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

[danolsen]

Steve, great post! I agree information overload is becoming a bigger and bigger problem. However, I think scaling 100% human curation is going to be a challenge in light of the incredible pace of content creation. I think software-assisted human curation is more likely the optimal solution.I invite you to check out YourVersion a real-time discovery engine that discovers new, relevant content tailored to your topics of interest. We launched 2 months ago at TechCrunch50 where we won the People's Choice Award. Scoble shared his thoughts on curation with us and posted his video interview with us on Building 43.Our v1 feature set is focused on discovery, bookmarking, and sharing, and our Profile page give you a public URL where you can curate your favorite webpages organized by topic. We'll be expanding further into more social and curation features. We also have a free iPhone app and a Firefox toolbar.I look forward to hearing your feedback on the product. Cheers,Dan OlsenCEO, YourVersion

[James]

Steve,Great post!SALE.com (http://www.sale.com) is doing something quite interesting in curating sales information and uncluttering inboxes from ecommerce sites. You can create a list of your favorite stores, and easily browse, or window shop, those stores, as well as view their email newsletters, instead of having email newsletters to your inboxes and acting like spam.

[Trendero]

Great post; I agree. I like the idea of users doing the curation, which is the approach we take at Trendero.com.

[Colleen Greene]

Very good post (and excellent original post from 2008). Data curation *is* a big deal, particularly due to so much information overload. The ability to help people sift through the junk to find useful web-based information revolutionized the role of librarians over the last decade or so. But now, next generation librarians, like me, are looking for ways to harvest and incorporate user-curated data into our products and services.

[Golf SLO]

I guess what I started last week on facebook might be considered manual curation of local golf news (http://golfslo.com/facebook). This is the result of a middle-aged nerd discovering golf. Need to check out Posterous.

[Jughead]

I put together (curated) a blog specifically about social games (www.socialgamenews.com) and it serves two purposes. 1. It provides people who are looking for news about social gaming with a way to find all of the top articles related to a particular story or news event in a very fast and efficient format.2. It creates a chronological archive that can be searched via tagged keywords as well. I am sure many other people are doing the same thing covering different subjects on other blog platforms. (I use Wordpress)

[steve n]

Having managed the sites of a major player in the traditional media space, I can safely say that topic curation by non-professional, anointed experts is a major threat to traditional media companies - particularly if the content is findable. Findability (SEO in particular) will be a major stumbling block as will establishing real avenues for monetization (i.e. going beyond AdWords). Top tier advertisers are still going to the tired, ridiculously thin traditional media sites because of how media buying actually happens. I think curation will be huge; the questions I have revolve around how advertiser dollars will find the curators. This redistribution of media wealth will allow true topic experts, accreditized or not, to develop deeper and more compelling properties. The other problem of findability is also a big one: search engine algorithms seem to penalize single-topic urls relative to multi-topic sites that may be far less valuable to the reader. I'm not sure how either of these problems get fixed to support the natural evolution towards curation and the atomization of topics on the web.

[Malcolm Bastien]

Unless the automated systems are smart and employing a set of sophisticated rules in the content they're gathering, the idea of automated curation just seems to be a bit of a contradiction no?I'm having trouble understanding how "automated curation" could be anything but automation/aggregation in disguise.

[charly omer]

@malcolm Bastien, fully agree with you

[Florentin]

Here is a quick way to run your own popurls style website: http://www.pythondaddy.com/niftyurls/Powered by django, it's using jQuery and YUI Grids for visual effects and dandy features.Instead of tooltips I used a facebook style lightbox (facebox) and the option of showing a full view of the feed.The whole project is available for download, I made it easy configurable so you can roll your own instance.

[Din Freebies]

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.