Curators and Social Networking Communities Collide
September 7, 2012
An interesting interview concerning the value of curation in networked communities caught my eye today. According to Content Curation World, we should all just forget search and go with content curation. The interview with “cyberculture pioneer” Howard Rheingold is discussed in the article, “Curators Create the Metadata Needed to Enable Our Emerging Collective Intelligence. ” Rheingold believes curation is a “fundamental building block” in social networking communities.
Rheingold speaks on the value of curation on the Internet:
“But the kind of curation that is already mining the mountains of Internet ore for useful and trustworthy nuggets of knowledge, and the kind that will come in the future, has a strong literacy element.
Curators don’t just add good-looking resources to lists, or add their vote through a link or like, they summarize and contextualize in their own words, explicitly explain why the resource is worthy of attention, choose relevant excerpts, tag thoughtfully, group resources and clearly describe the grouping criteria.”
It seems the belief is held that unless the overwhelming amount of information in networked communities is sorted by a trained curator, the public is not empowered enough to make the correct decisions as to what information is important to them. So should we trust a curator to help us when we need to find something of value to us? I am not sure that is a great idea.
Andrea Hayden, September 07, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext.
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
