CONTENT CURATION CONTEST IS ON!!!
Finally have all the details worked out and we pushed the Content Curation Contest LIVE today! Apologies for the delay but we are away and looking for the Top 10 Content Curators Of 2011. There are Two Phases APPLICATION (Deadline 2.26) and VOTING (Starts on 2.27).
ENTER Atlantic BT's Content Curation Contest
Not sure where I was when the realization hit me like a ton of bricks. We couldn't create all the content we needed. My team thought someone just shot my dog. "There is no way the four of us can keep up," I stated. Met by curious glances I continued, "the demand for great content is moving faster and faster well beyond our ability to keep up." I was having this conversation on gut instincts since it was well before I did research on Amazon's content dominance (almost a billion pages in Google). I didn't yet know how completely platforms beat web sites.
I challenged my team to help get me out of my funk. What was the answer? We came up with several ideas that day several years ago including:
- Create a multi-author blog.
- Develop contests and games to generate User Generated Content (UGC)
- Curate content from authoritative sources in a non-proprietary way
- Hang on for dear life
Content curation is strange alchemy. At first and from the outside arranging content created by others into a coherent stream may seem simple and close to stealing. Such perspective denies the creativity and vision needed to filter, organize and present. Curators at MoMA or The Metropolitan take years to organize, filter, arrange and write scholarship behind one show. Attending the Jackson Pollack retrospective in 1999 I consumed several years of work in an afternoon.
Web content curation is different than museum curation. The web exists in a constant NOW. Taking a year to assemble content would mean any final product would be hopeless out of touch. Web content curation happens NOW. This doesn't mean there aren't "evergreen" ideas involved, ideas that stretch across even Internet time.
Ideas such as social media marketing, Facebook, video and email marketing are big ideas that change within a predictable range (say plus or minus 10%). Change tends to come in storms or "bursts". Linked author Albert-Laszlo Barabasi explains, in his follow up book to Linked. Barabasi sees ife and marketing are a series of bursts. Twitter comes out with a new look, Google changes their algorithm and Facebook adds Brand Pages simultaneously creating a burst of change. Bursts are why the most common graph I've seen in 15 years of Internet marketing is a wavy sine wave (and I see it over and over).
Web content curators smooth out the web's natural "burst-iness" by curating content into "ever-green" buckets and themes. I created Curation Revolution on Scoop.it because curation seemed a new evergreen idea. Evergreen ideas create bridges from the web's constant now to tomorrow, next week and next year. Web content curators create bridges between NOW and THEN, between the web's content infinity and our very finite minds.
Web Content Curation's Magical New Tools
There are rare moments when we all arrive simultaneously at the same conclusion. Moore's Law, that integrated circuits become more powerful even as their cost decline, means we are and will be drowning in content. About a year after my "we can't create enough content" team meeting I wrote Curation The Next Web Revolution (on ScentTrail and Technorati) to explosive response.
Reading my posts Scoop.it founders Guillaume Decugis and Marc Rougier emailed sharing keys to their brand new Ferrari. Granted access to Scoop.it's beta I fell in love creating my first Scoop.it feed - Curation Revolution. I couldn't use Scoop.it much during beta so I loved from afar. Over the last few weeks I've thrown myself headlong with love, passion and admiration easily doubling. Scoop.it is magical (read Why Scoop.it Rocks).
Scoop.it isn't the only magical mashup tool. Hunch.com (Why Hunch Rocks) is one of the fastest ways to learn I've found and its UI is a thing of MoMA-worthy beauty. Pnterest, Gimme Bar, and Pearltrees will change web curation further.
Content Curation Contest...coming soon
I'm working on a Content Curation Contest to identify and reward great content curators such as Robin Good, Anise Smith and Michele Smorgon (maxOz). If you are a great content curator and would like details about the contest, please follow @ScentTrail and use #curationcontest in a Tweet (or two or three). If you know content curators such as Karen Dietz, Alex Butler and Morten Myrstad please let them know about our contest.
Pre-Contest Tweets & Email
Use #CurationContest in a Tweet to be on the contest mailing list. Curation Contest will start before Christmas. Or email Martin.Smith(at)AtlanticBT(dot)com with "Curation Contest" in subject.
Thanks and stay tuned. Martin
