Why we need content curators and who should do it

There may be more, but at as far as I can tell, the main reason we need to curate content is because of information overload, and the main factor that makes it possible is social media.

According to Steve Rubel,

Information overload makes it difficult to separate junk from art. It requires a certain finesse and expertise – a fine tuned, perhaps trained eye. Google, memetrackers such as Techmeme and social news sites like digg are not curators. They’re aggregators – and there’s a big difference.(-link)

According to the OLPC wiki page,

Comparison and critique of shared work leads naturally to grouping and curation

The current model assumes that digital content curators must be people driven to curate content. Again, according to Steve Rubel;

The call of the curator requires people who are selfless and willing to act as sherpas and guides. They’re identifiable subject matter experts who dive through mountains of digital information and distill it down to its most relevant, essential parts.

I for one, disagree with this view, which assumes there is some sort of collective action problem around curatnig content because the curated content is a public good. In short, a public good is one where the individual has little to no incentive to create because he cannot exclude other from using it and hence he cannot charge for it, so is all cost and very little benefit. That it is usually at the heart of collective action problems, where a group want to get a problem solved (let say consumer want a lower price from milk) but the insentives are rather low to organize in comparison to the counterpart (the small group of milk producers).There is of course a solution to the low incentives and that is to pay people to curate content the way Mahalo does. But, as I said, I don´t believe that content curation need to be treated like a public good.

On the contrary, I believe that since we all suffer from information overload, we all have an incentive to solve our little island of information overload. And what´s more, we would all gain from exchanging our own curated work because from it we gain a less costly access to other domains of information. In this issue the key is to make an  easy to use tool to curate content and a close to zero cost information exchange platform.

Of course, there will be some that will free ride, but their freeriding will be proportional to their information overload so my take is that it would be marginal.

The task then is to create the curating tools and the exchange platform in order to combat information overload by re organizing content.

Omnisio

Omnisio, who just been acquired by Google, is thought of as a service that allows you to mashup video content and hence simplify the video content creation process. In the words of Mark Hendrikson of Techcrunch:

“Omnisio wants to provide more options for us less creative types. Since most people don’t have enough time, patience or skill to record their own original content, Omnisio is giving them the tools needed to create mashups of other people’s original content.” (-Full article here).

That statement is true but certainly it is not the full story. It describes the incentives users have to re structure content. But it says nothing about the incentives for users to view such mashed up content. Why would I want to broadcast a mashuped video and who would want to look at it?

Let´s say I am an Obama fan. One way of discovering video content is to get it from friends who embed videos on their blogs or send links via emails. But I might want more, in which case s my next best option is to go to Youtube and browse through more videos that I can possible digest. The problem here is the recurrent theme of this blog: information overload. To this pain, Omnisio offers a solution: let someone mashup the content (we already now there is an incentive to do so) and re organize it so that in one video you get see the best of all Obama speeches. Yes, I might want to see the full speech to get the context on one of those speeches that I particularly like but clearly, the mashup is a great complement to the “social/friend” discovery of one video my friend happens to like.