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.
