Content Curation World

Robin Good: Critical thinking is a key strategic skill needed by any serious professional curator. 

"Critical thinking provides the keys for our own intellectual independence..." and it helps to move away from "rashy conclusions, mystification and reluctance to question received wisdom, authority and tradition" while learning how to adopt "intellectual discipline" and a way to express clearly ideas while taking personal responsibility for them.

Key takeaways from this video:

• Critical thinking refers to a diverse range of intellectual skills and activities concerned with "evaluating information" as well as our own thought in a disciplined way.
   
• Critical thinking is not just thinking a lot. To be an effective critical thinker you need to seek out and be guided by "knowledge" and "evidence" that fits with reality even if it refutes what the general consensus may want to believe.
   
• Critical thinkers cultivate an attitude of curiosity and they are willing to do the work required to keep themselves informed about a subject.
   
• Critical thinkers do not take claims at face value but utilize scepticism and doubt to suspend judgement and objectively evaluate with facts the claims being made.
   
• Critical thinkers should evaluate information on the basis of reasoning and not by relying on emotions as claims the factuality of a claim cannot be solely based on the level of emotion that accompanies them or the fact that they may be believed by certain groups.

Highly recommended for all curators. 9/10

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OLPL5p0fMg 

Robin Good: Maria Popova has just launched a classy and laudable initiative, focused on increasing awareness and in highlighting the importance of honoring always where or via who you have got to a certain article, report, video or image.

Credit and attribution are not just a "formal" way to comply with rules, laws and authors but an incredibly powerful emebddable mechanism to augment findability, discovery, sinergy and collaboration among human being interested in the same topic.

She writes: "In an age of information overload, information discovery — the service of bringing to the public’s attention that which is interesting, meaningful, important, and otherwise worthy of our time and thought — is a form of creative and intellectual labor, and one of increasing importance and urgency.

A form of authorship, if you will.

Yet we don’t have a standardized system for honoring discovery the way we honor other forms of authorship and other modalities of creative and intellectual investment, from literary citations to Creative Commons image rights."

For this purpose Curator's Code was created.

Curator's Code is first of all "a movement to honor and standardize attribution of discovery across the web" as well as a web site where you can learn about the two key types of attribution that we should be using:

a) Via - which indicates a link of direct discovery

b) Hat tip - Indicates a link of indirect discovery, story lead, or inspiration.

Each one has now a peculiar characterizing icon that Curator's Code suggests to integrate in your news and content publication policies. 

Additionally and to make it easy for anyone to integrate these new attribution icons in their work, Curator's Code has created a free bokkmarklet which makes using proper attribution a matter of one clic.

Hat tip to Maria Popova and Curator's Code for launching this initiative. 

Whether or not you will sign Curator's Code pledge, become an official web site supporting it, or adopt its bookmarklet instantly is not as important as the key idea behind it: by providing credit and attribution to pieces of content you find elsewhere, you not only honestly reward who has spent time to create that content, but you significantly boost the opportunity for thousands of others to connect, link up to, discover and make greater sense of their search for meaning.

Read Maria Popova introductory article to Curator's Code: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/03/09/curators-code/ 

How to use the Curator's bookmarklet: http://vimeo.com/38243275 

Healthy. Inspiring. 9/10

Curator's Code official web site: http://curatorscode.org/ 

N.B.: Too bad that the Curator's Code bookmarklet doesn't work with Scoop.it, as the one excludes the other. But you could save the two codes for the special attribution characters in a text note and copy and paste whicever you need. Given the need for simplicity and integration this is not an ideal solution but I am sure that between Maria and Guillaume at Scoop.it they will find a way to make this work easily for all. Maria and Guillaume: what do you say?

Robin Good: Josh Sternberg at Digiday highlights a trend that is only going to get bigger in the near future: brands, as they realize the increasing need to be active publishers, are recognizing the problems and limitations that this task involves.

"The problem is publishing is a lot harder than it looks, or rather it’s a lot harder to do it with the consistency, day after day, that’s needed to build a long-term audience.

That’s leading some brands to hook onto the idea that their role lies more in the curation of content."

But in choosing this path, the article recommends, brands need to be careful in what and how much they curate. 

Here some valuable advice from the article:
 

"Brands need to be careful in not only what, but how much they curate.

There can’t be articles that make the reader question why a brand is sharing it.

Also, brands need to make sure they’re not just regurgitating content, but instead offering readers/followers valuable information, as readers will quickly determine the curated content — and thus the brand — is not worth their time.

Since consumers have their own tools for curating – Storify, Storyful, etc. – brands have to know each of their customers and have the credibility in their field to get consumers to trust the content they spread."

Truthful. 7/10

Full article: http://www.digiday.com/publishing/brands-apply-for-content-curator-roles/ 

Robin Good: Back in 2010, Mahendra Palsule, wrote an interesting article on the "role of curation in the attention economy".

In it he wrote: "When you share something on any network, you are telling your social circle – “Look at this, this is something I think you will find interesting.”

In essence, you are asking for attention from your followers. Your followers distribute whatever attention currency they have budgeted for you among the things you share.

The attention each item receives depends on the total number of items you share. If you overdo it, you are reducing the value of each shared item...

What the formula doesn’t take into account is that by blindly and indiscriminately increasing one’s ‘give and take’ in social media, one is decreasing the relevance of one’s shares to one’s followers.

By ‘giving back’ to certain people, you’re at the same time ‘taking away’ from your other followers.

When the relevancy of your shares decrease, your reputation and trust declines."

Unless you are a ruthless relevance evaluator of whatever passes in front of your eyes, with an investigator attitude in researching and looking beyond the surface of each news story, the idea of gaining reputation, authority and visibility through curation may be only a trendy illusion.

"Social media tools might indicate you have a large number of followers, your ‘influence’ is ranked highly in terms of numbers, and you become popular as a friendly person. But your followers may not be clicking on the links you tweet or buying the products or services you recommend."

So, rule number one is to have focus and to share only what is truly and verified to be relevant for your audience.

"Curation is such a buzzword these days, that some have gone so far as to dub every act of social media sharing as ‘curation’ – from Foursquare check-ins to Blippy purchases, to Yelp reviews. I consider some of these examples as annotations or adding meta data to a crowdsourced database.

Considering each act of social media sharing as an act of curation is like considering all sex to be an act of love.

The one way I’ve seen true reputation and influence increase on the social web is when one’s shares are relevant to followers.

This necessitates a brutal and ruthless evaluation.

Is this content relevant to my followers? Irrespective of which influencer wrote it, irrespective of which ‘guru’ endorsed it, the relevance question is of prime consideration in deciding whether I endorse, share and propagate it to my followers."

Good. 8/10

Full article: http://www.skepticgeek.com/socialweb/role-of-curation-in-the-attention-economy/ 

(Image credit: www.spreadshirt.it)