The Steve Rubel Stream

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!

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?

I wrote post on curation a few weeks ago: http://jameswdcrawford.wordpress.com/?s=curation

Definetely a BIG trend. I would like to know more about the IBM project. How is this curation?

By its nature a tumblelog is pure curation.

financials too with stocktwits :)

you are right on obviously

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.

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).

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/

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

@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.

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

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

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 ;-)

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.

editor+web tools=curation, a la Mechanical Turk

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 growth

i 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

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

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

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.

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 Olsen
CEO, YourVersion

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.

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

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

@malcolm Bastien, fully agree with you

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.

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.