Content Curation World

Lutz Finger, reports from SxSW on the topic of algorithms, curation and the future, as the skills of content creators, data analysts and code programmers are seemingly converging for the first time. 

Among others, he reports Steve Rosenbaum (founder of Magnify.net) significant own words at SxSW: "...a wise combination of human judgement enabled by algorithms will become the new king of content."

But while there are great new tools, startups and ideas leveraging the great potential of big data and human curation, there is a big, invisible danger, still looming on us.

"The danger is that any algorithm might fall prey to someone trying to influence it.

This might be the ones programming the algorithm or the users. We for instance saw governments trying to skew algorithms by introducing fake online personas (Learn more about the US government persona-management software).
 

But the biggest and realest danger lies in us.

If we believe that there is only one truth and that is the one generated by a black-box algorithm we might be deceived easily."

Informative. Resourceful. 7/10

Full article: http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140320132545-6074593-the-age-of-the-algorithms-sxsw-summary 

See also: www.masternewmedia.org/future-of-search

Image: Bjoern Ognibeni - SxSW

Even though Google has become very good at understanding and providing relevant results for many popular queries, many search users are getting lazy and taking those results as currency. 

John Ball writes on Search Engine Land: "People don’t think, analyze, or really even understand how search works anymore. They just assume it will work and they’ll get the results they need. 

This is a very real trend, and likely to continue."

And he goes on: "For example, consider Google Now — no searching required, just results you’re likely to need and can further refine. Also, consider Google Glass. Glass doesn’t even support advanced searching — it’s all short, to-the-point answers, likely based on the Knowledge Graph, which is rapidly expanding."

If you are a journalist, researcher or content curator, you are likely uninterested in such auto-selected results and prefer to dig, explore more and vet before drawing a conclusion.

To go beyond the surface of Google forcedly limited search spectrum, it is of great help to be able to use Google search modifiers. These are manual commands that you can insert in your search queries and that allow you to ask to Google to bring you the results you want in the way you want it.

If you are not familiar with these or have not been using them in a while, I do suggest to scan through them again as they can be real life-savers in many a situation. 

Very useful for any good journalist, researcher or curator.

Useful. Good examples. 8/10

Full article: http://searchengineland.com/top-10-search-modifiers-why-they-matter-what-they-are-how-to-use-them-173343