My brain perks up when I notice some of the Internet’s leading voices saying similar things.
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Exhibit A: Steve Rubel is talking about digital curation and the role that brands can help play to find “good stuff.” In AdAge, Rubel notes that while Facebook and Google are dominating our attention online today, there’s an enormous need for a mix of automated and human tools to help us make sense of and synthesize the chaos of information overload. Rubel goes on to point out that smart companies like Microsoft and UPS are laying claim to “categories” in which they can help to provide the role of digital curator about topics that are important to them (Windows 7 in the case of Microsoft, general business news in the case of UPS).
I then recalled that Rubel echoed these thoughts when I interviewed him recently for Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere:
There's a huge role for professional digital curators – people who can separate art from junk in high-value niches. Blogs do so. But so do automated sites like the ones Sawhorse is building. There will also always be a market for content creators who know how to stand out from the din.
Exhibit B: Also involves an interview, in this case one that I just completed with Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis last week. In response to my question about Netscape’s influential role in creating a hybrid approach to user generated and human curated news, Calacanis talked about how products like Digg Dialoggs are “laying produced content on top of community content” and ended by stating flat out that, “Curation is the future of the Internet.”
I’ve long felt that this “post-web 2.0” period that we’re in has a great need for platforms that allow for the curation and aggregation of specific topics and themes to meet specific needs, which might range from online communities to product launches to subject specific websites or blogs. And it’s exciting to see leading voices talking up this trend and products launching from a bevy of sources to satisfy this need.
(this post first appeared on Technorati)
