Bill Liao: Curation: Filtering out Rubbish and Creating Relevant Content

In the world of social media, where anyone can generate content, tools are desperately needed to enable those with the talent for curation and/or those, who have excellence in a field of expertise to identify themselves to us and to enable them to direct and curate content, such that we can sieve out the signal, the news, the interesting from the overwhelming pool of noise.

The Internet and the media are undoubtedly powerful marvels that allow our species unprecedented access not just to view content but to create it ourselves. There is a kind of unsaid expectation that alongside this power, we somehow have the time to also filter the entire Internet to our personal tastes.

Frankly speaking do we really have time to do that? What we need is actually powerful filters, that sift the Internet looking amongst the noise for those gems that are truly interesting. People like John Lloyd of QI, who tirelessly search for the interesting and bring it out to our attention, because it’s the right thing to do. People like Richard Feynman who could take any scientific topic and turn it into something fascinating and fun.

People like this who have talent and passion for pulling together content in a moving and informative and fun way, need tools and recognition such, that they can follow their dream and be recognised and rewarded for it. The good folks at TED curate the most wonderful experience that you get to see for free at TED.com in the form of magnificently produced videos of talks by eminent people. Yet why not more TED’s?

There is a lot of Buzz about curation, yet it appears little understanding of what makes a truly great curator and almost no tools that allow someone to become a great curator. There are a plethora of enabling technologies that enable you to produce rubbish, yet very little that allows you to filter out the rubbish and produce interesting stuff.

New sites, like storyful.com, buck this trend by equipping seasoned Journalists with cutting edge curation tools. Programs like QI regularly make television interesting and the genius of Flickr.com’s Interestingness never ceases to amaze.

Still the opportunity is there for a much more powerful set of tools to take hold and for these few examples to get the aider audience they deserve. If you know of other great examples of curation or curation tools please tweet them to me @liaonet as I see that the future holds a lot of mediocrity if we do not take arms against a sea of drivel.

Please feel free to tweet questions to be answered in this column to me as well.

(by Bill Liao/news.ch)