Remixing Digital Media, Curation & Content Marketing for all at the TechWeek Conference in Chicago

Curation is going to be a big topic at the TechWeek Conference starting this Friday 6/22 in Chicago and we’re very happy to be part of it at Scoop.it. For those of you not familiar with the event, TechWeek is a week long festival of technology that has been a huge hit these past few years. This year’s edition is very promising with 500 speakers and 2000 technology companies attending.

What’s on the agenda? Obviously a lot as Arabella Santiago who runs the show and also the founder of Startup Live is a great observer of all trends in technology and startups. But Curation will be a significant part of the discussion with several sessions you don’t want to miss if you’re attending. I’ll be a speaker at two of them but here’s a longer list worth looking at that shows how strong a theme curation is for the evolution of the Web, Social Media and Publishing – not just in Silicon Valley but reaching now broader audience.

Remixing Digital Media : to me, Social Curation is part of a bigger trend that probably started when DJ’s began to remix music. The whole idea that you can create the New by remixing the Old started to appear. As I and others already observed, it’s a fascinating trend to discuss for digital media: be it for music, for news, for videos, etc… Here’s the session abstract: “From entertainment media and news to daily deals or social photos, our information society becomes more and more effective as organizations and end users have the ability to ‘remix’ and re-publish media. Instead of a large audience subscribing to a few publishers, remixed media enables anyone to curate a new media feed for a more specific and targeted audience. How have startups innovated in the remixing media space, and what are the best practices for corporations to empower their users to remix media? How is content quality and reputation preserved when everyone becomes their own publisher? What new types of media are not- but should be- remixed next?” I’ll be speaking with Marques Gunter, the founder of myVidster, the social bookmarking service for videos and Seth Goldstein, the co-founder of Turntable.fm, the Web site that lets you DJ online.

I’ll definitely go see Andy Crestodina speak about Content Marketing: PR, SEO and Social Media. Curation has been a way for many to get easier access to content marketing and as Andy noted in the session abstract “Content creation, curation and conversation have emerged as the keys to web marketing”. In other words, Content Marketing is the new advertising, Curation being an essential part of it.

Self-curating communities is going to be an interesting panel too. Can moderation be made by communities themselves by empowering curators? Big question to solve to make sense our of forums and other collaborative platforms which are very rich and sometimes too rich.

Finally, I’ll be doing a solo session on how to leverage Curation to develop online visibility, something we have seen a huge number of our users do successfully and which is now a key motivation for many to become curators.

After being a prediction made by a few Social Media experts, it’s good to see Curation cross the chasm and be a key topic in mainstream technology conferences such as TechWeek. I’m delighted to participate and if you’re attending too, make sure to say hi by pinging me on Twitter: @gdecugis.

See you in Chicago!