Goodbye Search, Hello Content Curation

Mashble.com raised the idea of content curation playing a critial role in the media and publishing value chain. They talk the concept of how content curation is needed when search engines fail to deliver useful results.

Definition: Content Curation is the act of humans manually organising content.

“Curation comes up when search stops working,” says author and NYU Professor Clay Shirky.

I totally agree with the discussion they’ve created, as we’re living in a world where there’s content super-overload and even content aggregators, of which there are many, are meaningless streams of content.

However…

• the act of content curation has been happening for a long time
• it’s about to get even better
• more people are going to demand it
• and it’s not going to cost media/publishers/advertisers anything

Who said what now? Well, Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious and many others have been faciltating content curation for years – where the masses rate and categorise pages all over the internets. If you go to Digg.com, select a category, you’ll find what everyone using Digg thinks is worth reading/viewing anywhere on the internet right now. Some publishers have been smart, using the Digg engine to sort and organise content on their own sites…

But, it’s about to change dramatically as one of the major downsides to sites like Digg is only a certain type of person uses Digg, generally more tech savvy. Whereas, Facebook is used by just about everyone, and they’ve recently created their very own Digg, taking content curation to the absolute masses. You’ll see ‘Like’ buttons appearing all over the Internet more and more, like my personal blog and washingtonpost.com.

Facebook have rolled out this new piece of functionality with both users and publishers in mind. For users its super simple, and for publishers there are tools to help ‘organise’ or curate your content very quickly, checkout washingtonpost.com. And Levis’s have integrated it really well in their online shop.

Which then appears on Facebook like this.

Mark Zuckerberg today said that there will be over one billion “Likes” in the first 24 hours, and i’m not surprised.

And what’s next for content curation? People won’t have to leave Facebook, it will become an awesome search engine, ranking results based on what your friends like, and content will start to feed into Facebook from the broad Internet as your friends like stuff.

Pretty exciting times. I reckon Google would be a little nervous.

So yes, Content Curation is the future, it’s already here and about to get super easy. Any organisation with a website will be able to let their users do the curation, using tools like Facebook Like, and if you don’t you’re missing out.