“People are going to be the new keepers of the flame,” proclaims Steve Rosenbaum, author of Curation Nation, a book that celebrates humans as “essential software” in today’s technology.
His Big Idea: We need quality filters for the daily data deluge that overflows from our inboxes, Twitter feeds, blog posts, Google alerts and Facebook notifications.
His Big Solution: A human-filtered web.
In the curation nation, Rosenbaum says, computerization is on its way out, and people are marching in.
"Journalists are already curators. Or at least the good ones are,” says Rosenbaum, during a chat in a noisy Times Square cafe.
The good news is that we're curating all the time, whether we realize it or not. Every time we post a video, like a link or comment on a blog post, we are making editorial decisions and curating, says Rosenbaum. In the coming years, the major change in curation will be in how the skill is packaged and sold. And any of us can sell it.
'Social search has replaced automated feeds. I sort of think Google will be out.'Rosenbaum spends what might be a little too much time defining curation: We can all agree that it is humans who select and gather valuable information, based on their qualitative judgment, to organize content that is being aggregated arbitrarily.
This concept is rehashed and reinforced until I could pick out an example of curation in my sleep. A great way to get to the Everyman, but a bit gratuitous after the first five times.
But early on one gets a taste of Rosenbaum the storyteller. Each chapte is a self-contained pocket of narrative, filled with people-centric anecdotes. Stories of familiar media brands and their makers pepper the book — NBA video archives, the Huffington Post, Myspace.
The history of curation is an especially colorful chapter: The story of Reader’s Digest, the origins of Time magazine and the birth of cable TV speak to a vast, nostalgic audience. The “success story” element inspires both optimism and curiosity about the coming changes in the new world.
The lively narrative is held together by a cast of characters: author and NYU professor Clay Shirky, überblogger Robert Scoble, larger-than-life entrepreneur Jeff Pulver and researcher Andrew Blau -- who Rosenbaum says is “prescient as hell.”
These voices share thoughts, advice and opinions throughout, be it about marketing consumer brands, making money from curation or shouting down the cynics. The most surprising character Rosenbaum says he encountered was digital entrepreneur and journalist Esther Dyson. “I expected her to be more on the fence, but she jumped right in,” he says.
We come to the crux of the matter in Chapter 6. Tools and Techniques is a dummies' guide on how to turn curation into a business. The tips are instructive, without being patronizing, and they list each step of setting up your own curation platform. This is when the utility of the idea comes into focus: Curation can be your career.
Asked if curation will be more lucrative than automated aggregation or even creation of original content, pat comes the reply. “That’s easy. Absolutely.” Rosenbaum claims it will be a great business within two years, definitely in five, with advertising revenue starting to flow in.
He quotes Russian internet investor Yuri Milner, who told a recent Abu Dhabi media summit: “I think the next big theme is basically curation.” Rosenbaum grins and punches the air victoriously. "If you don't have 'curator' on your resume yet, figure out a way to add that skill set soon, and you'll be in great demand.”
Although Rosenbaum devotes bandwidth in his book to various media platforms, video is his preferred medium of storytelling. “I began being a filmmaker in high school,” he says. “I had the first Flip cam in my hands the day it came out of the factory.”
The Micronets chapter explores his passion for creation and curation of high-quality community-produced video. “The granular detail” of visual media is unparalleled, says Rosenbaum, which is what he loves about it.
Early in his career, he says, he decided to break out of the boxy confines of television, because “I wanted video to be democratized.” He wanted people to be able to tell their own stories, whether about science or skateboarding.
Now, video micronets like Rob Barnett’s My Damn Channel and web series host blip.tv are biting into conventional prime-time television viewership and cutting substantial checks in the bargain.
Also predicted: the marginalization of search as we know it. "Social search has replaced automated feeds,” Rosenbaum says with a shrug. "I sort of think Google [search] will be out.”
Facebook and Twitter do things differently, he says. “I find more on Twitter than on Google on any given day.”
You may not think of yourself as a curator ... yet. But after reading this book, a small part of you will wonder if maybe you are.
“If there was a political agenda for the book, this was it,” says Rosenbaum wryly. “To empower an army of curators who didn’t know that they were.”
