Readin', 'Ritin', and (Publishing) 'Rithmetic

The content curation movement keeps growing.

Het algoritme wordt (en is het soms al enigszins)  de nieuwe curator ...

 An interesting lengthy article displayin the growing content curation industry.

Sam Burroughs says it right: "What if we considered content curation from a user centered design perspective? What would audience centered curation look like?"

His suggestions are right on the mark:

• Stop thinking you need to post always something. If you haven't got something good, don't.

• Focus on a very specific interest and audience. 
   
• Evaluate and share your opinion.
   
• Let readers know how much time it takes to read the source you are suggesting to check.  
   
• Explain, always clearly why something you are curating is relevant. Contextualize. 

More signal, less noise.

A good review of five things you need to pay attention to, for your content curation to generate some results.

Right on the mark. Practical advice. 8/10 

Full article (4 mins read): http://weelearning.co.uk/2014/01/five-ways-curators-can-improve-user-experience/ 

Image credit: (Teamwork concept by Shutterstock)

Tips to improve curation and benefit both you and other users

"Explain, always clearly why something you are curating/communicating is relevant. Contextualize."

This is just one of the five great points from Sam Burroughs that we should consider when communicating relevant information to people on our list.

There are four other great tips equally as important, that we should use when communicating information to others.

In today's fast-paced world the information that we are trying to communicate to others should be user centered.

You might want to check this one out. I know that I am
Tim
TimothyLeyfer.com

Another Good-One From Mr Robin Good

Netflix and Amazon understand something most "new to web" catalog merchants don't - information is both means and ends. Online scale depends on information more than money. 

This post is about how Netflix uses their reviews-based User Generated Content engine to disrupt online retailing. Where that disruption will end who knows? The advantage of online scale is, once built, you can point a scaled and increasingly intelligent system at any business vertical and win. 

Amazon will make more money from their cloud services than from book sales soon. Why? Because online scale presents ways to monetize one could only imaging at the beginning of the journey. Netflix's genius use of review curation shows, once again, the value of online scale and of thinking like an Internet marketer instead of print or brick and mortar based retailer....at least online.  

@Martin (Marty) Smith says, "Amazon will make more money from their cloud services than from book sales soon. Why? Because online scale presents ways to monetize one could only imaging at the beginning of the journey. Netflix's genius use of review curation shows, once again, the value of online scale and of thinking like an Internet marketer instead of print or brick and mortar based retailer....at least online."

SCOOPS --  I began using Scoop when I was defining myself a LITE FEET DANCER.  There was no single source of info about Lite Feet dance, a NYC Born Battle dance phenom and YouTube Sensation.  I created LITE FEET SCOOP TO reference for my own resume but also to provide anyone interested a link to the multitude of YOUTUBE Channels, Sound Cloud and personal sites dedicated to this unique art form and the talented dancers who participate. 

Scoop.it helps with the process of curating content. This is a must for your social media.

Robin Good  of Content Curation World breaks the findings down thus:

a) what people curate as relevant is not generally among the top ranked results according to popular metrics. Good stuff is not the same as what is considered normally popular or authoritative stuff.

b) content curation allows a community to synchronize around specific issues and subjects (as anticipated by Clay Shirky)

c) better and more appreciated curation is of the "structured" kind, providing additional info, meta-data and categorization.

d) curators that are highly appreciated are characterized by consistent activity and by a variety of interests (or viewpoints under the same theme) that they are capable to cover.

This is rather my experience; however, I usually explain it to my clients this way:

a) You can be doing an excellent job, but never receive the recognition, popularity, or traffic you deserve.That doesn't mean you won't be appreciated greatly by the smaller group of people who do find/read your curated works.

b) No matter the popularity of your curation, you can build and have conversations -- but remember, community cultivation not only requires additional time, but a different skill set.

c) If you're going to do it, do it well. Use tools, such as labels and tags, and *always* provide context as well as proper credits and links.

d) Consistent activity is nearly as important as showing some personality along with your knowledge. Your topic may be narrowly focused, but offer additional topics and information about you personally (not just professionally) so that people get a sense of you.

A research paper by Zhong, Shah, Sundaravadivelan and Sastry, King's college London, 2013

See the excellent notes from Robin Good below. Interesting to see more work emerging in this field.

Fascinating!

Makes sense to me.

Curating - how to manage it. And curation experts already exist - they're called Librarians!

This is good that they are helping

Perma.cc is an upcoming web service that aims to help authors and journals create permanent archival copies of their online published content.

Way too often in fact, due to a multitude of reasons, not only content gets moved and relocated to new sites, becoming more difficult to find but in many others it is permanently deleted or lost.

To comfort your doubts that this is a true and tangible issue, you should check the work being carried out by Kendra Albert, Larry Lessig and Jonathan Zittrain, who are completing a study of link rot, available at http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2329161. ;

Link rot is the phenomenon by which material we link to on the distributed Web vanishes or changes beyond recognition over time.

Believe it or not half of the links in all of the Supreme Court opinions, don't work anymore.

In this context "the Harvard Library Innovation Lab has pioneered a project to unite libraries so that link rot can be mitigated.  We are joined by about thirty law libraries around the world to start Perma.cc, which will allow those libraries on direction of authors and journal editors to store permanent caches of otherwise ephemeral links."

The Internet Archive has provided its powerful archiving engine to support this effort and Cloudfare its distributed CDN.

The official tagline of the upcoming site reads: "perma.cc helps authors and journals create permanent archived citations in their published work"

Here is essence what you should expect from it: "Perma.cc allows users to create citation links that will never break.

When a user creates a Perma.cc link, Perma.cc archives a copy of the referenced content, and generates a link to an unalterable hosted instance of the site.

Regardless of what may happen to the original source, if the link is later published by a journal using the Perma.cc service, the archived version will always be available through the Perma.cc link."

N.B.: While anyone will be able to go to Perma.cc and archive any web page this resource is designed for researchers, authors and journals. In this light Perma.cc downloads the material at the designated URL and provides a new URL (a “Perma.cc link”) that can then be inserted in a paper. 

After the paper has been submitted to a journal, the journal staff checks that the provided Perma.cc link actually represents the cited material. If it does, the staff “vests” the link and it is forever preserved. Links that are not “vested” will be preserved for two years, at which point the author will have the option to renew the link for another two years.

My comment: Can't wait to test it. We need these type of archival tools like oxygen. It's not only important that we organize and curate what is important from the web, but it is essential that we also take care in preserving it for the longest possible time.

Free and open to all (soon).

Request beta access here: http://perma.cc/ ;

More info: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/futureoftheinternet/2013/09/22/perma/ ;

Similar Tools: www.Permamarks.com

Essential, if the Internet is our all-time library resource...

Thought provoking article with a great twist at the end (No spoiler, you better read it all). Thank you Robin for zooming in available opportunities for curators.

I've heard everyone from Jaron Lanier to Tim Berners-Lee and a number of other noteworthy tech brains bring up this topic up. How do the creators of content and innovative ideas cash in on the contributions they have made that everyone is passing along and sharing? No one wants their work and thoughts stolen and most everyone I know wants creative people to keep creating what we need and want and would like them rewarded and to be able to earn a decent living doing that. This article is about how we can make sure that happens.

Thanks for this reflexion about contents and their creators in the times of the content curation!  Sorry, I didn't intend to make a rhyme. :-/

Discussing the pros & cons of Scoop.it with Co-founder & CEO, Guillaume Decugis.

See my comment in the stream.