For avid news and article readers on the net today, and indeed ever, there is just one humongous problem: There is just too much shit out there that hides away all the good stuff! This problem is enhanced by everyone having their own notion of what is shit and what is the good stuff. The solution? Curation.
Eloquently this time:
Way more information is created than can be consumed. That is a plain and simple fact. And in a way we do have the choice between what we wish to consume. But without any sensible sorting and pre- selection, we could only hope to wade through waves and waves of material senseless to us; utter gibberish in other languages, or information directed towards those of other interests or ages. So against the pandemonium of the creators we have various distribution filters. They can be roughly be divided into three; A.I filters and aggregators, crowdsourced lists and curated content.
In the first category we find search engines such as google and altavista, in the second digg, stumbleupon and your twitter wall, and in the third we find news outlets, curated blogs, flickr photo- sets and the like.
Often the three are used interchangeably. A curator may get crowdsourced tips, which are then followed and expanded upon by the use of an A.I. filter, before the curated content is presented in the end.
Your twitter wall is curated by you, but the collection of all the links people shared with you become a sort of crowdsourced news- stream. I even follow a guy who curates his own twitter stream, which he subsequently shares on twitter. It's interaction is crazy. Enormous amounts of information is flowing through a series of selection processes before it ends up at any one channel. Everything that is willfully published, is willfully selected. The whole process takes up a huge amount of time.
Time for Value
In the end it comes down to what has value to you. The broadness of a search engine is wonderful, but you can't wade through it with favorite queries everyday, hoping to find what you didn't know what you were searching for. Crowdsourcing is at best erratic. What you want is stable quality over time, paired with creative selection - or in other words personality, and that you are only going to get from content curation.
But curation is very labour intensive. New material is made and delivered the whole time, which means that any updated curator is also going to be gathering material the whole time. After the selection process, a synthesis of a general theme must be written and presented.
I didn't become aware of this phenomenon until I stumbledupon the fantastic curated site Brain Pickings. In the margins of that blog is written: "Brain Pickings takes 450+ hours a month to curate & edit, between the blog, the newsletter and Twitter." Followed by: "If you find any joy & value in it, please consider a modest donation." The sites founder, Maria Popova, in a lecture given at the Creative Mornings lecture series, spoke about the tremendous dedication serious curation takes, and how we, as an internet nation, is horrible at crediting this work:
Whether we call it link love or the via crediting, giving credit online is incredibly simple, it’s much easier than doing a proper literary citation or clearing image rights, and yet there’s precious little of it online. And for publishers and curators, it’s not about “getting traffic” or “monetization” or any of those dreadful SEO terms. It’s about something much more deeply human, the same thing that I believe underpins every human aspiration and action, and it’s as true of suicide bombers as it is of the greatest artists and poets: And that is the desire to matter in the world, to be seen, to know that our existence makes a difference, that our creative and intellectual labor is of value to the world. - Maria Popova
While I love google, and at least see the value of digg and stumbleupon, these do not offer the same quality of direction as a professionally curated outlet like Dark Roasted Blend or Brain Pickings, or for that matter Kotaku and Wired.
What we as an internet entity must learn is that CURATION = CREATION. It is that simple. Knowledge could be defined as information set in a personalized relation, and that is what proferssional curators provide. They bring together information, often from many places, into one single post. They show us the relation of that content to it self, but also to us. This has value, is is value. The synthesis of entities equals the emergent creation of a new entity. Curation = Creation.
Ultimately the choice for us, is to get to know, love and follow the identity of these outlets. I follow Dark Roasted Blend because they understand what steam-punk, urban exploration and art deco have to do with one another, and I follow brain-pickings because they understand what personal skills, shearing and beauty has to do with creativity. It is that simple.
