There was a time when the only curator was a person who selected artwork or hard-to-find artifacts for an art gallery or a museum. Not any more. Today, according to author, Steven Rosenbaum, founder and CEO of Magnify.net, everyone is a curator. In his book, “Curation Nation,” you get a sense of how curation evolved.
From the beginning when Reader’s Digest was developed, to the recent explosion of the singer, Susan Boyle, the reader realizes that curation has been in use for a long time. When there were only three major stations in this country, the news editors curated the content that viewers were able to receive. However, through the years, things have changed and within recent years, the power of curation has been put in the hands of the consumer. We now tend to lean on our neighbor, our friends, our local bloggers and online resources for our information.
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Reader’s Digest, founded by DeWitt Wallace who had been a curator all his life, spent months at the local library reading all the magazines he could. The proto-type of the first Reader’s Digest included articles that he read and found of interest from the Atlantic Monthly, Saturday Evening Post and even Ladies’ Home Journal.
Susan Boyle’s story is a little different. Paul Woods, an investor from London, saw Susan Boyle and knew she had something. He got her on Britain’s Got Talent and purchased a website, susanboyle.com. The night of her performance, he got her site up and running. It became a site for those to share stories, ideas and see performances of Susan Boyle. Within four days, it had more than 42,000 subscribers.
The Huffington Post is an excellent example of a curation site. Here people submit stories, many don’t get paid and the Huffington staff curates the stories appropriately. People want to be in the Huffington Post because it is one of the largest blog sites on the Internet.
Steven Rosenbaum suggests that video is going to become more prevalent and in constant need of curation. He also believes that we are all going to continue to go smaller, using our mobile devices as the device of choice. He includes a section on privacy issues and ways in which credit card companies, banks and retailers plan on using our data. Take a look at Rue LaLa, the shopping site. Once you add in your credit card information, all you have to do is click on the item you want and you purchased it.
Laced with case studies and interviews from Chris Brogan, Seth Godin, Jeff Jarvis, among many other great online marketers, Curation Nation is a strong and powerful book that makes you think about how the world is changing and how important it is to be on board before you “miss the boat.”
Reading this book, I started to think about other curation sites like Blogcritics and Blogher. Both of these sites use free content from their users and segment them into categories so that the viewer can easily find stories they may be looking for.
Today, anyone and everyone can be a curator.
Overall, I liked the book and agreed with Steven Rosenbaum. However, I felt as if he was a little too impressed with the people he was interviewing.
Rosenbaum made some strong points about curation and how we need to engage it because it is becoming more and more important every day, but curators are also becoming more powerful too. He suggests that if you can come up with a site where you can be the curator, your chances of making a living are extremely good.
President Barack Obama summed it up by saying to the graduating class at Harvard that we currently live in an era where we have overwhelming data and this data requires discipline and solutions.
From what reporters want us to hear, to people around the world telling us things that we may not have ever heard if there were no Internet, it’s all becoming way too hard to handle. And, it’s difficult to absorb and sort through all of the information available at our fingertips This, according to the author, is called Curation Nation.
I thought Curation Nation was an interesting, exciting book that made me think about the world in a different way. I would recommend it to anyone who is involved online.
