Only Dead Fish

The 3 Pillars of Content Curation (Redux)

My post about the 3 pillars of content curation elicited some good comments and debate around where self-curation fits within the model that I set out. My thought had been that it went across everything, but (in addition to this) that there was a passive and an active part of each element. The comments helped articulate this a bit more (thank you) and so, taking those points on board, I put together a crude visual (above) and a little more detail (below) to help explain it. As I noted before, this will increasingly shape the future of content consumption and distribution.

1. Alogrithmic curation :-

Explicit - the bit we are more actively involved in. The words we choose to search against, for example, or the streams we choose to hook an algorithm up to, or the friends we choose to be connected to which provide the basis for an algorithm (like Edgerank) to determine which content is likely to be of most interest to us. In each case we are actively inputing information which enables the algorithm to do its job better.

Implicit - more passively through scrobbling content consumption (like Zite), or recommendation engines based on our puchase history and those of thousands of others (it's interesting that Google has just launched Schemer, an "activity recommendation engine to discover things to do"). It's implicit because we don't actively input data (like a search term) in order to directly serve up relevant content. 

2. Professional curation:-

Explicit - the magazines and newspapers we choose to buy, the sites we choose to visit. 

Implicit - the articles an editor selects to go into the magazine or newspaper you suscribe to, the music played by the DJ in a radio show we choose to listen to.

3. Social curation:-

Explicit - the people we choose to connect with. The lists or circles we decide to group people into.

Implicit - the content those people choose to share. That which we see because it is surfaced by voting, rating, commenting, use of social analytics

As I said in my previous post, my belief is that the best-in-class here will come from combining more than one, if not all, of the above. I think it's fascinating that curation apps are rapidly becoming far more significant and such a hotly contested area. One day after Flipboard launched their iPhone app (which caused such excitement that it crashed the server), Google launched their Currents app (US only I'm afraid) which combines content from 150 publishing partners with the ability to plug in RSS, video and photo feeds, Google+ streams (and which SAI say is even better than Flipboard)

Flipboard iPhone and Currents join an increasing number of curation driven apps including the aforementioned Zite (which I like), the respectable Editions from AOL (yes, it's actually pretty good), and Yahoo's Pulse and Livestand. 

The interesting point to note is that with a few notable exceptions, the real innovation in this space right now seems to be coming from start-ups and GAFA rather than incumbent media owners.

Post Of The Month - November 2011 - The Winner

A close run vote this month between Noah Brier's excellent post on the stock and flow of content strategy, and Bret Victor's brief rant on the future of interaction design, but in the end the latter won through (just). So well done Bret - you get the props of your blogging peers and are entered into the hall of fame. Thanks for everyone for nominating and voting.

Post Of The Month - November 2011 - The Vote

Another great shortlist, so thanks to all those that nominated. Our shortlist is between:

How Mastering Stock And Flow WIll Boost Your Content Strategy by Noah Brier

My ICT Teacher Can't Mark My Homework from Emma MulQueeny

A Brief Rant On The Future of Interaction Design by Bret Victor

The Social Graph Is Neither by Maciej Ceglowski

From Destination Social to Dispersed Social by Patricia McDonald

Ushering In The Creative Age by Alan Freeman

What Should The Digital Public Sphere Do? by Jonathan Stray

Social Proof Is The New Marketing from Aileen Lee

And you can vote below.

Post Of The Month - November 2011 - Nominations

Time again to open up to nominations for Post Of The Month. A particularly fertile month for good thinking and writing so very hard to narrow down to a few starting posts, but I've listed my own favourites below. Please do nominate your own good reads that were posted in the month of November in the comments below and once I have a good selection I'll stick them all up for a vote. So, the starters are:

How Mastering Stock And Flow WIll Boost Your Content Strategy by Noah Brier

My ICT Teacher Can't Mark My Homework from Emma MulQueeny

A Brief Rant On The Future of Interaction Design by Bret Victor

The Social Graph Is Neither by Maciej Ceglowski

Please nominate your own good reads below.

The 3 Pillars of Content Curation

Curation is already becoming an overused word but it's an increasingly important one. Not least because the way in which we discover content that we like or find useful, and how it gets in front of us or gets our attention, is changing radically. With an explosion of choice and noise, and attention becoming the new scarcity, how we choose to curate what gets that attention (or, as below, how it is curated for us) is hugely important to anyone in the business of creating content. And let's face it, that's now everybody. So here's my take on the three pillars of content curation that will increasingly (and already actively) shape the future of content consumption and distribution:

1. Algorithmic curation:- We see stuff because a technological process interprets, anticipates, or predicts our needs. Obvious examples include Google personalising search results through what else it knows about us, or serving ads based on the context of the content that surrounds them, or Facebook Edgerank interpreting which content out of all that which is posted by our connections is important to us, and Amazon recommending products to us based on what it knows about our purchase history and that of thousands of others. New tools like Percolate offer a potentially great utility for brands to easily curate content "at social scale" by hooking up to and filtering relevant streams of content (check out the short film below of Noah Brier talking about it). New media apps like Zite (the "personalised iPad magazine that gets smarter as you use it") that use a form of scrobbling to accumulate data, learn your tastes, and power content recommendation.

2. Professional curation:- we see stuff because a skilled editor or commisioner uses their insight into a particular audience to determine what might interest us. It's the granddaddy of curation and there remains huge value in this.

3. Social curation:- we see stuff because we, our friends, or a wider audience think it's good/relevant. Social curation has been around for years of-course (tagging and voting on social bookmarking services, ranking by ratings, Twitter lists, Google+ circles). But the applications are becoming more sophisticated all the time. Like The Guardian Zeitgiest prototype that combines social analytics (how many people shared specific pieces of content across the site, or commented) with web analytics (referrals, how many people have looked at it/read it) to create "a visual record of what people are currently finding interesting on guardian.co.uk at the moment". This is when it becomes more exciting - when these mechanics are combined with other forms of curation including algorithms that can identify the most popular content shared by the people you follow (like Flipboard does). Right now, so called 'Frictionless sharing' seems  to be the antithesis to this, dramatically changing the emphasis between declarative and implicit sharing. 

My view is that the most engaging content, and the smartest content producers, will incorporate more than one of these (if not, all three) techniques in some form. What do you think?

Image courtesy 

Teach Our Kids To Code

"Your IT curriculum focuses on teaching how to use software, but gives no insight into how it's made." Eric Schmidt

I think our education system is letting down our kids. And it's a curriculum issue. Instead of opening young minds to the creative possibilities and empowering potential of open software and computing, our ICT (Information and Communication Technology, or Computing to you and me) curriculum is rooted firmly in desktop computing. Instead of educating our children on how stuff is built and encouraging them to tinker, we are training our children in how to use Microsoft software. 

It desperately needs to change. So I've dedicated my latest column for New Media Age to it, prompted by this exceptional post from Emma MulQueeny (who is behind the brilliant Young Rewired State and Coding For Kids) telling the story of a young developer who became disillusioned with the education system when he failed a school project only because his IT teacher could not mark the iPhone game he had built.

Over the last five years, there's been a 57% fall in the number of pupils taking ICT GCSE, and the number of students sitting computing A-level has fallen for eight successive years. And yet this should be one of the most directly empowering and exciting subjects on the curriculum. For me this is about equipping our young with critical skills that can enable them to thrive in the new world. But it's also an investment in the present and the future of our economy (how many times have we heard the phrase 'enterprise-led recovery') that is so badly needed right now. The government has just admitted that Britain is not doing enough to teach the next generation of programmers, so let's see them do something about it. 

Emma MulQueeny has created a government e-petition to start teaching coding as a part of the curriculum in Year 5, believing that this will also help address the serious gender imbalance among coders. After seeing a tweet I put out about this yesterday, the clever folk at Digit designed a poster to help support the cause which you can see below. I urge you to sign the petition.