Curation

The video is from my interview with Robin Good. Here is what I wrote about curation in my 2012 book, Net Smart: How to Thrive Online. (Here's a PDF of the introduction). 

"Curation" is short for "we're all each other's filter"

“A tweet is an atom. A photo on Flickr is an atom. A conversation item on Google Buzz is an atom. A Facebook status message is an atom. A YouTube video is an atom. Thousands of these atoms flow across our screens in tools like Seesmic, Google Reader, Tweetdeck, Tweetie, Simply Tweet, Twitroid, etc. A curator is an information chemist. He or she mixes atoms together in a way to build an info-molecule. Then adds value to that molecule.” 

Robert Scoble, “The Seven Needs of Real-Time Curators,”[i]

People have always made choices about what to pay attention to. In the online world people also make choices that influence what others pay attention to. That’s what people mean when we use the word “curation” to refer to online behavior. The role of curator used to be reserved for the people who ran museums, but the word has been revived and expanded to describe the way populations of Web participants can act as information finders and evaluators for each other, creating through our choices collections of links that others can use. The voluntary curation contribution of every person who ever puts a link on a website, blog, or tweet is what enables Google to not only find websites that mention specified strings of words, but to rank the sites in order of popularity. Popularity turns out to be a pretty good but far from infallible gauge of the potential value of a site — crap detecting skills are still necessary to separate the accurate from the merely popular. Google itself is not the curator — we are. Every time a person references a link, we help to curate the web. In 2010, Facebook recognized the power of curation by making available to millions of sites added a “like” button that Facebook users could click on to recommend that site to others. Best-selling author and web entrepreneur Seth Godin foresees curation as an emerging position of power: “If we live in a world where information drives what we do, the information we get becomes the most important thing. The person who chooses that information has power.”[ii]

Curation is a form of participation that is open to anyone who might not want to blog, Tweet, or update a Facebook profile, but who are happy to bookmark, tag, or “like” other people’s digital creations. Judgement, taste, depth and breadth of knowledge can be an asset, a public good, and a commodity. People can gain attention, admiration, collaboration partners, professional reputation, business relationships by becoming known curators. Curation has been an interest of mine since I wrote this in 1987: “In my virtual community, we don't have software agents (because they don't exist yet), but we do have informal social contracts that allow us to act as software agents for one another. If, in my wanderings through information space, l come across items that don't interest me but which I know one of my group of online friends appreciate, I send the appropriate friend a pointer to the key datum or discussion. This social contract requires one to give something, and enables one to receive something. I have to keep my friends in mind and send them pointers instead of throwing my informational discards into the virtual scrap-heap. It doesn't take a great deal of energy to do that, since I have to sift that information anyway in order to find the knowledge I seek for my own purposes. And with twenty other people who have an eye out for my interests while they explore sectors of the information space that I normally wouldn't frequent, I find that the help I receive far outweighs the energy I expend helping others: A perfect fit of altruism and self interest.”[iii]” Because of my long-standing interest in curation, and because I’m known as a curator myself (you can find my Diigo.com and Delicious.com bookmarks under the username hrheingold, I’m Johnny Shoepainter on Flickr.com and howardrheingold on Youtube), I knew just who to talk to about curation skills.

In pursuit of latter-day master curators, I interviewed one of the first journalists whose curation brought him celebrity among the digerati, Robert Scoble. I had the privilege of watching him in action during a two week “travelling geeks” tour of the UK. Like all great curators, Scoble is first (and energetically) an enthusiast and friend of enthusiasts. He loves to find interesting people, ask them questions, tell their stories. Scoble is an enthusiast for social media, web entrepreneurs, and the latest digital tools. He blogs, microblogs, favorites tweets, “likes” websites, tags and bookmarks thousands of people, enterprises, media, and websites about those subjects. And because he understands the literacies of attention, participation, crap detection, collective intelligence, and social network dynamics, Scoble can do magic in public — like the time he beat the US Geological Service to the news of an earthquake in China. According to Scoble, his passion for curation started in college. “In 1991-92,” Scoble recalled, “I ran the Associated Press wire machine at San Jose State University andfell in love with that. I was running the machine when OJ Simpson was found not guilty. There were something like 650 stories from hundreds of journalists who had been at the courthouse. The San Jose Mercury News picked two or three stories to put in the newspaper but I always wanted to have more. Today, Twitter replaces the AP wire machine for me. I have a Twitter list of all the world news brands and now I can see world news happen in real time. Most people can’t put up with all that information streaming at them, so I try to pick interesting things out of the flow for a geek audience — I am curating for geeks or people interested in technology. It’s like a newspaper editors’ job. I enjoy picking out interesting things and seeing patterns that other people don’t see in the news.”[iv]

Scoble came to beat USGS to the Chinese earthquake because, as he told me, “I watch tens of thousands of people on Twitter. I was just watching as entertainment one evening and I saw five different people say something about an earthquake — and those people were located in five separate cities in China many miles apart. So I kept refreshing the USGS website and Twitter search. I always start out skeptical because it’s not fun for your brand to be pushing along stuff that doesn’t prove to be true. Once USGS confirmed the quake, the people who had reported it on my Twitter feed became authoritative on that subject. I immediately started watching everything they wrote. One of them started linking me to pictures, videos, news reports — 45 minutes before Associated Press and CNN admitted there had been an earthquake in China.”[v]

Scoble’s advice to novice curators: “Start out by building a Twitter list of people you trust and you like reading. Don’t add any person or organization to the list until you understand who they are and you’ve watched them for a little while. I look at these lists as funnels. Who do I put in the funnel? I want people I trust for some reason. On my main Twitter list I follow all geeks. On my Tech-influencers list, you actually have to have some influence in the technology world to get on it. Try to meet and interview the people on your list who prove to be the most interesting and useful. Don’t try to compete with me or the Huffington Post. Find a small niche. Really understand it. If you wanted to study the White House, study what a pet is doing at the White House. Pick something very specific and become the world authority on what the pets are doing at the White House. Totally cover it. Own that small niche.”

Scoble codified the emerging craft of curation on his famous blog, Scobleizer.com. According to Scoble, “The Seven Needs of Real Time Curators” include:[vi]

1. The need to bundle. Scoble bundled together tweets about the Chinese earthquake, together with links to videos and pictures. Tools like Storify.com, Curated.by and Scoop.it are emerging to make bundling and other aspects of curation as easy as blogging.

2. The need to reorder. The order in which you found information, or the order in which it flowed to you, is not often the order you want to present to your public — arranging the most important items in an order is part of the value curators add.

3. The need to distribute bundles. Curation tools increasingly include automatic blogging, so each bundle can have a URL. Without a URL, there’s nothing to link to, and links are the connective tissue and social currency of the Web.

4. The need to editorialize. “So, now we have a bundle of Tweets, YouTube videos, Flickr photos, Google Buzz items, Facebook status messages. We’ve seen a new pattern in the world and now we want to explain our view of that pattern.”Ibid., [vii] I don’t just want Scoble to bring a new app to my attention. I want to know what he thinks of it, and why.

5. The need to update. Stories and bodies of knowledge change over time — some more quickly than others. In an era of information flows and activity streams, curated bundles have to be updated (including as part of the bundle RSS feeds for specific tags are one way).

6. The need to invite participation. Enable reader comments on your blog (this can make you vulnerable to spammers who auto-comment their uninvited ads — Scoble only leaves comments for any story open for only 30 days for this reason, and other means can be used to filter out spammers.)

7. The need to track your public. TweetMeme.com can tell you how many times your tweet or bundle has been retweeted (copied and published by others via Twitter), Google Analytics can provide an entire dashboard. URL-shortening services like Goo.gl and bit.ly enable you to keep track of how many times your shortened link is clicked on.

I was fortunate to also have met the other person I consider to be a world authority on curation, Luigi Canali de Rossi, known to the world as “Robin Good.” I’ll never forget seeing Rome from the back of his motorbike. And the RSS feed from his “MasterNewMedia” super-blog is in the top left corner of my dashboard — the place I position the most useful and timely information-flows.[viii] Good has published a detailed series on what he calls “newsmastering” or, like Scoble, “real time news curation.” Again, I’ll paraphrase, distill, and quote, but I recommend Good’s comprehensive series on “Real-time News Curation, Newsmastering And Newsradars — the complete Guide Parts 1-6.”[ix] Good listed the following attributes of a good curator (again, paraphrased — and note the overlaps with Scoble’s advice about curation):

1. Subject matter expertise. Not just cold knowledge, but a passion for the topic.

2. Relevance. “The result of subject matter expertise coupled with a very good understanding of the audience one is trying to serve.”[x]

3. Trust. “Repeated relevance,” Good succinctly states, leads to trust. It’s why you want to double-check before passing along badinfo and damaging the trust your public has granted you.

Good also listed the skills required by a person who gains these attributes (again, note the overlaps with Scoble):

1.  Online Re-search skills. Search savvy and infotention (I learned the concept of “radars” from Robin Good). If you’ve read this far and diligently practiced what I’ve showed you, you already have a start on mastering these skills.

2. New media literacy skills. Crap detection, online collaboration (the subject of the chapter following this one).

3. Presentation skills, including storytelling, visual presentation, active listening to communities, knowing your public and adapting to their feedback, cultivating a unique voice.

4. Editorial skills, including selecting (knowing which one of the hundreds of items published today about a niche topic is worth recommending is in itself a valuable skill), contextualizing, providing additional resources, citing and crediting, summarizing and updating.

5. Semantic skills, including organizing and classifying information into relevant categories and knowing how to tag an item usefully and quickly, pattern recognition, sense-making, and understanding how search engines draw your public to your publications.

6. Social skills, including building networks of trusted relationships with knowledgeable people, engaging with others in your personal learning network and public.

7. Information library skills, including organizing and archiving stories and bundles. Over time, do your collections add up to more, or become less accessible?

8.Technical skills, including RSS (which I introduced as a technical component of infotention) and content distribution channels, from blogs and feeds to more sophisticated distribution channels offered by curation web services.

Next, Good listed the steps in a curatorial workflow process. If you want to go beyond basic literacy to become what Robin Good calls a “newsmaster,” here is your step-by-step guide to mastery:

1.  Identify niche — as Scoble also pointed out, focusing on a specialty is the way to distinguish yourself.

2. Select — identify sources. The kind of exploration in search of expertise I’ll discuss in regard to personal learning networks will be relevant to this step.

3.  Setup search framework — create a dashboard and use Twitter and social media searches (“radars”) to monitor information-flows about your niche.

4. Reach out — network with “reporters, journalists, passionate users, influencers and experts in your topic niche.”[xi]

5. Aggregate — create a single outgoing feed about your niche, compounded from your selected, filtered incoming feeds

6. Filter — use PostRank and other filters to weed out the least useful input before it reaches you. Protect your public from spam by using the spam-filtering tools that most comment systems now offer.

7. Select stories — Here’s where you apply your taste and expertise.

8. Verify. Crap detect before you send information out to your public — lest they crap detect you.

9. Edit. Introduce, summarize, copy-edit, check your references and citations. 

10. Contextualize — learn the art of the snippet that enables your public to zero in on the reason why you’ve selected this item for their attention.

11. Spin — add perspective, state your opinion, explain the big picture.

12. Title — in the world of search engines and human infotention, you need to concentrate on the findability and spreadability of the titles you give every outgoing story or bundle.

13. Credit — don’t just link. Reference. Provide citation information. Credit sources.

14. Sequence — “time is not always the best sequencing variable.”[xii]

15. Organize — tag intelligently.

16. Update — turn inert content into an info-flow by adding an RSS feed to your bundle that updates with links you bookmark under specific tags.

17. Disclose — “Be upfront about your focus, mission, and personal profile information. Disclose as much of this info as possible letting your readers-subscribers know what is your topic, perspective, or editorial take on it and your specific background and expertise. Make commercial partnerships and sponsors you have publicly known.” I[xiii] 

18. Syndicate — let your public know how to subscribe to your updates through RSS.

19. Feedback-replay — respond to suggestions, critical feedback, debates, invitations from your public.

20. Monitor — all kinds of analytic tools enable you to find out more about which of your stories are most clicked, favorited, liked, shared.

21. Refine and improve. If you are serious about curation, this cycle makes it possible to put attention into continuous improvement, with the help of your public.

If you want to curate, keep Robert Scoble’s and Robin Good’s advice in the forefront of your attention, and apply the practices they recommend. Two ways to get started are by learning to tag intelligently (and to follow tags to find the information you seek) through social bookmarking, and by making public lists, such as Twitter lists.

Search engines have replaced much of our previous practice of indexing information within folders within folders — if you can remember the exact name of a document or a unique combination of words you know are on a web page, there’s no reason to store a reference. But that doesn’t help to store for your own reference a collection of previously vetted websites on a particular subject or to curate a library of resources on a subject for others. A programmer who worked on databases for a financial company, Joshua Schachter cooked up a quick program that allowed him to store URLs for websites along with his summary or a snipped of text from each site, attach multiple keywords to each bookmark, and then retrieve the links later by looking up the collection associated with any of the tags he used. So a link to a video by Marshall McLuhan about media could be stored and then retrieved via either “McLuhan,” “video,” or “media” tags. Instead of choosing which folder to put a bookmark in, tagging makes it possible to put it in as many categories as I’d like, When his friends started asking for copies of his program, it was easy to make it possible for any of his friends to make his bookmark choices, summaries, and tags available to others. Schachter’s personal knowledge-management utility grew into the web service used by millions of people now known as “delicious.com” and the genre he created is “social bookmarking,” a practice that enables those with sufficient attention, collaboration, and network know-how to multiply the value of a public good while serving our own self-interest. 

Social bookmarking makes possible discovery as well as curation — I can use my own particular expertise to cull out the best links on a topic I know about, and enable others to access my vetted collection, and I can browse through other people’s collections of resources to find good information about particular topics. Give me a subject that can be described in a word or two, like “ media literacy” or “molecular gastronomy,” and I can pinpoint within minutes a key online resource or two and begin to assemble a personal network of relatively trustworthy expert sources on the topic. In that way, social bookmarking is a vast knowledge commons, free for the harvesting. And as I accumulate my own collection of links to, say, material about wikis, I can make a resource like http://delicious.com/hrheingold/wiki available to anyone who inspects the bookmarks tagged “wiki,” those who browse my own publicly viewable bookmark collection, those who subscribe to my wiki tag and receive an RSS update whenever I tag a new bookmark with “wiki.” And when I want to point my students or a colleague at my bookmarks for using wikis in collaboration, I can send them to http://delicious.com/hrheingold/wiki+collaboration 

[i] Scoble, Robert, “The Seven Needs of Real-Time Curators,” Scobleizer.com, March 27, 2010, http://scobleizer.com/2010/03/27/the-seven-needs-of-real-time-curators/.

[ii] Rosenbaum, Steve, “Why Curation Is Just as Important as Creation,” Mashable, March 17, 2011, http://mashable.com/2011/03/17/curation-importance/.

[iii] Rheingold, Howard, “Virtual Communities,” Whole Earth Review, Winter, 1987, http://journals.tdl.org/jvwr/article/view/293/247.

[iv] Interview with author.

[v] Ibid., Interview with Author.

[vi] Scoble, Robert, “The Seven Needs of Real Time Curators,” Scobleizer.com, March 27, 2010, http://scobleizer.com/2010/03/27/the-seven-needs-of-real-time-curators/.

[vii] Scoble, 2010.

[viii] http://masternewmedia.com.

[ix] Good, Robin, “Real-time News Curation, Newsmastering And Newsradars — the Complete Guide Parts 1-6, ” MasterNewMedia.com, September 7, 2010, http://www.masternewmedia.org/real-time-news-curation-newsmastering-and-newsradars-the-complete-guide-part-1/.

[x] Ibid. Good, Robin, 2010.

[xi] Ibid. Good, Robin, 2010.

[xii] Ibid. Good, Robin, 2010.

[xiii] bid., Good, Robin, 2010.