Curation as a Cure

Simply put, we're living in the era of abundance and curation helps combat information overload. In this context, one of my favorite case studies on the importance of curation comes from a nearly 200-year-old publisher with a legacy of breadth and depth, The Economist.

In a world of perpetual data overload, [curation] implies information design and selectivity: the channeling, filtering, and organization into intelligible and usable information; the digging up of new or long ignored cultural corpora. Most of these corpora are simply sitting in storage: less than 1% of the Smithsonian Institution’s permanent colle... See more

It has become popular to say we live in the information age, and we need curation to help us sort through the mess. But thus far, the conversation around “curation” has been too focused on the content and not enough on the structure. We seem to have accepted the job of the curator as providing a product review, a list of links, a song recommendatio... See more

In Curators are the new Creators, Gaby argues that this will create opportunities for curators — increasingly, we will pay people with good taste to help us sort through the ever-growing mass of information.

The business of good taste has been well documented. There are plenty of businesses that address the question “what should I read?”; The Browse... See more

Curation as the internet matured was seen as something in the shape of “directories” or “algorithm based feeds” all which end up being gamified, and in these cases the removals of friction tend to lead to the ultimate destruction of the inherent utility of these aggregations in the first place. Curation can be viewed as necessary friction that is n... See more

Curators filter signal from noise in an increasingly noisy world. As the barriers to being a creator decrease, the internet gets even noisier and the need for credible curators increases. Algorithms will continue to play a role in aggregation, indexing, and personalization. But the best curation requires a human touch. You’re more likely to have an... See more