Curation is the new hot buzzword in the tech blogosphere. Some just slough it off as yet another form of aggregation. Others, depending on how the curation is done, throw around words like scrappers and content thieves.
Then you have people like Robert Scoble who – as is his wont – take it to an extreme. However in a post the other day he made some valid points that Louis Gray discussed in a post earlier today.
Robert Scoble, a peer, and fellow geek and curator, said that he will be skipping out on Wednesday’s news, and watching the news ink feeding frenzy as it seeps through our computer screens. His goal won’t be necessarily to report on the news, which will be common knowledge as soon as he starts typing, but to find the best interpretations of the news from his favorite sources. He publicly will be doing something we all must learn to do – separating the news discovery artists from the news spin artists. With tools like Twitter and other networks making it ever easier to hit the publish button, our ability to screen, filter and decide what information is good for us is going to be increasingly tested.
This is something that I have been thinking about off and on for the past little while. It is an idea that I think has a lot of merit and could open up a whole new area for bloggers to expand into.
I’m not talking about the Dredge Report style of curation. Nor am I talking about the hybrid style of Techmeme with their algorithm and biased human editors.
What I do think we could see is more human curation of news, information and ideas done in ways that can provide real value. Especially as people are finding they have less and less time to devote to their own gathering and reading of news and information.
Personal news desks.
I get the sense that a new set of interesting doors could be opening up.
Do you think that we might be on the brink of a new way of finding and processing our daily news fixes?
Very interesting post! We, at Arktan, have been thinking about curation of web content along the same lines.
We provide the ability to aggregate content (tweets, blog posts, photos, videos, bookmarks, news, etc.) from different sources and organize them into channels. Individual items can also be hand-picked and curated into relevant channels.
A channel page can then be shared directly or it can also be re-published to your own website/blog.
Eg. http://bit.ly/90t1OQ
Srikanth
Arktan Co-founder
Your insight for developing tools is dead on. We’ve created a great product that embraces and extends content strategy for brands, bloggers, publishers, pundits and marketers alike. While there have been many tools that capture pieces of functionality around “curation” we’ve created something that combines them all. Our product Curation Station allows for users to aggregate, publish, share and track. http://www.curationstation.com.