Content Curation World

If you are curating content with the idea of saving time, posting more content and getting away with more traffic, greater visibility and ranking in Google, or if you are using some cheap content marketing tactics sold to you as "content curation" you probably don't even care whether what you are doing is "ethical" or not.

Content curation is an ethical activity by definition, as it requires you to study, analyze, dissect, find patterns and relationships and to distill, personalize and contextualize them for your readers / viewers, while fully crediting and attributing all sources and relevant references.

Everything else, and that is the majority of what is promoted and created in the name of "content curation" around the web nowadays (by the very companies producing many of these content curation tools), is not unethical. It's valueless.

There's not any such thing as unethical loving. If you love something, you do.

If you want to "curate" something, you do not go for quantity or automation.

If you are looking for insight, you don't need tools to expedite or automate. You need deep competence, personal interest and passion for that topic, as well as time to research and collect relevant info to curate.

There's no technology that can replace or augment that.

You can augment the search, the finding and collecting, but you can't automate the ability to see beyond the surface, to scan and recognize patterns or to find great parallels with other stories.

The problem in fact arises only when someone teaches or markets to you the idea that by "loving" (or by "curating") something you can get certain benefits you crave for. From that moment on your idea of "love" (or curation) will be a corrupted, wrongly conceived idea for what love is.

Pawan Deshpande, founder of Curata, illustrates in this useful article the fundamental aspects that characterize true "content curation" from other cheap content marketing techniques which work only to:

a) increase the noise,

b) dissipate your potential value

c) create opportunities for the true content curators to visibily stand out. 

Rightful. Valuable advice. 7/10

Full article: http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2013/11/ethical-content-curation-checklist/ 

Check also: 

http://www.masternewmedia.org/what-makes-a-great-curator-great 

(Image credit: Justice blindfolded by Shutterstock)