Curation is a Means to an End, Not the Objective

Any hype period has its share of buzzwords. Curation is one of those buzzwords today. It’s probably one of the most used, misused and abused words when it comes to discussing the future of news and digital content.

The flurry of curation platforms has amplified the attention on the act of curation itself. But curation is only a means to an end, and not the end itself. It has to serve a purpose, and it has to be surrounded by a lot of peripheral value. If you see curation as the main thing, this novelty will wear off, and you’ll soon be wondering why so much time was spent on it.

Curation with a purpose and benefits is a powerful catalyst to engaging users around your content. And for journalists, it can augment their side of the story.

Curation can take several forms:

1) Curating for yourself. You’re curating content about a topic in order to showcase your authority and express what you like. You publish the curated content daily or continuously via Twitter or on the web. Some news media professionals have taken to curating social media in real-time in order to enhance their story telling or as a part of it.

2) Curating for others. You’re curating for a team (internal or external) who is mostly consuming the content. You’re saving them a lot of time. They are not lazy, but they may not have the time to configure news radars themselves. They prefer to consume the news, rather than be consumed by it. A few years ago, Robin Good rightfully called this process Newsmastering.

3) Crowdsourced curation. All on-board. Everybody curates the same topic. A number of users can add or remove content, as well as suggest new sources and keywords for that content. The challenge for this method is that content trickles-in lightly if there aren’t enough users that are actively curating, and you end-up with a partial view of the topic, unless a single user ends-up pulling more weight than others.

4) Social curation. Twitter! Facebook! When your friends are sharing content in their stream and you’re consuming that stream, you’re in essence the recipient of their content curation. This can be taken a step further if you only follow their Twitter Favorites or Google Reader starred items, as this content represents the cream of the content crop. This is a bit like the next evolution of bookmarking systems.

At Eqentia, curation is all over our platform’s capabilities. It’s a before, during and after act. Curation is intricately part of the aggregation rules and set-up, as well as the post-aggregation production of content. We even have a resident Chief Curator whose job is to oversee the curation process for our showcase portals, as well as to educate our customers on managing their own curation initiatives.

We support the four types of curation, although with #4, we focus on surfacing Twitter Favorites and Google Reader starred or shared items. We believe this slice of content is the most valuable part.

Digital curation is sitting at the intersection of two larger topics: Content Marketing and the Future of News. We resisted creating a portal on Curation only, because curation has to be part of something else. You can find a lot of curated articles on the curation topic both in the Future of News portal, and the Content Marketing portal.

And if you’re solely interested in that topic, just pick-up the two Connections and add them to your Personal News Page, and they’ll be mashed-up as a single topic that you can consume via email or on the web. Curation + Personalization.

Related articles

• Eight ways to search Great Content On Social Media (globalthoughtz.com)
• Curate Your News Streams or Drown in Them (eqentia.com)
• What’s the right balance between original and curated content? (holtz.com)