Curation Revolution

Lee Odden CEO at Toprankblog interviewed 10 thought leaders on content marketing and curation. The article was published one year ago but is still really relevant, probably even more. I love the approach of Brian Solis who asks the good questions :

"Obviously you (as a company) have something to contribute, something to say, something of value to offer which is mostly likely why you’re in business. I need to hear about that."

 

Curation offers the opportunity to settle this dialogue between a brand and its users, becoming always more engaging. It's not enough to be here, you have to be here to say. As says Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer at @marketingprofs, "All organizations are now publishers — meaning, the company with the most engaging and interesting content is the one who wins."

Via janlgordon, axelletess

Robin Good: Maria Popova has just launched a classy and laudable initiative, focused on increasing awareness and in highlighting the importance of honoring always where or via who you have got to a certain article, report, video or image.

 

Credit and attribution are not just a "formal" way to comply with rules, laws and authors but an incredibly powerful emebddable mechanism to augment findability, discovery, sinergy and collaboration among human being interested in the same topic.

 

She writes: "In an age of information overload, information discovery — the service of bringing to the public’s attention that which is interesting, meaningful, important, and otherwise worthy of our time and thought — is a form of creative and intellectual labor, and one of increasing importance and urgency.

 

A form of authorship, if you will.

 

Yet we don’t have a standardized system for honoring discovery the way we honor other forms of authorship and other modalities of creative and intellectual investment, from literary citations to Creative Commons image rights."

 

For this purpose Curator's Code was created.

 

Curator's Code is first of all "a movement to honor and standardize attribution of discovery across the web" as well as a web site where you can learn about the two key types of attribution that we should be using:

a) Via - which indicates a link of direct discovery

b) Hat tip - Indicates a link of indirect discovery, story lead, or inspiration.

 

Each one has now a peculiar characterizing icon that Curator's Code suggests to integrate in your news and content publication policies. 

 

Additionally and to make it easy for anyone to integrate these new attribution icons in their work, Curator's Code has created a free bokkmarklet which makes using proper attribution a matter of one clic.

 

Hat tip to Maria Popova and Curator's Code for launching this initiative. 

 

Whether or not you will sign Curator's Code pledge, become an official web site supporting it, or adopt its bookmarklet instantly is not as important as the key idea behind it: by providing credit and attribution to pieces of content you find elsewhere, you not only honestly reward who has spent time to create that content, but you significantly boost the opportunity for thousands of others to connect, link up to, discover and make greater sense of their search for meaning.

 

Read Maria Popova introductory article to Curator's Code: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/03/09/curators-code/ ;

 

How to use the Curator's bookmarklet: http://vimeo.com/38243275 ;

 

Healthy. Inspiring. 9/10

 

Curator's Code official web site: http://curatorscode.org/ ;

 

This is very helpful and will share - thanks Robin!

***** Attribution is a bear for Internet marketers too. I'm signing and crediting curators such as Robin, maxOz, Mike, Susan and Anise is why I created the Content Curation Contest. Marty

Via Robin Good, Barbara Bray

This a great blog post from Rian van der Merwe , describing the noise you can find on the web now, and especially content just created for SEO purposes or advertisers. As many, Rian is tired of it.

Rian speaks for many of us who are overwhelmed, overloaded with content that gives us no value at all. This is the problem

 

"I used to believe that if you write with passion and clarity about a topic you know well (or want to know more about), you will find and build an audience. I believed that maybe, if you’re smart about it, you could find a way for some part of that audience to pay you money to sustain whatever obsession drove you to self-publishing"'

Here's what caught my attention:

****The wells of attention are being drilled to depletion by linkbait headlines, ad-infested pages, “jumps” and random pagination, and content that is engineered to be “consumed” in 1 minute or less of quick scanning – just enough time to capture those almighty eyeballs[2]. And the reality is that “Alternative Attention sources” simply don’t exist.

The Scoopit team agrees!

My input:

****The Opportunity: This is the time for all good curators to come forward - 2012 will be the year of the content curator -

**Know your audience

**Know their pain points

**Find and select the best content, add your own opinions, information or anything that will provide more value for your audience

**Select only the best content, don't just aggregate links that add to the noise

**Become a trusted resource - many opportunities will come to you, it's your time to shine

Curated by Jan Gordon covering "Content Curation, Social Media and Beyond"

Read full article here: [http://bit.ly/tF0opI]

Via axelletess, janlgordon