My favourite curation site is Brain Pickings. It’s a labour of love, quirky, informative.
It was via Brain Pickings that I came across the video I have embedded in this blog.
In the old days, I would have bookmarked the link, using Diigo, perhaps. But I wanted to store it somewhere I could find it. Think about why it had touched a chord. Share it. Apply my own layer of thought around it. Curate it.
Curation is increasingly easier. The coolest social media collateral right now is Pinterest. Curation made simple – it levers on the immediacy of the visual, the low-attention span of our distracted generation, and one-click collection and storage. Download the ‘Pin It’ icon, embed it in your browser, and you’re suddenly collecting images and organising them. If you want to do something similar with texts, you can do worse than use Scoop It. Or Storify.
Of course, as we collect, we leave more valuable clues – about our social graph, what makes us tick, the stuff we like, the brands we admire, the culture we can relate to, the tribes we aspire to belong to. The clues we leave are the trigger for another start-up, another adjustment in some search algorithm, the future promise of monetisation because of the mass user-generated content.
Except of course, it’s not content we’re creating as much as extending the life and reach of content curated by others. Right now, we’re primarily doing it for amusement: if you are to believe the social media marketers, brands are benefiting from our efforts. The truth, as usual, is probably somewhere in between amusing ourselves to death and navigating our digital lives to another level of curiosity.
Now if we can find some way of using the curation tools to help us add value to others and manage infotention in the process, then we may really be on to something.
What is Curation? from Percolate on Vimeo.
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