Robin Good
@robingood
The *curation guy* - indie author, speaker, advisor - focus on empowering subject-matter experts, artists, creators.
robingood.substack.comRobin Good
Intelligence today means staying open. It means unlearning old frameworks, following genuine curiosity, and letting go of the need to appear sophisticated. It means practicing sense-making in public, without fear of being mid-thought.
Uncredentialed Futures
Curation and Knowledge Management
"Agriculture made towns and cities possible, made it possible to meet and associate with far more people than was possible in hunter-gatherer tribes.
Eventually, poets could meet poets, artists could meet artists, and musicians, musicians. The potential of a group of competent musicians is so much greater than the sum of them all in ones and twos.
But large cities have been with us for thousands of years now, and somehow the advances brought on by civilisation seem to have run dry, and urban decay has begun to manifest.
Provided that people can still communicate and work together, the next step forward in human cultural terms might well be independent from physical proximity – it might be through association by choice.
Perhaps now is a good time for the better application of those information technologies that have been developed in recent decades, in supporting storage and reuse: not of food, as in neolithic times, nor even of money, where information technology applied to finance has enabled both wonderful and dreadful things.
It is now the turn of personal information to be the focus of the new technology – information technology – so that we can present ourselves and the values we have chosen to others, and let that information be used for the further positive transformation of society."
Consumption is easy. It’s loud, fast, and often insecure. Taste is slower. It’s edited. It builds over time. It requires knowing yourself well enough to say no more often than yes. It asks what deserves permanence instead of what photographs well.
The Aesthetic of a Life Well-Lived
If knowledge is causal, creative, and world-shaping, then we’re now in an era where what you know — and how expertly you encode and refine it — can literally shape the world (and beyond).
When Expertise Goes Viral: Why Your Knowledge is the Killer App.
Entrepreneurship and Life
curation is an act of love and restraint and deep intentionality.
Emma • You’re a Collector Pretending to Be a Curator
The only way I’m reading something is if there’s an extremely strong trust signal — which basically means it’s been written or boosted by someone I’ve heard of. Otherwise my default position is scepticism.
In such an environment, making it as a “nobody” is nearly impossible.
In such an environment, making it as a “nobody” is nearly impossible.
If you make content online, here's the problem
The more you sample, the better and broader your taste will be. The more you stick to what already speaks to you, the more limited and narrow your taste.
How to have good taste
What we need is more support for the act of curation itself: Not just paying online creators for their content, but paying curators, sustaining the people who find what you like.
One Thing • ⬜ the Importance of Curation
Curating = Unpacking for a General Audience
Thomas B. Campbell, Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, shares in this TED video, his journey to become a respected museum curator, and the valuable discoveries and insights realized along the way.
This passage, in particular, struck with me louder than a thousand words:
"We live in an age of ubiquitous information, and sort of "just add water" expertise, but there's nothing that compares with the presentation of significant objects in a well-told narrative... what the curator does, the interpretation of a complex, esoteric subject, in a way that retains the integrity of the subject, that makes it -- unpacks it for a general audience."