Content curation

Content curation is the process of gathering information relevant to a particular topic or area of interest. Services or people that implement content curation are called curators. Curation services can be used by businesses as well as end users.

Concept

Content curation is not a new phenomenon. Museums and galleries have curators to select items for collection and display. There are also curators in the world of media, for instance DJs of radio stations tasked with selecting songs to be played over the air.

Methods

Content curation can be carried out either manually or automatically or by combination of them. In the first case, it's done by specially designated curators. In the second case, it's done using one or more of the following:

• Collaborative filtering
• Semantic analysis
• Social rating

Collaborative Filtering

Collaborative filtering is a method of forecasting often used in recommendation systems. This principle is based on the axiom that evaluations made by users in the past are predictive of evaluations that they will make in the future.

Collaborative filtering can either be based on votes and views of a given social community, as it's done on Reddit, elCurator and Digg, or the end user's own prior activity, as it's done on YouTube and Amazon.

Semantic Analysis

Semantic analysis examines the relationship between the various elements and sources of information found in a given document. The system compares some of the factors or all the information sources topics and terms. This method uses the principles of factor analysis to analyze relationships between the studied phenomena and objects.

This approach has been successfully implemented by services like Getprismatic, Stumbleupon, My6sence, and LikeHack, which break up content according to topic, subtopic, and category. Trapit uses semantic analysis in combination with user feedback and AI technology to refine content selections for its users.

Social Rating

This method employs user ratings and recommendations to select content. The system finds someone with interests similar to the end user and bases its recommendations on their activity. This method of selection is widely used on social sites such as Facebook and Flipboard.

Parameters for determining the social ranking are generally based on actions such as shares, vote, Likes, etc., keeping in mind the time that these activities are carried out once the content is published.The more there are such activities in a shorter time, the higher rating this content gets. Such a method is used on curated content websites such as Timelypick.

Content Curation and Information Overload

Many content curation services are used to screen out unwanted content from Twitter, Facebook, RSS, and other feeds, thereby reducing the overall flow of information and making it more targeted to the end user's interest. The main advantage of curation is that it allows the user to accelerate the process of discovering relevant content, which is especially crucial for those whose work involves processing large amounts of information.

Using content curation

For a long time, content curation was largely a marketing tool for selecting information appropriate for corporate blogs or websites depending on the company's niche or business sector. It can also be used as a tool for selecting content for brands to post to social media channels. (See, for example, curata.com, Trap.it and Scoop.it )

However, recently it has begun to see wider applications among end users eager to cut down on the time they spent every day sifting through online information. Social curation^[1] using tools like Pinterest allows users to share their curating experience as well as engage others in dialogues about the curated content. The technology of curation can also allow for the creation of online newspapers or magazines (see paper.li or scoop.it) or pages like Storify, which lets the user create stories or timelines using social media such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

See also

• Content (media)
• Digital curation
• Storify
• Pearltrees
• Trapit
• Declara

References