What is Content Curation?
Most people associate the term curation with the work undertaken by museum or art gallery curators.
Demand for timely, relevant content that is specific to our unique interests and perspectives has given rise to online content curators together with a number of tools that help individuals and companies curate content from the web and deliver it in a meaningful way. The tools range from simple, application-specific types such as social media aggregators and discovery engines, to more robust, full-blown publishing solutions for publishers of all sizes.
Content curation remains essentially contested subject. It means different things to a variety of stakeholders be they journalists, editors, bloggers, business executives or marketers.
Some high profile big Media owners have lumped Content Curation with Search as well as Aggregation and suggested that it represents theft of intelectual property.
Fred Wilson the Venture Capitalist and blogger sees curation as an essential element in today's media landscape as indicated by one of his posts here .
Some argue that curation could actually save media.
Others have argued that there is a new type of curation that is in effect the New Search.
There is even a higly respected Academic Journal that is focused on Digital Curation , the International Journal of Digital Curation
Most people inadvertently already act as curators whenever they decide to post a link or video to their social networks to show their friends they have found great or topical content.
We think Rohit Bhargava's generic definition from 2009 is still valid today:
"Content Curation is a term that describes the act of finding, grouping, organizing or sharing the best and most relevant content on a specific issue."
Editors have always made curatorial decisions about their own internal content — which stories to assign, what to feature on a specific page and so on. Going forward, those types of curatorial decisions will be made on other people’s content as well, and today the role of the editor is undertaken by a myriad of individuals be it a professional journalist , a marketer who is responsible for using content as part of the marketing mix, a blogger, or in reality anyone that publishes online.
