A few weeks ago, I was participating on the #prwebchat when someone posed the question, “what’s the difference between content creation and content curation.”
I responded, “Creators write, curators collect & aggregate. Anyone can curate, not everyone can create.” Apparently this struck a chord, because a lot of people were responding and retweeting to what was just a throwaway line which made me realize there’s a lot more to this idea than I originally thought.
Thanks to the blog tools and plug-ins (like Zemanta, which lets you link to related articles), Twitter lists, and RSS readers, anyone can compile a list of the interesting stuff. It’s a matter of identifying the most interesting articles from very popular or esoteric sources, and sharing them with your network.
But I don’t think content curation is that valuable. It’s important, to be sure. With a semi-decent RSS reader, anyone can be a content curator. But it’s not that valuable. Think of what the curators are actually collecting: content that someone else created.
Truman Capote once said of Jack Kerouac’s literary efforts, “That’s not writing. That’s typing.”
A stinging rebuttal to be sure, but it’s one that explains the difference between creation and curation.
Think of the effort that goes into creating a single blog post. There’s research to be read, surveys to be compiled, and opinions to be formed. And then you have to be able to present it in a way that not only flows logically, but is compelling to readers.
Still, curators cannot exist without creators to provide them with material to share; creators rely on curators to make sure their stuff is shared. So I can’t entirely bag on the curators, since 1) I rely on them, and 2) I’m trying to be one myself too.
Occasionally you’ll get creators who can handle their own curation — and that’s what social media has done for us — but we always get a boost when other people do some curation for us. For example, I always see a huge traffic spike whenever Jason Falls shares my blog posts with his readers. And Jason is a great example of someone who both curates and creates in order to provide value to his network.
So which are you? Are you creating, curating, or doing both? Is one more important than the other, or are they equally necessary? Can content creation actually live without curation? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.
My book, Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself (affiliate link), is available on Amazon.com, as well as at Barnes & Noble and Borders bookstores. I wrote it with my good friend, Kyle Lacy.
I think that if someone comes with a nice idea that curates the content aggregated from various sources in an interesting way, that helps users find what they want, then it surely adds value to the web. It has been overly exploited but that doesn’t mean it is less valuable. For example I was recently browsing the new delicious stacks and found a lot of interesting content.
Thought provoking question and dialog, Erik. My skim of the article from Erik gleans that he is thoughtfully suggesting that when it comes to blog content that people prefer to read original content and have authentic dialog with you than discover you swiped ideas from elsewhere…and being a data and research hog…I would agree.
Eric, you should join Seth Godin, Robert Schoble, Steve Rosenbaum (author of the new book, The Curation Nation), me and others who think curation is becoming more and more critical. We have a shortage of attention with way too much information. We need curators to help us find items of value. In that process, they are providing value. Check out my blog post on this topic, http://connectconsultinggroup.com/blog/5-ways-to-curate-and-add-value/
AWESOME response, @Tania. I think this reinforces my response to @John Uhri about the difference between an aggregator and a collector. I may have to revise my thinking a bit, and use your comment in my new post about it.
Good to hear from you too. I’ll let you know when I’m coming to Muncie again.
Well, this is all most amusing to see. Kind of reminds me of the question are you a producer or a consumer? And to see myself as a poster child for the questions you pose seems all the more rich. Better than a stock photo I guess?!
As a curator of education I have occasional opportunities to organize exhibitions, but far more often it is a way of producing an opportunity for enrichment and learning–a program, workshop, film series, tour, lecture series, etc. Indeed I shuffle the (art collection) deck to reinterpret and reconstitute meaning based on the collection’s
possibilities. The chronological approach to the history of art is just one means of understanding art, but if I develop a program about food in art that may turn into a totally different kind of understanding for visitors, and be the relevant connection they are seeking with art in turn changing their experience and understanding to possibly inform some aspect of their lives.
From my studies of creativity, I really like and believe the idea that we are all creative. The basic premise is even the redone and rehashed ideas develop new meanings. There are stages of understanding through various modes of expression, and the recreation of new knowledge is when that creativity grows and arises. Erik, the patterns you realize need to be made between seemingly disparate units of information is a thinking process, but it can quickly become a creative process, especially depending on the output. That same kind of creativity is often in response to a problem. What is the connection? What needs to be expressed? What is important to communicate? What is the most suitable format for presenting it? These are also the questions, whether intuitively or overtly, that artists asked in relation to their work. For example the painter Lee Krasner, whose work is in our collection, throughout her life attempted to solve the problem of filling a flat surface while ensuring it felt open. If one looks at her early work compared to her later work, her solutions emerge. It’s exciting to see.
Since the photo is from my Bead Museum days, it leads me back to a key example: many of the serious bead collectors and bead artists tended to refer to bead stringers as mere assemblers. It never seemed quite fair to me to use such terms for anyone at that stage of experiencing and understanding the art and history beads; it was a learning stage. In short depending on the subject and specialty, we are at different stages of building expertise and experience and grow as we choose and apply ourselves.
Well, that’s more than I intended to write. But thanks for a provocative discussion, Erik! I look forward to hearing more on this topic from you and your readers.
John,
Now THAT is a great way to think of it. To be able to curate something so it’s more than just a collection of articles IS a skill that not everyone can do. To be able to find a pattern and a connection between, say, gas prices and the rise of telecommuting AND the growing divorce rate would be a curating skill that not very many people have. (There really isn’t a connection; I just made it up).
That curation-creation skill is one worth exploring further. Thanks for the insight. What would you call that skill? Maybe aggregation is the process of collecting and curating is the act of narrating a story through the artifacts/content collected.
I like to think I’m a curator, but it seems that I’m just a hoarder.
The best curators are those who take the information they have and blend it together in a way that is relevant.
To use your friend Tania as an example, she must take the museum’s pieces and put together an exhibit that narrates a story and puts the artifacts into context. This is an act of creation