The internet is a great vehicle for the creation and dissemination of buzzwords. I run across them all the time, and in the areas where I spend my time online the term ‘curation’ has been getting more and more play in the last several months.
It seems that way back in time (the mid 1990’s) the idea that you could save URL’s with your browser was a valuable idea. Netscape had its bookmarks, and Microsoft Internet Explorer had its favorites…and while they were saved in different formats, they were conceptually the same thing…a list of saved URLs.
Now, not even two decades later in time (8 to 20 generations in online time…maybe more…), the idea of bookmarks has become so passé, and ubiquitous that it has little value as a metaphor…it is as if the word and concept are worn out.
We use the internet and online content in increasingly some complex and different ways from what we might have done back in the days of Netscape 4.0… and with this change has come some new Web 2.0 terms, you see we don’t bookmark things any more, we curate collections of information which we may have gleaned from, the infinity of data to be found online.
The term curation implies managing a collection for viewing (i.e. museums…), and with online journalism I can see that collecting and collating links, information clippings, audio, text, graphics, and video might imply the need for some new tolls to accomplish these tasks.
Last week I reviewed Storify, which is one of many new curation tools out there. This tool allows you to create collated ‘stories’ based upon readily available forms of online media (Tweets, Flickr photos, YouTube video, clippings from almost anything, etc.) into what could be seen as news article outlines.
There are some new tools I ran across this week which have comparable properties:
Bundlr
http://gobundlr.com
curated.by
http://www.curated.by
Scoop.it
http://www.scoop.it
I suspect that Storify is an equivalent tool, and there are still some ‘old school’ bookmarking suites online which are very close to these curation tools (Diigo comes to mind).
Curation, what’s new? People-power, that’s what
http://mediahelpingmedia.posterous.com/curation-whats-new-people-power-thats-what
To be honest, we never called it curation before. That was something folk in museums and art galleries did. We had terms such as ‘newsgathering’ and ‘covering a beat/patch’. We didn’t associate the term curation with journalism – well, not where I was dragged up as a journalist we didn’t.
What’s the best curation tool? I’m testing three
http://mediahelpingmedia.posterous.com/whats-the-best-curation-tool-im-testing-three
Right now, I see these tools as important for journalists, bloggers, reporters, and possibly researchers and even some students…in time they may start to take on a much larger audience
