So how exactly is the word “curation” applied online? Just like the museum curator, who picks out which paintings are shown, online curators pick out which bits of content are shown.
If you think about it, hasn’t this been going on since the dawn of communication?
Human’s have always shared what they felt was the most important, most relevant information to others around them. Even if they were the original source of that information.
Lately however, marketers have decided to call this “curation” in order to make it sound new. Regardless of whether it’s new or not, it is a very solid content strategy. Especially in this day and age! Let’s face it, there is an overwhelming amount of content out there now. We’ve become our own media outlet now that we have these smartphones in our pocket.
With an overabundance of content comes a growing demand for that content to be sifted and sorted. Curated to bring only the best bits to the forefront!
One old example of this online is The Drudge Report. This site produces no original content. Everyday they update the links on the one page they have. That’s it! This site gets butt loads of traffic, and it is worth millions. They employ a very small staff that “hand picks” the news they will feature on their homepage every day.
A better example would be The Huffingtonpost. As you can see, they add their own voice and opinion on the topic at hand in addition to syndicating content from other authoritative websites. It’s important to note that the owner of that site recently sold it for to AOL for $315 million dollars!
In regards to the word “curation”, Business Insider goes on to explain why it is becoming so popular with media companies large and small:
“..It’s a word that gained a lot of traction in the past 12 months as the overarching trends of ubiquitous distribution and mass content creation have emerged as the two headed dragon that may slay media as we know it.
The old model was “one to many” (NBC -> viewers). The new model is “one to a few” (YOU -> your friends and followers). That means there is an overwhelming explosion of content being created (Twitter feeds, blog posts, Flickr photos, Facebook updates) and most of it is interesting to a very small number of people. But, mixed in with this cacophony of consumer content, there is contextually relevant material that needs to be discovered, sorted, and made “brand safe” for advertisers.
Curation is the new role of media professionals.
Separating the wheat from the chaff, assigning editorial weight, and — most importantly – giving folks who don’t want to spend their lives looking for an editorial needle in a haystack a high-quality collection of content that is contextual and coherent. It’s what we always expected from our media, and now they’ve got the tools to do it better.
Yes, that’s right, the future of media is better, not worse. It’s more detailed, multi-faceted and nuanced. And, just more.“
A lot of content creators aren’t so happy about the growing popularity of “editorial curation — human filtering and organizing”. Steve Rosenbaum, the CEO of Magnify.net, explains why:
I have recently switched from using Firefox as my default browser to using Chrome. It’s just faster, and more streamlined in my opinion. I also had the chance to check out the Chrome Web Store.
If you’re not familiar, the Chrome Web Store has “Apps” that you can install in the Chrome browser to do all sorts of useful things. It’s similar to “add-ons” in Firefox. The difference is that in many cases these Apps are simply icons installed on your Chrome start page that link to a particular site or blog. Essentially they are just fancy bookmarks! Considering how many people use the Chrome browser, it’s easy to see why it would be beneficial for you to have an “App” for your site.
Anything that will allow Chrome users to easily access your site from their start page can only be a good thing right?
It would also be beneficial for you to promote this App from your website and to your ezine subscribers because the more popular your site is in the Chrome Web Store the better it will rank in the store. It’s almost like some kind of secret, secondary search engine.
How great would it be if your site had an App in the Chrome Web Store? Vikitech.com explains how this can be done:
“After reading the Chrome Web Apps Documentation for a while, I found that the process of making a web app from any existing website is quite easy. As an example, I created a Web App for Mind42.com which is my favorite site for creating Mind Maps.
Using the process described below you can create your own Chrome Web Apps. Lets see how it’s done.
Creating Your Own Chrome Web Apps:
Basics: What does a Chrome Web App consist of?
A Chrome Web App consists of a .crx file that contains the metadata describing the app. (The .crx file format is just a variation of ZIP that’s used by Google Chrome.)
The .crx file for a hosted app (app made from an existing website) must contain an icon and a manifest that has details about how the app should function in the browser.
Getting Started:
These are the only 2 things you need to make a Chrome Web App. The manifest and an icon for the web app.
The Manifest - Every app needs a manifest—a JSON-formatted file named manifest.json that describes it.
The Icon - Every app also needs an icon. The icon is used on the New Tab page.
Creating The Manifest:
In order to create a manifest file, open the notepad or any other text editor you use and…” [Read More]
Please feel free to share your Chrome App by leaving a comment below! We’ll have one for TrueWebPresence.com done very soon!
“After graduating from college in 1980, Prescott had labored for almost three decades to become a best-selling novelist, writing more than 20 books under various names. He enjoyed critical praise and some successes.
But when 25 publishers passed on buying his thriller Riptide, Prescott thought the gig was up. Then, on a whim, he decided to self-publish it as an e-book.
Today, the soft-spoken Prescott, 51, is living his dream. He is one of 15 self-published authors whose e-books, often selling for just 99 cents, have cracked the top 150 on USA TODAY’s Best-Selling Books list this year, threatening to change the face of publishing.
For Prescott and a handful of others, the numbers add up. Prescott says he has earned more than $300,000 before taxes this year by selling more than 800,000 copies of his self-published e-books.
Five of Prescott’s thrillers have logged a total of 42 weeks on USA TODAY’s best-seller list.
‘If someone in this year had told me I was going make a lot of money with e-books, I wouldn’t have believed him,’ Prescott says. ‘I thought maybe a couple of hundred dollars.’
E-books are changing the way authors and readers connect.
Today, authors such as Prescott can bypass traditional publishers. They can digitally format their…” [Read More]
Are you as excited as I am? Leave a comment and let us know what is on your mind!
I don’t know about you, but I find it very entertaining to watch how the Internet continues to evolve. It truly boggles the mind when you realize just how fast technology is advancing. This new Google update is a welcome change since I feel it can only increase the quality of the search results. Not everybody agrees of course.
“Google Search has always been about finding the best results for you. Sometimes that means results from the public web, but sometimes it means your personal content or things shared with you by people you care about. These wonderful people and this rich personal content is currently missing from your search experience. Search is still limited to a universe of webpages created publicly, mostly by people you’ve never met. Today, we’re changing that by bringing your world, rich with people and information, into search.
Search is pretty amazing at finding that one needle in a haystack of billions of webpages, images, videos, news and much more. But clearly, that isn’t enough. You should also be able to find your own stuff on the web, the people you know and things they’ve shared with you, as well as the people you don’t know but might want to… all from one search box.
We’re transforming Google into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships. We began this transformation with Social Search, and today we’re taking another big step in this direction by introducing three new features:
Personal Results, which enable you to find information just for you, such as Google+ photos and posts—both your own and those shared specifically with you, that only you will be able to see on your results page;
Profiles in Search, both in autocomplete and results, which enable you to immediately find people you’re close to or might be interested in following; and,
People and Pages, which help you find people profiles and Google+ pages related to a specific topic or area of interest, and enable you to follow them with just a few clicks. Because behind most every query is a community.
Together, these features combine to create Search plus Your World. Search is simply better with your world in it, and we’re just getting started.[Read more]
What are your personal feelings regarding this new update to Google’s algorithm update? Please leave a comment.
I stumbled across this really great essay on Paul Graham’s website that is derived from a talk at the Berkeley CSUA. The title is a bit of an exaggeration, but I find his method of “hacking” the corporate world to be great advice for any young, motivated 20 something who is feeling a bit hopeless due to today’s plummeting job market:
“The three big powers on the Internet now are Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft. Average age of their founders: 24. So it is pretty well established now that grad students can start successful companies. And if grad students can do it, why not undergrads?
Like everything else in technology, the cost of starting a startup has decreased dramatically. Now it’s so low that it has disappeared into the noise. The main cost of starting a Web-based startup is food and rent. Which means it doesn’t cost much more to start a company than to be a total slacker. You can probably start a startup on ten thousand dollars of seed funding, if you’re prepared to live on ramen.
The less it costs to start a company, the less you need the permission of investors to do it. So a lot of people will be able to start companies now who never could have before.
The most interesting subset may be those in their early twenties. I’m not so excited about founders who have everything investors want except intelligence, or everything except energy. The most promising group to be liberated by the new, lower threshold are those who have everything investors want except experience.
Market Rate
I once claimed that nerds were unpopular in secondary school mainly because they had better things to do than work full-time at being popular. Some said I was just telling people what they wanted to hear. Well, I’m now about to do that in a spectacular way: I think undergraduates are undervalued.
Or more precisely, I think few realize the huge spread in the value of 20 year olds. Some, it’s true, are not very capable. But others are more capable than all but a handful of 30 year olds. [1]
Till now the problem has always been that it’s difficult to pick them out. Every VC in the world, if they could go back in time, would try to invest in Microsoft. But which would have then? How many would have understood that this particular 19 year old was Bill Gates?
It’s hard to judge the young because (a) they change rapidly, (b) there is great variation between them, and (c) they’re individually inconsistent. That last one is a big problem. When you’re young, you occasionally say and do stupid things even when you’re smart. So if the algorithm is to filter out people who say stupid things, as many investors and employers unconsciously do, you’re going to get a lot of false positives.
Most organizations who hire people right out of college are only aware of the average value of 22 year olds, which is not that high. And so the idea for most of the twentieth century was that everyone had to begin as a trainee in some entry-level job. Organizations realized there was a lot of variation in the incoming stream, but instead of pursuing this thought they tended to suppress it, in the belief that it was good for even the most promising kids to start at the bottom, so they didn’t get swelled heads.
