This excellent and very comprehensive article looks stall the aspects in which content curation is transforming organizations – from individual professional development to collective collaborative learning and communication. 

“Increasingly we are being challenged to deliver ‘more with less’ in the learning department.  Curation potentially holds an interesting answer to some of the constraints we’re facing in time and cost. Why build new content, when you can curate?”

Bill Gates once stated that in the future the way we would control information in business would determine whether we win or lose. Here’s an interesting framework to be among the winners. 

The world has changed and so did the economy. From an agricultural to an industrial world, we’ve now moved into the post-industrial era where knowledge is the true currency and a lot of us are knowledge workers.

In this great post, Elia Morling explains how he views content curators as playing a key role as a “money handlers, changers and lenders all wrapped into one.”

Erin Griffith analyzes how the use of authorships combined with Google+ is now impacting Google search results.

This change is not new but, as she puts it, it is significant: “Google was always about the algorithm, not curation, certainly not curation through something as, well, human as a social network. The emphasis before was about what was on the page not who wrote it.”

While she focuses on the new importance of authorship given by Google, what’s happening is actually a mix of a couple of things which are in my opinion equally good:

1. Authorship
2. Social results

#1 means that an identified, reputable author will prevail; #2 is part of the social signal that Google uses more and more to rank results and that builds on curators’ activity.

Bottom line is that – as I predicted a while ago – the age of low-quality content cheaply produced by random anonymous writers in content farms for pure SEO purposes is over. By combining a measure of the author’s influence as well as taking into account curators’ appetite for a piece of content, Google is bringing quality back in the game. Which is good for authors, curators and… readers.

Shane Snow makes a good summary on Mashable of the trends impacting SEO these days. We moved from a machiavellian approach to game Google to influence-based content marketing because social media changed the game as others have observed before.

The success of Social Content Curation is a good example of that trend: human sharing and curating content beat the system and become such an important trend that Google had not only to change their algorithms but also start a social network just because of that.