The 18th and 19th centuries are remembered for the industrial revolution. The 20th and 21st centuries may be remembered for the information revolution. There is an abundance of content around us. Never before have humans had such easy access to as much information as they do today. An ocean of content is just a click away. However, not all this content is good. In fact, most of it is very poor in quality, and there is a tremendous amount of noise around us. And this dramatic rise in content found online, and the incredible ease of finding it, has, in turn, created a culture of “clickers, stumblers, and jaded spectators.
We now no longer have the time, or the resources, to keep up with the ever-growing amount of new stuff that is all around us. When I need to buy a new phone I have no desire to spend 2 weeks researching hundreds of different models. I want to talk to an expert who would recommend the best model for my needs. When there is a debate on the debt ceiling, I want to read knowledgeable persons who can explain the issues in understandable terms. When there is conflict in Syria, I want to know the historical context and political ramifications by someone who actually understands the issues. All this information overload has led to a parallel search for such experts – or gatekeepers-or what some have taken to calling the new “curators” of the information age. Of course being a curator or a gatekeeper is not an easy job, but in this world of overwhelming choices someone has to do it. And we need to find these gatekeepers or curators in our daily lives if we are to survive the onslaught of the information age with any degree of sanity.
The term “curator” stems from traditional museum curation: museum curators collect art and artifacts and identify the most relevant or important to be displayed in an exhibit for the public. Museum curators are subject-matter experts with higher levels of education that guide an organization’s overall art collection. Curation has also, historically, referred to overseeing the care and preservation of precious collectibles. In the information age, the term curator takes on a wholly new meaning. For with the overwhelming amount of content available on the Internet today, it is difficult for anyone to efficiently manage their daily reading activities, as well as separate useful and accurate content from the dross. This is where the information curator comes in, allowing individuals or businesses to provide a valuable service to their audiences by addressing their need for quality content and the lack of available time to find it. Further, by sharing the most relevant, thought-provoking online content, curation can also establish individuals and companies as authorities and thought leaders. A content curator is thus someone who continually finds, groups, organizes and shares the best and most relevant content on a specific issue online.
But sadly we have arrived where everyone is a content creator- witness the explosive growth of online bloggers. Every magazine seems to have directed their staff to start a blog online and to pretend to become a content curator. Not since Gutenberg have we seen such a significant change in who's able to use the tools of content creation to engage in a public dialog. We, of course, go to trusted sources in order to raise the signal, and lessen the noise and here are some ways that people on the Internet are trying to do this:
Editorial: these are individuals that make decisions about what is worthwhile to promote. Examples include: sophisticated sites like Huffington Post, with millions of page views per month, that run with a similar hierarchy to magazines – and where there are layers of editing, concept vetting, story pitches, etc.
Crowd sourcing: this uses the audience to help guide decision-making about what is important. Examples include: social sharing sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, and Reddit, where the audience can vote on what is important or relevant to the community.
Algorithms: this is when the coders assign importance based on rules that are written into the system themselves. Decisions about implementation, spam control and how to prevent gaming the system have an impact on all users. Examples include: Google, Bing and other search providers – where the heart of search is about filtering content for relevance
The Social Graph: which uses your social connections in combination with one of the above methods. Examples include: Facebook for news and links – this is the purest form since it uses your friends to help show you what’s important.
Improving all four of these “curation” methods will be the biggest challenge of the next ten years of the web – in particular, because so much more content will be coming online.
But it is the individual curators of information that can really help you in your daily lives in handling the information overload. They are like your personal advisers in navigating the complex and complicated world out there in an intelligent and confident manner. You know who they are and what they represent and so trust and reliability become the key words in all your searches. They are not so much curators as your information advisers. There are four types of curators of information that I have encountered:
First is the “forwarder” of information and not really a curator. They will send you a link or a cutting to something that they found interesting or bizarre. This content tends to be generally from your friends and can vary – at least in my case- from the precepts of St Augustine to pandas learning to dance, from home remedies to babies and orangutan friendships. Many of them are a waste of time but some are funny, entertaining and educative. Since they come from my friends, they are at least worth a look – and it helps to have friends with an amazing range of outlandish and interesting tastes. And these forwarders provide a unique function – it is like skimming a newspaper and spotting an unusual news item that you were not really looking for but is nevertheless enthralling as it oftentimes takes you into a completely new world.
In the second category are those who forward views and comments that bolster their own preconceived ideas. These people tend to be generally political activists and those who are outraged by the goings on in the world. I have received links to various sites that single out the corruption fighters in India to the perennial hypocrisy of the American right wing nuts.
But the real curation really starts with the serious bloggers. These are individuals who have a distinctive point of view but write with a purpose, martialling data to carry on their public discourse. In this category are bloggers like the economist Paul Krugman, writer Tom Friedman, sociologist David Brooks or commentators like Gurcharandas. The originator of this approach is Andrew Sullivan, who now writes for the Daily Beast. He has a brilliant description of what a modern day blogger is.
The final category is the true definition of an information curator. These would be found in the serious literary journals where each reference would be religiously quoted and footnoted. These would be found on websites like the Browser or Arts and Letters Daily.
Godin explains: "if we live in a world where information drives what we do, the information we get becomes the most important thing. The person who chooses that information has power…" In the future the economics of the information infrastructure will indeed be curators, but not curators with buildings or newspapers but individuals. From Godin's point of view, we need a middleman, a curator, to help us find what's important. That's where the true value lies. And he says that person will become the linchpin in the information age.
But what will really power curation is a really strong, clear, interesting, unique, distinctive, creative innovative point of view.
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