We have all moved from just web presence to commenting, liking and sharing everything online – from users to curators. Social web helps us become the keepers of our culture, trends, create photo galleries, bookmark fun stuff, pass on knowledge, popularize hit videos and more. Whenever we click on comment, like or share on facebook or RT on twitter we are becoming content specialist slow and steady.
This is our primal instinct to hunt and collect things. We pride ourselves to showcase our collection to the world, spread our ideas, seek comments and appreciation. This is what the social web enables us.
Lighspeed has an interesting post on Social Media’s 3 classes: Creators, Curators and Consumers. This article goes on to explain the 3 classes and here’s what it says about the curators.
Curators tie these two groups together (Creators & Consumers). Not all content that the Creators create is of equal quality, and the Curators perform an important filtering function to bubble the best content to the top, hence keeping the Consumers happy, engaged, and coming back. Curators use the mouse. They click to vote/digg/rate. These actions are what give the Creators the attention and affirmation that they are looking for.
It’s important to make it very easy for Curators to give their feedback. This means making the feedback process as close to frictionless as possible. The feedback mechanism should be immediately adjacent to the content that is being rated. Such clicks should be part of rich internet application, and not take you to another page – there should be no “wait time” penalty for providing curator feedback as they wait for a page to load. Ideally, it will not require registration, or registration will be kept as light as possible. Since Curators use the mouse, avoid them from having to touch a keyboard as much as possible.
In an another piece from Steve Rubel "The Digital Curator in Your Future", he talks about how the digitial curators work in the digitil realm
Much the same, the digital realm too needs curators. Information overload makes it difficult to separate junk from art. It requires a certain finesse and expertise – a fine tuned, perhaps trained eye. Google, memetrackers such as Techmeme and social news sites like digg are not curators. They’re aggregators – and there’s a big difference.
The call of the curator requires people who are selfless and willing to act as sherpas and guides. They’re identifiable subject matter experts who dive through mountains of digital information and distill it down to its most relevant, essential parts. Digital Curators are the future of online content. Brands, media companies and dedicated individuals can all become curators. Further, they don’t even need to create their own content, just as a museum curator rarely hangs his/her own work next to a Da Vinci. They do, however, need to be subject matter experts.
There’s also a suggestion for MSM "Journalists need to stop thinking exclusively like content creators and start acting also as content curators" – Tim Windsor .And more such recommendations from JP Rangaswami and Scott Karp
Crowdsourced Curation : Comment | Like | Share – RT #tags and more…
The common tools on social web platforms is already helping us become the curators. We may not be expert curators but collective activities of crowd or mass surely helps in bringing up the best of the collection and connect creators with consumers.
On social web it’s infact the switching of roles which makes it even more interesting, the consumer becomes the curator unknowingly. Sometimes just by forwarding it to the right person or adding a very important meta data and enhancing the original creation.
If you browse through the profiles of friends and professionals connection on facebook, linkedin, twitter and so on, you also traverse through the massive collection of their likes, dislikes, environment, society, country and the industries that they represent. That’s also the reason why time spent on these properties is increasing and would continue to do so.
The best example of this would be the blogosphere where a) blogs and blogrolls and b) blog post, inter links and trackbacks exhibit this mass collection, filtering and curation. Microblogging made it more easy with with easy 140 character posts, RTs and hashtags. Trending topics on Twitter is precisely this.
The Status Updates or Tweets is all about “Hey, Look at my collection”. User doesn’t have an investment in your property or content, whereas the curator is almost showing the ownership and takes pride in it.
From MSM point of view we really need to think hard are we allowing the users to become the curators.
- Are we allowing them to collect our content or media and make their own sense out of it
- Is the content valuable enough for them to care and share
- Are there enough transport mechanism for them to share it with the world
- Are they volunteering for you, are you allowing them to graduate beyond readers/consumers to fans/caretakers.
- Remember they act as the connectors and bridge between creators and consumers. How many bridges have your created ?
The platforms are already there, are you participating ? There’s walled garden, no more…