This is a great survey piece that I somehow never encountered before, and despite its age (December 2009) is a must read even today for anyone wanting to grasp what this new-fangled notion of digital curation is all about.

The Content Strategist as Digital Curator - Erin Scime via A List Apart

The term “curate” is the interactive world’s new buzzword. During content creation and governance discussions, client pitches and creative brainstorms, I’ve watched this word gain traction at almost warp speed. As a transplant from museums and libraries into interactive media, I can’t help but ask what is it about this word that deserves redefinition for the web?

Curation has a distinguished history in cultural institutions. In galleries and museums, curators use judgment and a refined sense of style to select and arrange art to create a narrative, evoke a response, and communicate a message. As the digital landscape becomes increasingly complex, and as businesses become ever more comfortable using the web to bring their product and audience closer, the techniques and principles of museum curatorship can inform how we create online experiences—particularly when we approach content.

For a long time, we’ve considered digital objects such as articles, slideshows, and video to be short-lived. But today, more and more sites can be considered institutions that house evergreen assets—they collect, preserve, attend to, and create themed content packages that together, offer a unique perspective.

Go read the whole piece.

30 May 2012 23 Permalink

futuresagency (stowe boyd):

One way to know that tectonic changes are happening in an industry is to see people’s titles change when they aren’t being promoted. Newest example? Editors are becoming Content Strategists, and there is increasing demand for this ‘new’ specialty:

The Rise of the Content Strategist - Cheryl Lowry via Flip the Media

Kristina Halvorson’s Content Strategy for the Web, first published in 2009, has been a big influence, as Peter notes in his post. In her book, Halvorson defines content strategy as “the practice of planning for the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable content.” How does this differ, though, from what professional content writers, editors and managers have been doing all along?

I see it as a question of abundance. When I began writing content, creation was the goal. Marketing copy. User guides. FAQs. Help systems. Writers and editors produced and published words, and moving up the chain meant managing an editorial calendar and other writers to produce ever greater sums of copy. As print gave way to the web, this became considerably easier and cheaper to do. Many companies employed (and still employ) a strategy that web usability expert Gerry McGovern refers to as “launch and leave:” produce a ton of content, and then leave it sitting there unmeasured and unmaintained. Clay Shirky calls this abundance a result of post-Gutenberg economics, in which “the cost of producing [content] has fallen through the floor… .and so [now] there’s no economic logic that says you have to filter for quality before you publish.”

However, several recent trends have contributed to organizations demanding more from content.. The Great Recession, the rise of web analytics, and the voice of the customer amplified by social networks have all given companies more tools and incentive to create and maintain “useful, usable content.” Organizations are now realizing that content ought to earn its keep — it should drive conversion (sales, donations), or reduce call drivers (solve frequent and actual problems customers have). If it doesn’t, it’s just polluting the relevance and searchability of content that does.

So, the content strategist is concerned with the full lifecycle of media, not just production or aggregation. I think this title will absorb the brief rise of ‘content curator’, because it sounds shinier.

3 April 2012 25 futuresagency Permalink

Kate Niederhofer via Social Abacus

I’ve blogged before about Wegner’s notion of the transactive memory, a concept I love about how we get information into our heads (encode), arrange and add context (store), and eventually access when needed (retrieve) *as a group*. In my mind, this is underpinning of the success that Twitter is. It also helps explain this tendency we have to read-and-share as a means to coordinate our social network. That is, by sharing certain content with specific people, we more effectively encode, store, and retrieve information as a social network. Think of it like really effective curating. Simply by sharing links, we’re making sense out of our expanding networks. 

But something else happens when we read-and-share. We create virtual spaces. As the great sociologist Ray Oldenburg might say, we create “a third place.” Places, really. Salons. Sharing links creates places for us to meet and talk about our shared interests. Traditionally a “third place” is a place of refuge. It’s not your home, not your job. So these virtual salons we create let us escape— or augment our reality— while performing social network maintenance: clustering and categorizing our network.

Yes, I believe that by curating we are sharing more than links, although it’s not a space that we define, but a way to share time: to still the time we are in, and share it with others, who experience it themselves.

We are sharing experience: Time is the new space.

20 March 2012 15 underpaidgenius Permalink