Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Curation, Content Creation

IMG_1217Image by brjkt via FlickrI said at this blog several years ago that content and search will never go stale. We will come up with new forms of content creation. We will find ever new ways to do search. If you think about it, Facebook is search. Twitter is search. Facebook is content creation and curation. Twitter is content creation and curation.

But looks like we are about to embark on a new era of startups that focus primarily on curation. And that is a good thing.
ReadWriteWeb: 3 Reasons Curation is Here to Stay: Pearltrees has just surpassed 100,000 curators and 10 million page views a month, and in the past two years nearly a dozen companies that incorporate digital curation into their models have launched. ...... curation is one of the underlying principles of the Web ...... When Tim Berners Lee originally conceived of the Internet, he envisioned three principal functions: ..... Allow anyone to access any type of document ...... Allow everyone to disseminate his or her own documents ..... Allow everyone to organize the entire collection of documents ...... Hypertext and Google made it possible for anyone to access any type of document. Platforms like WordPress, YouTube, Twitter and even Flickr have made it possible to disseminate documents. As Twitter co-founder Ev Williams said at last year's Web 2.0 Summit, one of his overarching goals was to democratize publishing "by lowering the bar about as far as it could go". ....... curation has begun a similar process towards democratization, and that what we are seeing now is an adoption curve similar to blogging ...... quoted Russian mega-investor Yuri Milner as saying, "I think the next big theme is basically curation." ....... Fred Wilson, has written about the value of curation in social services. His contention is that curation improves the signal-to-noise ratio in social Web services that have become "messy and hard to navigate." Yet another high-profile thinker and investor, Paul Kedrosky, contends that curation begat search which is being replaced once again by curation. ..... curation is not just the flavor of the month, but a rapidly growing trend that represents both a third phase of the Internet and a huge opportunity for entrepreneurs and investors.
The Yahoo directory was the original act of curation. That got taken over by search, aka Google. Now major league curation is taking place across platforms like Facebook and Twitter. The next phase necessarily will be search based on all that curated stuff. Facebook could go deep into search down the line.

Facebook Could Do Well In Search
IMG_1362Image by brjkt via Flickr
Fred Wilson: Curation
Paul Kedrosky: Curation is the New Search is the New Curation: Curation steadily gave way to algorithmic search, which at first was just spidering of the web, and then more intelligent spidering with keywords. And then it became Google, with ranking algorithms that placed websites into a hierarchies of keyword-related relevance based on things like authoritativeness, as defined, in part, by links from other sites — by those original hand-curated lists, ironically enough. ........ What has happened is that Google’s ranking algorithm, like any trading algorithm, has lost its alpha. It no longer has lists to draw and, on its own, it no longer generates the same outperformance — in part because it is, for practical purposes, reverse-engineered, well-understood and operating in an adaptive content landscape. Search results in many categories are now honey pots embedded in ruined landscapes — traps for the unwary. It has turned search back into something like it was in the dying days of first-generation algorithmic search, like Excite and Altavista: results so polluted by spam that you often started looking at results only on the second or third page — the first page was a smoking hulk of algo-optimized awfulness. ......... we could head back to curation, which is what I see happening, and watch new algos emerge on top of that next-gen curation again. Think of Twitter as a new stab at curation ....... the re-rise of curation is partly about crowd curation — not one people, but lots of people, whether consciously (lists, etc.) or unconsciously (tweets, etc) ........ We are going to increasingly see nichey services that sell curation as a primary feature, with the primary advantage of being mostly unsullied by content farms, SEO spam, and nonsensical Q&A sites intended to create low-rent versions of Borges’ Library of Babylon. The result will be a subset of curated sites that will re-seed a new generation of algorithmic search sites, and the cycle will continue, over and over.
Robert Scoble: The new billion-dollar opportunity: real-time-web curation: Twitter did us all a HUGE favor by limiting us to 140 characters. It let us read HUGE numbers of people's opinions. Just today, for instance, I've read thousands of Tweets and shared out the best hundred or so. ...... Well, after having my son this weekend, I see I have a ton of places to share photos, videos, pictures, and little Tweets. But I don't have anyplace I can really put those all together with a nice blog post. ...... I've moved about 60% of my reading time onto my iPhone ..... sites like Mashable and TechCrunch are watching Tweets all day long and are regularly building blog posts out of those Tweets (but they are doing them by hand). ....... Blogging got to a few hundred million people. Twitter and Facebook are going to hit far larger numbers, why? Because the potential market for microblogs is bigger than blogging was. Think about it. Lots of people can write a status message. Not as many people can put together a good blog post. ..... Even more people will be able to curate. ...... we want to curate our lives and now that more and more of you will be pouring your lives into Twitter and Facebook you'll want to save some of those moments in a more permanent, and curated, way.
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