpful way to view ourselves on Twitter - how are we curating to provide value for others?

[James Crawford]

I wrote post on curation a few weeks ago: http://jameswdcrawford.wordpress.com/?s=curationDefinetely a BIG trend. I would like to know more about the IBM project. How is this curation?

[Steve Rubel]

By its nature a tumblelog is pure curation.

[howardlindzon]

financials too with stocktwits :)you are right on obviously

[optimizerx]

As curation is higher level meeting of needs than simple aggregation, but major search engines need to dedupe & rank for efficient ad serving (= $$$ stream), how are the consumer masses to effectively bring it all together easily from across all of the disparate platforms (Tw/FB/Li/BookMarks/etc.) without unwittingly contributing to bookmarked urls (and now) list proliferation to derive a personal favorite of all the favorite sources.Btw, Google is eliminating digest blogs which serve as archives of Twitter statuses - so that solution no longer is kosher.

[Mark Essel]

I heard your take on stream at the time you were moving from your blog to posterous. I took curation on as a personal challenge. Now I've got the hint at something that can filter the stream with semantic tools and am working on search tools to handle friend and follower streams (wanna know what your followers are most talking about right now?, I do).More to come shortly.. check out http://victus1.victusmedia.com for a taste (you can see a potential monetization path for our streams, personalized ads).

[Shannon Clark]

I wrote about how the Future of Media is curation a year ago. See http://shannonclark.wordpress.com/2008/11/18/the-future-of-media-is-curation/

[FredDavis]

Yeah, back in the old days we used to call a curator an editor...

[wayan_vota]

Fact: More information will be -recorded- in 2009 than all prior years, but I disagree that more will be created. We've always been creating content, just not recording it in data formats that share so easy.

[Steven Addis]

I agree with you Steve. I began blogging about this in 2005 at: CuratorEffect.com. I moved on from the meme but its time may finally be here.

[Steven Addis]

Here's the link: http://www.curatoreffect.com

[James Crawford]

Re: IBM, never really thought of projects like that as curation, but the more I consider their Tumblr the more it makes sense. Tumblr is slightly better for curation isn't it? Have you thought about changing from Posterous? I still use Posterous but am interested in your thoughts.

[Tech_Blend]

Totally agreed here Steve and Pop Urls Brown and Blue Editions are my faves. End of the day its about bringing the best content to one site or platform so others with similar interests can access it easily.I rely heavily on sites like hacker news and Pop Brown for my content.

[Peter du Toit]

Excellent insights as always! Thanks for linking back to the piece you did last year. I think the analogy with Museum curators is very apt. Coming to think of it I do think of you, Robert and Louis Gray among others as curators.

[Steve Rubel]

@James I like Tumblr a lot. I have spent time with the team. They have great features and community. But I like the autoposting features on Posterous and its simplicity.

[dan Phillips]

dave galbraith has been going on about this for ages. His sites are grouped under http://curations.com/. Read his thoughts at http://davidgalbraith.org/technology/digital-curation-the-opposite-of-social-media/1232/ which he wrote in 2007

[denise lee yohn]

i'd like to see brands step into the role of curator!

[FredDavis]

Sheesh, this sure is a case of same old wine, brand new bottle! Editors have been sifting through and curating printed information for centuries... over 15 years ago, when the web was first started, and there were no portals, I had a site called Weblust that curated links in my favorite categories.... got nice thank-you's from people ranging from Ralph Nader to Avram Miller... so yeah, I made a career as a journalist, and it's nice to see a basic journalistic tool like editing come to the web, even in such a crude form as curation ;-)

[cognizr]

Curation will definitely be key as we hanker for ways to reduce information overload. Human curation is, let's say difficult, to maintain and scale. Most of automated curation or attempts are trying to use keywords and so are inherently limited. The real deal will be "Semantic Curation" - the use of semantic technology to curate the spatio-temporally relevant information streams.

[FredDavis]

editor+web tools=curation, a la Mechanical Turk

[Tomas]

i have never thought of myself in terms of a 'curator' but i like it (I have always seen myself as an 'archiver' or just plain 'loco') and wanted to throw my thoughts into this as i have invested a tremendous amount of time and energy in this evolving concept and truly believe in its value and future growthi believe a human(s) is by far the best tech for creating something useful from aggregation whatever web system/service is used - i believe this because i have personally 'curated' 54k items around a niche topic - by this i mean i have collected, organized, optimized, categorized by geography and subject, tagged and prioritized hispanic news over the past 4 years with a lot of love i might add. - imho there is simply no way to get the quality, the human touch without one of us. just my dos centavos

[Miles Maker]

If I can't delete Tweets from my Twitter list, I'm not curating anything.

[Miles Maker]

If I can't delete Tweets from my Twitter list I'm not curating anything.

[charly omer]

I fully agree with you steve. I'm trying to do the same with mcsquare: "separating art from junk online" and share this in almost realtime.