Content Curation World

Harold Jarche has a good post about curation and PKM on his blog. Nonetheless is from a year back or more, it is definitely worth a read.

The short relatively post has been inspired by a somewhat misleading tweet by Cristina Milos (where she says that "curating is different than aggregating and that's why she is not a fan of Scoop.it pr Paper.li).

The tweet is misleading because, while Paper.li is indeed an aggregator for most, Scoop.it does not automate the process of selecting and publishing a curated magazine, though, I must admit, plenty of its top viewed channels do not go much beyond what Paper.li does, basically reposting other people content "as is". So I definitely sympathize with this issue.

And the key point Harold Jarche wants to make, is that, anytime there is some kind of human intervention to pick, select, re-title, contextualize or introduce some information, then, we are actually "curating" something. Not so, when we strive to automate, simplify and abbreviate the time needed to produce some valuable info.

He writes (read the word "PKM" as if it said "curation"): "...sense-making, or placing information into context, is where the real personal value of PKM lies. 

The process of seeking out information sources, making sense of them through some actions, and then sharing with others to confirm or accelerate our knowledge are interlinked activities from which knowledge (often slowly) emerges.

...The act of writing a blog post, a tweet, or an annotation on a social bookmark all force you to think a bit more than clicking once and filing it to an automated system. Other sense-making routines, like a weekly review of Twitter favourites and creating Friday’s Finds, encourages reflection and reinforces learning.

Automating sense-making is antithetical to the rationale behind PKM."

Rightful. Insightful. Useful. 8/10

Full post: http://www.jarche.com/2012/03/the-pkm-value-add/