Our users have been asking for people and content discovery to go alongside our contextual and actionable content indexing, as well as increased social media integration points. We have responded with the following innovative new features.

Content Discovery
Content discovery comes in two flavors. One,- for the end-user, and two,- for the curator. From a end-user’s Personal News Page (where they choose which topics to follow), or a user’s Personal Stream (where they sync up their Twitter Favorites or Google Reader starred/shared items), Eqentia will recommend new articles based on the existing content in any one of these personalized streams.

Recommended Content from a user’s Personal News Page

And for the professional curator, Eqentia will recommend new content that’s closely aligned with the existing content that’s being filtered. In one-click, the curator can “add” the chosen articles into the curated pool of content. In both cases, these recommendations are generated in real-time and use an algorithmic analysis of the content that’s already there. Therefore these recommendations will vary on a daily/hourly basis and will learn and adapt from the users actions.

Curation Suggestions for the Professional Curator are added via a one-click action

Our users have asked for serendipitous content discovery to complement our guided content filtering. These new features meet this demand and go a step further by offering an instant boost to content delivery, instead of a drip oriented flow via a social media stream.

People Discovery
One of the great benefits of social media is that via social gestures, people are associating themselves with content that matters to them. Eqentia finds and exposes these content-to-people linkages. We believe that content leads to people. And when you frame this content around the right context, discovery of people becomes actionable.

Eqentia allows you to find the key people that are engaging with your content on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Specifically, with Twitter, Eqentia demonstrates this along 4 dimensions:

a)    by revealing a Twitter Engagement Leaderboard listing the top 100 users that are interacting with a specific context, ranked by their engagement power or Klout score.

Twitter Engagement Leaderboard is updated each 20 mins, and includes threaded Twitter conversations based on the specific context

b)    via a functionality called “Visual Who Is” which displays graphically these users and ranks them according to a Klout-based influence score into three buckets: top influencers, mid-influencers, low-influencers.

Visual Who Is Tweeting?

Visual Who Is enables a drill down on any Twitter user. Size of the box is related to their Klout score

c) by identifying the user’s other interests via Eqentia’s own aggregation of a user’s social presence in other interest areas, therefore by tapping their implicit interest graph.

By identifying the user’s other interests via Eqentia’s own aggregation of a user’s social presence in other interest areas, therefore by tapping their implicit interest graph.

d)    by notifying the user via a daily email of the most engaged users on Twitter for their context

New people that are engaging with your context are being suggested as part of the daily email.

Eqentia has been focusing on social media integration. We believe that social media’s value increases the more it gets integrated into users workflows and inside the content’s fabric. That’s why we have focused on the integration aspects of social media throughout the lifecycle of any piece of content within any context.

And if this is not enough, we have additional features that have been tucked in:

-       Enhanced Curation mode (publish/unpublish with one-click)

-       Google+ integration (capturing the Google+ number and enabling a user to +1 any article)

-       Drupal plugin for seamless content integration into a Drupal CMS including tracking of curation actions and syncing of semantic tagging of content with a Drupal taxonomy (if you have a Drupal site, email us to test it out)

-       Automatic sifting of top URLs from Twitter into the magazine-like portal with an assisted curation workflow management

We’re very excited to share these new features with our users and prospects, and we are confident this solidifies Eqentia’s position as the enterprise leader in Curated Content Management.

Image via Wikipedia

It’s not quite a chicken and egg syndrome, but the question is: Do People lead to Content or does Content lead to People?

I think both are equally true, but the novelty is coming from the later statement- Content leading to People.

People Leading to Content
You meet someone or you come across a person either online or in the real world, and you start following their blog, Twitter account, social networks, etc. That’s a given. The person is the starting point for the relationship and they lead you to the content they will write, share, tag, comment, discuss, etc.

But with social media, we have a new process that’s emerging: content leading us to people.

Content Leading to People
One of the great benefits of social media is that via social gestures, people are associating themselves with content that matters to them. If you can find and expose these content-to-people linkages, wouldn’t that lead you to discovering people that might be interested in the same things as you do? Add to this a social media influence layer filter (e.g. Klout), and a strong content filtering underpinning to accurately frame the context and you have what Arnold Waldstein has described as “closing the action gap on the social web”.

So why not push the envelope on having Content leading to People? [in the right context of course]

I think we can. This is the time.

There 4 ways you can discover new people with Eqentia totally serendipitously and without any prior biases:

a)      via a Twitter engagement leaderboard of the top 100 Twitter users that are interacting inside a given context, e.g. in this context on Content Marketing, or this other one on Content Curation.

b)      via a “Visual Who Is” display of Twitter users and as relatively ranked by their Klout scores

c)      by following Eqentia’s own ranking of users’ social presence in other interest areas, therefore tapping an implicit interest graph and revealing it alongside the content that users are interacting with

d)     by exposing the top 10 engaged Twitter users for a given context in a daily email, prompting you to take action

People Leading to People
You may be thinking- How about People Leading to People? Yes, it is a third dimension, but I’m not covering it here because Twitter “owns” that angle due to the insight they have on our social graphs. Twitter is doing this via “Discovering who to follow” and suggesting others “you might want to follow” as soon as you follow someone new. These suggestions, according to Twitter are based on “several factors, including people you follow and the people they follow”. In other words, they are based on analyzing or correlating your social graph against other Twitter users.

People-to-people discovery is interesting, but it is not as dynamic as the content-to-people paradigm which is the one we’re discussing here and are excited about.

Don’t just discover content. Discover people. And if you can discover both within the right context, your reward will consist of a rich set of actionable choices.

Related articles

• Klout – not perfect, but not to be ignored, either” (wordspring.ca)
• Sharepocalypse Now: Why Social Media Overload Means New Opportunities for Startups (mashable.com)

The Social Internet Landscape & Ecosystem by Eqentia

I’ve been wanting to frame in one picture the current phase of the Internet’s evolution: the Social Internet. I drew this Infographic as a way to see the social Internet’s landscape in one place, to spark a discussion about its ecosystem, and to prove that there is a lot more than ‘social media’ and ‘social networking’.  The question that’s on everybody’s mind- professionals, consumers or companies, is “Where do you play”?

Here are the pieces. It’s like a “sandwich”. The buns are the Commercial Apps (top) and Base Platforms (bottom). What’s in the middle consists of: Social Gestures, Social Measures and Platforms of Expressions.

Commercial Apps
That’s where the large business opportunities seem to exist and where a number of viable companies are emerging for each of these sectors. Some sectors are more mature than others, but they offer similarities in business models.

Base Platforms
We could call these the Big Six: Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, LinkedIn, Tumblr and YouTube. They are the most popular social networks or composite networks that users revolve in and out of. If you’re not in any one of these, you haven’t even dipped a toe in the Social Internet.

Social Gestures
These include the one-click gestures (liking, sharing, favoriting, bookmarking, following, friending) as well as what’s commonly referred to as “User Generated Content” (UGC) such as discussing via comments or reviewing. These are the key fabrics of the Social Internet.

Social Measures
You might think- how can these be measures without metrics? Well, this area is probably the debatable because it’s embryonic and still evolving. At least, there’s a lot being discussed here.

Platforms of Expressions
Being social is about being expressive.  Shy or private personalities will have a tough time adapting. The Social Internet is allowing us to express our thoughts, photos, hobbies, music, etc. These Expression Platforms beg us to use social gesturing, and our increased usage will certainly impact our Social Measures.

Putting it all together, do you see the leverage points between the various elements?

Here’s an example statement from us:
Eqentia plays in the Curation Platforms space. We track and analyze Social Gestures about content and we provide actions that impact Social Measures. We allow curators and creators to Express their thoughts, and we interface with the Base Platforms in bi-directional ways.

What do you think? Where do you play?

Anything missing from this picture? How would you improve it?

Related articles

• Social Media Landscape (Day 4) (socialmediafish.wordpress.com)
• Why Social Media Will Evolve Into Social Business (darmano.typepad.com)
• User Generated Content Marketing Strategy Tips (customerthink.com)

Image via Wikipedia

There are two flavors of content discovery: serendipitous and targeted. Social media is giving us tons of serendipitous discovery via following people on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and now Google Plus. But how about Targeted Discovery?

Just like Targeted Filtering (covered in a previous post) accomplishes a different objective than People Filtering, Targeted Discovery should bring you new suggested content, boosted by the existing material you are currently seeing.

Boosting the Curation Process
Targeted Discovery is very helpful during the process of Content Curation.  Curators want to be productive. They want to find new suggestions to curate quickly. So we’ve developed a new algorithmic method that mines existing content (which was mostly found from keywords and filter rules), and suggests new content that can be added to a given curated portal.

This raises the bar on Content Curation productivity. It’s like a super lever of content that displays 30 new articles that are very closely related to you topic, via one-click. As your curation actions continue to improve the quality of content in a given curated portal, so will the Curated Suggestions. It gets better over time. Here’s to Boost Your Content Curation from our Curation Tools Knowledge Center.

Boosting Content Discovery
We’ve also applied a similar method for discovering new content around your interests, but the starting point is your Personal News Page, not a given portal. From your Personal News Page configuration, we extract an implicit interest graph which is used to mine the news universe for additional related content from the past 24 hours which you haven’t seen. It’s like lifting a ton of content at once, with one-click. Here are steps for enabling your personal Content Discovery.

Targeted discovery is a productivity gainer. Serendipitous discovery is a time sucker.

Would you rather see 30 great articles in one-click or spend 20 additional minutes in your social networks that may or may not get you the same thing?

Make sure you impose time limits on your social/serendipitous discovery and shift some of that time to targeted discovery, especially if it can be complemented by a content boosting algorithm.

Related articles

• Curation: The Blogger’s Ally (blogworld.com)
• LinkedIn, Weak Ties and the Serendipity of Magazine Content (blogs.forbes.com)

Yesterday, a tweet exchange between Paul Kedrosky and Sameer Patel caught my attention:

I replied to them “But serendipitous reading should be balanced with targeted one. FBoard has no real filters.” And Sameer Patel responded by saying that “fair point. And I agree we need that. Though sources are one form on filters too.”

My point is that we shouldn’t confuse information discovery with information filtering. The increase in social media mindshare is leading us to spend enormous amounts of times consuming serendipity-driven content, at the expense of forgetting how to properly configure powerful filters.

I believe there is a hierarchy and variety of filtering techniques to help us achieve the optimum balance between content completeness and time spent to gather the content. Here are 4 levels of filtering techniques that will yield powerful results when used together:

1) Sources. Remember RSS? It’s really about assembling the sources you’d like to read. Google Reader or Feedly excel at this approach. However, the drawback is that RSS feeds require continuous management and maintenance due to the dynamic nature of changes within these feeds.

2) People. Twitter epitomizes the people-filter paradigm. I’ve already critiqued the approach of relying solely on following people for making us “lazy” due to its ease of use. Social readers, including FlipBoard fit in this category because they rely on your network’s followers social gestures to populate various content streams.

Up to here, we were into “general-purpose” aggregation and reading where personalization is with a “small p”. The next 2 items enable “special-purpose” filtering via targeted content harvesting.

3) Keywords. Keyword filtering can range from single keywords, to long Boolean expressions, to text-mining that disambiguates meanings, and corner every nook and cranny around a particular topic. The Eqentia platform relies on such sophisticated keyword filtering that define a particular context from which content is extracted.

4) Triggers. The plot thickens. Triggers are actionable pieces of content that are the results of specific analysis that is unique to your needs. For e.g. some of the business triggers that we use at Eqentia for our company portals include Business Expansions, New Products, Partnerships, People on the Move, etc (see IBM’s portal). Triggers represent the highest levels of value because there lead to actionable recommendations (at the expense of analysis and extra processing, of course).

The reality is that you need the combination of all 4. For example, within any Eqentia custom portal, the user configures a) which sources to follow (as opened sources with no filters), b) the set of keywords (via sophisticated text mining formulas), 3) people (via Twitter Lists or users), and 4) business triggers to watch for (derived via a special analysis of the content).

There is an added element variable,– and it’s a Learning component. We, as users are just the operators. Algorithms and natural language processing can learn from our actions or results-to-date to improve, suggest or refine what we see next.

And other signals can serve to amplify or hide content. These signals include the ones coming from social media (attention gestures), relevancy matching (based on actual text analysis), and other authority-based metrics (number of clicks, source influence).

Filters are everywhere. Some will give you knowledge sponging  ad nauseam and others will lead you to relevancy and actions. Be sure to have the right mix of filters before your reading times are up.

Related articles

• Do We Have Too Many Filters, Or Not Enough? (gigaom.com)
• Information overload and failure filter are false problems (thewayoftheweb.net)
• Making sense of and filtering information overload (rossdawsonblog.com)

Image by jungmoon via Flickr

There’s this illusion that one day, we’ll get all our news from social media. I don’t believe so.

Don’t get me wrong about believing in the importance and vibrancy of social media. It’s here to stay, of course. But today, social media has more mindshare than market share, at least from a news content perspective. LinkedIn Today is a perfect example where you will get very incomplete views of news on particular subjects because of its sole reliance on social news.

The explosion of content has blown content to bits, leaving it up to us to literally pick-up the pieces and re-assemble them. Entered Social Media who offered easy ways to surface these pieces without much effort, e.g. via Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn and to social news aggregators who made it easy to pick-up these pieces. But what’s easy is masking the bottom of the iceberg where there’s equally if not more valuable content. By spending lots of time reading social news, we think we’re getting everything, but we’re not. What’s relevant to you is not the same as what’s popular amongst your friends or social networks.

As a Curated Content Management platform, we have one foot in social media, and the other in online media.  Our vertical properties perform a parallel duty of monitoring the Twitter stream as well as mining thousands of curated online sources. Therefore, we’re able to compare results from both sides of the media. We have found there are 4 scenarios for social media’s contribution as it pertains to being a bearer of news. Here they are:

Social Media as a Mirror
When the news is mainstream, social news will be a replica of popular online news. Example: our Company portal that monitors Research in Motion showed that the Twitter widget returning very similar content as the one from the web when they announced their earnings, Actually, online media was markedly more comprehensive.

Social Media as Long Tail
When the topic is not easy to properly define, social media monitoring allows you to discover additional content nuggets that would be difficult to find otherwise. This applies to topics such as Digital Curation, Social Media Intelligence or Content Marketing where our online filters are finding most of the content, but the Twitter stream is helpful in discovering new sources or related content at the edge of a particular topic.

Social Media as Breaking News
That’s a natural for Twitter and social media. Specifically, spectacular events (good or bad ones) will propagate “raw” on social media before any “media processing”. There’s no denying that Twitter is the optimal platform for breaking news.

Social Media as a Slice
In this scenario, social media will give you very incomplete content because the content is not being discussed or shared as comprehensively or willingly. This applies to a lot of professional topics where either the content isn’t there, or where you need sophisticated filters that go beyond the cryptic 140 characters. Examples including our Outsourcing or Supply Chain Management portals.

Paradoxically, you may think: if the news hasn’t bubbled into the social sphere, then it’s not worth reading. Yes, and No. That statement assumes that all the news is on social media to start with, and that enough people are giving it the necessary social gestures to allow it to rise to the top. That may be true for generic topics, but not true at all for the specialized needs of B2B professionals, niche hobbies and emerging or specialized topics.

By being busy and having plenty to read from social media, we think we’re being thorough, whereas we’re just being busy. You need to balance social news reading with targeted online news reading via keyword filters that mine more than the social mediasphere which is the tip of the iceberg for media.

Related articles

• Why news sites should consider adding the LinkedIn share button (blogs.journalism.co.uk)
• Everyone Should Hire ‘Social Media Experts’ (seomoz.org)

Istanbul's Grand Bazaar, Image via Wikipedia

One of the curation players that allows “anyone” to be a publisher by “creating” their own newspaper by selecting a combination of Facebook or Twitter lists, accounts, hashtags or keywords is making additional marketing noise about a couple of new curation features.

They have indeed lowered the barriers of publishing, but is it such a good thing? I don’t believe so. “Anyone” as a publisher is not such a good thing. It lowers the bar on content quality.

Abundance doesn’t equal quality. If Gold or Diamonds were abundant or so easily found and processed, they wouldn’t be as valuable.

Twitter and social media is messy as it is. We don’t need more mess. We need more organization. We need more context. We need better analysis of signals. And we need to be thoughtful when we create something and call it “The Social Media Expert Daily” or “The All About XYZ Daily”. It’s so fickle, and misguided. How many mediocre, incomplete and inaccurate “social media dailies” do we need?

Twitter streams are messy by birth. The people we follow are an eclectic bunch. That’s the nature of friendship and curiosity. And when you combine ‘eclectic with messy’, you get a bizarre bazaar. If you start with a big mess, and you instantly publish that mess, it becomes more difficult to clean the mess afterwards. And that mess becomes unreadable. It would be more appropriate to focus first on filtering, context, and quality before rushing to publishing anything just because we can.

I lamented a few weeks ago that Curation was being hyped and taken lightly. The same applies to Publishing.  And we should be saying “re-publishing”, not publishing (which is how we call this at Eqentia). If you publish something, it better be yours. If you are packaging other people’s publishing, that’s re-publishing, or re-packaging.

We’re in 2011. 2001 is not so far back that we can’t remember the lessons of the past. Here are similar patterns I’m seeing today that we saw in 2000 which lead to the 2001 crash:

1. Hyping something that doesn’t add value, even if a million users are using it.
2. Taking meaningful words lightly and out of context, to describe new concepts.
3. Drawing big names to your boards to seemingly give you added credence.

I’m all for healthy competition and pushing the envelope on innovation, but I don’t like hyped solutions. They will come back to bite, and drag us all down.

Related articles

• Paper.li upgrades social news curation platform, adds Eric Hippeau as an advisor (eu.techcrunch.com)
• Are we in a social media bubble? (econsultancy.com)
• Who Curates the Real-Time Web? (programmableweb.com)

Image by cseward via Flickr

A well respected VC friend of mine recently asked me this pointed question: why is this social reader start-up (which shall remain nameless) receiving massive hype?

I was quick to respond as follows:“How many RSS readers were there between 2000 and 2006: 40 or 50? How many viable ones are there today: 1 or 2? (GoogleReader is one of them). And how many are making money or have a self-sustaining business or revenue model? Zero.”

I believe the same will happen to these social readers because that business model will be hard to monetize. I’m currently using a dozen of them, out of curiosity, not usefulness. So far, none have delivered great value. It’s not their fault. They are limited by the intrinsic limitation of their backbone: social news. They all tell me the same thing: what my friends are reading, and with a large load of salt to go with it.

Here’s my assessment on the state of social reading:

1. Social reading is a social, period. Social readers loaded with our friends links are general-purpose readers at best, i.e. they paint with a broad brush. Most of us have an eclectic array of friends, and the news coming from them will be a reflection of that.
2. Friend-led curation is not personalization.  It’s firehose-style discovery.  “Curated by your friend” is an oxymoron statement. My friends are pushing stuff they think is interesting, and the path “from interesting to relevant” is not to be taken for granted.
3. Social news reading offers a partial view at best. It’s a slice of what you need to read. If you are relying on social news reading only, you will be missing a lot. We are seeing this in our portals since we introduced a “View Top Stories by Social Media Attention” feature where the user can re-sort content by social media popularity. Popular articles are bubbling-up, but there are several relevant articles beneath the popular ones. The exception might be true for breaking news that propagates faster on social media than via traditional media, but this due to the real-time nature of Twitter as much as it is due to the social habits of users.
4. Popular content is not necessarily relevant content. A piece of content that was tweeted 1,000 times may still not be relevant to you. I recently downloaded News.me and was trying to get enlightened by what my friends were reading. Then, the truth moment came when I clicked on my picture to see what my friends thought I was reading. To my surprise, not only were the displayed articles ones I hadn’t read,- they were ones I wasn’t even interested in. Therefore, I would be misleading my friends, according to News.me. A further analysis of that list revealed it was pulling the most popular links in my stream, and nothing more.

Social has a great future. Out of social networks, new segments have sprung such as social commerce, social media, social feedback, social CRM and social news. They all have a great future, but I think that the impact of social news may have reached a plateau.

I strongly believe that it’s far more useful to first seek what’s most relevant to us, then find out the social buzz, rather than finding out what’s buzzing first, and struggling to remove the noise to reveal what’s relevant.

That said, there is one thing that social reading apps have done very well vs. the old RSS readers. They have mastered the user interface part and beautified content reading (e.g. FlipBoard, as the poster company). Beyond that, they still have to figure out filtering, something that RSS readers totally ignored. They also have to provide more than serendipitous discovery of content. Discovery is an add-on, not a substitute, and social readers would have to take personalization seriously, a task that’s not easy to deliver on.

The jury is out on whether social readers will evolve and not repeat the same mistakes of RSS readers. Everything is possible, but there’s a lot of needed evolution ahead of them. RSS readers were usurped by other more comprehensive solutions, and social readers may face the same fate.

Related articles

• Hands-on: News.me iPad app for social news reading (intomobile.com)
• FlipBoard versus Zipe: Two FREE iPad Apps to Read Social Updates the Magazine-Style (searchenginejournal.com)
• Read, Share and Destroy (mondaynote.com)

Image by Enokson via Flickr

Today, we’re launching Eqentia 2.0, the latest release of our SaaS-based software, featuring a self-service capability for enterprise portals, as well as a totally revamped user interface.

With the new self-service option, a user configures their news stream from a combination of powerful text-mining filters, choice of 35,000 global sources, a context-specific Twitter stream, and over 75 curated topics. Anyone can create an Eqentia news portal for their organization in minutes. It involves just typing the list of keywords, the names of the sources you’d like to monitor (no fiddling with RSS). And for the Twitter stream, you combine keywords, user names, hashtags and Twitter Lists and we’ll produce a mashed-up stream which will surface the most popular URL’s as well as the most active users within this context.

Eqentia is a full-service, end-to-end platform with the following module capabilities: aggregation, personalization, curation tools, semantic tagging, branding and re-publishing. It can be set-up as a private or public portal, and is ideally suited for large and medium-size organizations.

We believe that we’re the only aggregator where you can combine the following 4 aspects together: 1) your own filters, 2) a range of feed sources, 3) a filtered Twitter stream, 4) curated content topics, and it includes a user personalization layer on top of that.Here’s what’s different about our approach.

We focus on content relevancy first, then we find out its popularity in social media, next. Therefore, we’re not a social media aggregator; rather we’re a smart aggregator that knows about social media attention.

This makes us a special-purpose aggregator, not a general-purpose one. We start by mapping the user’s needs accurately and precisely. The end-result is a targeted discovery of content, not a serendipitous one which is based on friending in social media. We’ve always believed that curation is a means to an end, not the end itself.  Therefore, Eqentia focuses on curation’s objective, typically a business one.

The New UI
Eqentia’s web portals have been totally redesigned, with a fresh look and intuitive navigation. Eqentia’s new design is based on HTML5 and CSS3, therefore the application looks great on a an iPad tablet or a smartphone. The portals are easily “brandable” to match a company’s style.

Other features worth checking-out
We have had these for a while, but didn’t officially launch them. Here they are:

Annotations
Instead of merely posting summaries and links to articles, Eqentia users can now write their own comment or assessment of an article (called an annotation) with its own headline. The annotation will automatically include a link to the original article.

Eqentia WordPress Plugin
For anyone who runs a WordPress blog, it is now easy to include content from Eqentia. Just install the WordPress plugin and content will flow seamlessly into the WordPress admin system where it can be posted, rewritten, annotated, or displayed in the margin as an aggregated feed. Plus, the semantic connections supplied by Eqentia are synced with the Tags and Categories on WordPress to surface contextual content.

Enhanced Personal News Pages
You can follow a range of topics on your private web page. Start with the default page, then add or delete as many pre-curated channels (or topics from those channels) as you wish. There are currently 75 curated channels to choose from. You can try out a Personal News Page here.  at  or visit the curated channels.

The Personal Stream
A Personal Stream is your own library of knowledge. It can be used to keep track of your competition, market, interests or clients. As a public stream, use it to curate a topic with high precision and share it on your social networks, or personal blog, or simply have others follow it. Content can be added in 8 ways: 1) via InstAlert – ,an Eqentia bookmarklet that allows you to highlight a keyword on any web page and by clicking on the bookmarklet, it starts to track it, 2) MarkIt – just click on this other Eqentia bookmarklet from any web page, and it will add the article to your Personal Stream, 3) Syncing from your Twitter Favorites, 4) Syncing with Google Reader Starred or Folder, 5) Emailing an article to a secret address will add it to your Personal Stream, 6) Searching openly via the Eqentia real-time news search, 7) from Eqentia’s 75 curated portals, and 8­) from a list of robust filtering keywords.
You can learn more about the Personal Streams here.

Enjoy Eqentia 2.0. Hopefully, there’s something for everyone. And let us know what else you like to see. We’re always feedback-hungry and innovation-ready.

Related articles

• Need a quick news fix in a speciality area? (mktg2bizexecs.wordpress.com)
• Experiments In Realtime News: The Eqentia Streams (techcrunch.com)
• Curation is a Means to an End, Not the Objective (eqentia.com)

The Internet has a history of hyping concepts. Gartner popularized the term “hype cycle”, where a “peak of inflated expectations” follows the initial “technology trigger”. I believe we’re at that peak with Digital Curation.

I’ve been to that movie before in 1999 when the advent of electronic marketplaces was a hot trend that was supposed to turn into a trillion dollars opportunity. The “hypers” suddenly realized that electronic marketplaces will replace bricks-and-mortar business because e-commerce was possible. It made a lot of sense, on paper: frictionless commerce, lower transactions costs, borderless reach, infinite number of users, large markets, etc… At the peak of these inflated expectations, more than 300 such marketplaces were predicted to flourish, each with billions of dollars in revenue potential. Then, it all collapsed, and only 2 marketplaces survived. I won’t go into the reasons for that, but the lesson learned is that when everybody starts to grab a term and use it loosely, it loses its meaning. It becomes over-used, abused and mis-used. It becomes hyped.

Here are 4 reasons why I think Curation is hyped, today:

1) Companies touting “curation” as the business model are being generously funded, whereas these are just features that no clear benefits or end-state. I already wrote a post saying that Curation is a means to an end, not the end itself. If your company relies solely on curation features, it’s dead-ended. A lot more is needed on top of that.

2) Several companies offering social readers that rank your social content by popularity of sharing and liking are calling themselves Curation services. Sharing and Liking is not curation. Sharing and Liking allows us to see the signal from the noise, but its loose interpretation of what curation is about.

3) Content farmers and SEO-hungry blog post are writing about “Content Curation”, just to appear in SEO searches. You go there to read it because of a catchy title, but these posts are empty SEO-optimized regurgitations. I’m not going to name these blogs, but enter a Google Alert for “content curation” and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

4) More curation by the masses is not necessarily better. It will come with a heavy toll: disorganization, poverty of attention, lower quality, and an end-state where noise is higher than signal, again. Curation by experts or incented users is more useful. Curators must be “trusted”.

I don’t want anyone thinking that I’m against Curation. I’m not. I’m betting my future on it. The company I founded offers a comprehensive curation, aggregation and re-publishing platform, with tons of curation features. We even have have a resident, full-time Chief Curator, a position I established about a year ago.

But I don’t want this concept to be hyped or belittled. When something difficult is made to look trivial and easy, it’s the beginning of hype. Curation is hard work, when done right. The end result should be a reference point for others, not incomplete sets of content.

Related articles

• Are Content Curators the power behind social media influence? (businessesgrow.com)
• Curation is a Means to an End, Not the Objective (eqentia.com)
• Curation (avc.com)