Content Curation World

"When we curate content online, it enhances who we are, both in the sense of... - we learn things, and we help to define ourselves by understanding our own interests - and in a more external way, by allowing other people to better understand who we are.

It becomes part of our ethos, part of our personal brand."

Dr. Gideon Burton of Brigham Young University offers an interesting insight into why curation is such a valuable activity for humankind by pointing out that our efforts to gather, collect and order the information chaos surrounding us, is a critical activity to understand ourselves, to learn more about anything, to make sense of the world we live in.

Even at the lowest, most amateurish level of social sharing or bookmarking, our best efforts to collect and order information, even when they are imperfect, incomplete or even inaccurate, do have great value.

The value is in the opportunity we create for others to discover, to get a better hint or a better understanding, of what we have collected and sorted. And even when collecting is a personal act of self-expression or a reflection of a pet interest, still, there is value, as "people are a very important way by which we can order our understanding of the world".

Content curation enhances who we are because it helps us Understand and Navigate the world we live in through someone else eyes and experience.

Inspiring. Truthful. Great perspective from which to look and appreciate the full value of curation.

Highly recommended. 10/10

Clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKu3HBEgtZ4&feature=youtu.be

Original full video lecture by Dr. Gideon Burton: https://youtu.be/JUvdnhanDjU

Dr. Gideon Burton:

http://english.byu.edu/faculty/gideon-burton

http://burton.byu.edu/

https://twitter.com/wakingtiger

https://www.linkedin.com/in/gideonburton

The Forest of Rethoric an example of valuable content curation created by Dr. Gideon Burton
http://rhetoric.byu.edu/

Robin Good  of Content Curation World breaks the findings down thus:

a) what people curate as relevant is not generally among the top ranked results according to popular metrics. Good stuff is not the same as what is considered normally popular or authoritative stuff.

b) content curation allows a community to synchronize around specific issues and subjects (as anticipated by Clay Shirky)

c) better and more appreciated curation is of the "structured" kind, providing additional info, meta-data and categorization.

d) curators that are highly appreciated are characterized by consistent activity and by a variety of interests (or viewpoints under the same theme) that they are capable to cover.

This is rather my experience; however, I usually explain it to my clients this way:

a) You can be doing an excellent job, but never receive the recognition, popularity, or traffic you deserve.That doesn't mean you won't be appreciated greatly by the smaller group of people who do find/read your curated works.

b) No matter the popularity of your curation, you can build and have conversations -- but remember, community cultivation not only requires additional time, but a different skill set.

c) If you're going to do it, do it well. Use tools, such as labels and tags, and *always* provide context as well as proper credits and links.

d) Consistent activity is nearly as important as showing some personality along with your knowledge. Your topic may be narrowly focused, but offer additional topics and information about you personally (not just professionally) so that people get a sense of you.

A research paper by Zhong, Shah, Sundaravadivelan and Sastry, King's college London, 2013

See the excellent notes from Robin Good below. Interesting to see more work emerging in this field.