Dan Schmidt

In preparation for a panel on “Real-Time Storytelling” that I’ll be participating in, I’ve been thinking a lot about content curation and what it means at its essence. I’ve been reading every article about curation that I can find; I’m struggling with the fact that curation is often described as a new phenomenon. For example, Steven Rosenbaum writes on Mashable:

Curation is now part of the content equation. It doesn’t kill anything, rather it adds a powerful new tool that will make content destinations more relevant, more robust, and more likely to attract and retain visitors.

I agree that the label “curation” points to something new that’s emerging, but something feels wrong about saying that content curation itself is new to the Web.

There are many types of curation behaviors and there is plenty room for new tools to enable these behaviors. For the sake of discussion, let’s consider one type of curation behavior that Robert Scoble mentions in his post “The Seven Needs of Real-Time Curators,” the act of bundling together related items such as tweets. While new tools are indeed needed to facilitate this sort of bundling, it’s a worthwhile exercise to consider how bundling has existed previously on the Web. For example, any article that links to a set of other web pages is a bundle; the author of a web page can link that page to any other page in the world, but, in a sense, they curated the set of links that are appropriate for the page at hand.

It’s misleading to say that media companies need to embrace curation to survive in this new world of content abundance. It’s more accurate to say that media companies need to embrace letting curation stand alone — it’s not economically feasible to add commentary to every bundle of sources a journalist discovers. The Journalist’s filtering and juxtaposition in most cases will have to be enough. And maybe, in some cases readers prefer a blank canvas of raw, but credible information. In the realtime web, readers would rather access curated information now than wait for the curation and the analysis to take place. Maybe the analysis comes later maybe it doesn’t, but publishers need to come to market with curation by itself or they will be late to the game.

In sum, the new behaviors we’re seeing around “curation” are marked by a subtraction, a removal of layers around long standing processes. Inevitably, when new circumstances enable a behavior to be performed independently of other behaviors that it was previously tied to, new patterns emerge. These new patterns mark what many in the web community refer to as the rise of curation.