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Hello, LikeHackers!

If you are reading this post then you probably want to know what is content curation, because that is what the title of this article says.
Ok, we also asked ourselves this question, and tried to investigate the matter as far as possible and collect the opinions of people who call themselves content curators to get the most comprehensive picture.

The curation, unlike the creation, is the concept of creating content (articles, videos, music and even books) when you do not create something entirely unique, but bring the best of what someone has already created and present it to your readers (in case we are talking about music or video, it’s called digital curation).

But why, where did it come from? Steven Rosenbaum gives a simple explanation to this in his article “Content Curators Are The New Superheros Of The Web“:

Yesterday, 250 million photos were uploaded to Facebook, 864,000 hours of video were uploaded to YouTube, and 294 BILLION emails were sent. And that’s not counting all the check-ins, friend requests, Yelp reviews and Amazon posts, and pins on Pintrest.

…

In 2010 we frolicked, Googled, waded, and drowned in 1.2 zettabytes of digital bits and bytes. A year later volume was on an exponential growth curve toward 1.8 zettabytes. (A zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes; that’s a 1 with 21 zeros trailing behind it.)

Which means it’s time to enlist the web’s secret power-humans.

Trish Jones talks a bit about who historically were the content curators, before this phenomenon came to the Web, in the article named ”What Is Content Curation?“:

Curation is nothing new, really. Historically, “curators” have been associated with museums and art galleries. They pick out what to put up for display.

Radio stations are also curators if you think about it. They hand pick what genre of music will be played, what the individual songs will be, and what order they will be played in.

But never has the ability to curate content (be it visual, audio or text) been so available for the general public.

In fact, most people that have any sort of online presence have curated content at one point or another. Most curation doesn’t happen with marketing in mind, though. I’ll mention more on this later.

We would also like to add that today’s news feeds on major portals are, in fact, the biggest examples of content curation. Because many of them do not generate content themselves, but just choose the most significant news of those provided by news agencies.

Yet, if we look at Google trends, we will see that this trend is not more than 3 years old. They also show, that it grew incredibly fast since it has emerged. It looks like a blast, as if Internet users were waiting when someone will come up with the phrase “content curation” to begin typing it into search engines with a breakneck speed:

However, it is easy to explain. If you try to search for content curation in a search engine, then first of all you’ll get the picture, formed by marketers. These nimble guys were the first to take this trend into service.

Why? It’s simple: Today’s internet marketing needs a huge amount of content. Social media marketing, corporate blogs, and marketers’ personal blogs – all of them should constantly tell something to their readers. And after all it is in fact much easier to make mashups of content that was already created, than to write your own original articles.

To be quite honest, many people have been doing this for a long time already. Everyone has a few friends on Facebook or Twitter, who share interesting links and are worth reading because of that. But once the content curation has appeared “officially”, everyone rushed to share links and make “Top 10″ reviews with a renewed force. A couple of years ago, the whole process looked like this:

But now everything is different. Specialized tools like Scoop.it help to significantly speed up the whole process. They take on almost all of the work, leaving only item no.2 for the curator. The content sources, are of course selected by a curator, but this process is greatly simplified, a user can search for the content of several kinds in one window: video, pictures, tweets, RSS-feeds.

This simplification of the process once again boosted the popularity. Content curation has become almost a separate subject in marketing, with its tools, techniques, and even gurus. There are entire portals that are dedicated only to this: http://bostinno.com/channels/real-world-examples-of-content-curation-inspiration/

In this video Todd Schnick and Dan Waldschmidt talk about content curation and explain the main differences between content curation and content creation.

Why content curator is not editor? by Liz Wilson

http://community.paper.li/2012/03/07/why-a-content-curator-is-not-an-editor/

How to be a formidable content curator: a 17-step guide by Chris Lake

http://econsultancy.com/ru/blog/9897-how-to-be-a-formidable-content-curator-a-17-step-guide

But marketers are called the marketers because they always follow the market’s demands. Trends do not emerge on their own, if they are not wanted. Content curation is just one of the directions of general trend of continuous education. Even the most diehard conservatives today have no doubts that the modern professionals must constantly educate themselves just to stay competitive on the market. Let us quote the article by Steven Rosenbaum once again:

One thing I’m sure of-the web is going to keep growing fast. And the solution to making sense of the massive volume is a new engaged partnership between humans and machines. There are a number of companies building cool solutions you can explore if you’re looking for curation tools. Among them: Curata, CurationSoft, Scoop.it, Google+, Storify.com, PearlTrees.com, MySyndicaat.com, Curated.by, Storyful,Evri, Paper.li, Pearltrees, and of course Magnify.net (where I hang my hat).

A variety of tools that we see today is probably just a beginning. In addition to the services listed by Mr. Rosenbaum there are such powerful automatic discover engines like StumbleUpon, and even Facebook EdgeRank. Although all of them, one way or another, utilize the user’s behavior as one of primary factors for content recommendation. We recommend you to start using any of the available content curation tools. In order to choose one for yourself, please read our special article on this topic.

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