The New Year’s resolution is such an interesting, inspirational concept. The fact that we’ve institutionalized a specific time of year to be introspective and reflect on how we lived our last 12 months of life is a pretty incredible thing — definitely an institution to respect and make a priority as we ring in 2013. Identifying which things in our lives were good and which things could have been improved should be top-of-mind when the clock strikes its respective 12:00 AM across the globe on January 1st, 2013 and signifies the start of a brand new year. I’ve always felt that a “resolution” may not be the most effective use of the insights we glean from reflecting on our last year. I’ve always felt pressure to do more things, or different things, or change my life trajectory in a significant way with each list of resolutions I’ve written. In 2012, it was “learn a new language,” in 2011 was “read at least 30 books,” and 2010 was “get a job that doesn’t suck.” I’ve always felt compelled to make a firm decision to either do a new thing or break some terrible old habit.

My name is Ally Greer. I’m a marketer with expertise in content marketing and curation. You’ve probably never heard of me.

With over 500 million users on Twitter, 175 million on LinkedIn, and over a billion on Facebook, you probably haven’t heard of most people on the Internet. The bad news is that this also means most of those people probably haven’t heard of you either.

That said, I’m certainly not here to tell you how flooded the Internet is and discourage you from jumping into the information pool. In fact, I’m telling you to do the exact opposite. Although it isn’t likely that all 500 million people on Twitter will be following you by the time you’re finished reading this (or ever), there are a few ways to look what we call “information overload” right in the face and use it to your advantage.

In a digital world characterized by an overwhelming amount of noise, everyone is struggling to find relevant content from people and brands with an expertise on a specific subject. Content curators are the ones who step up to the plate.

According to Michael Brenner, cofounder of Business 2 Community, content curation is the process of identifying relevant content for your audience from multiple sources, modifying or editing that content to reflect the needs of your audience and delivering the content to the appropriate channels of distribution.

The truth is, you’re probably already curating content. Do you share links on Twitter? Do you Retweet content that you find interesting? Do you write blogposts referencing content that’s been created by others? If so, you’re a curator. You know what you’re talking about, you know where the best content on your topic of expertise is, and you put it together for the world to see. But, the question still looms: if no one knows who you are, how will they find it?

This is a question that I found interesting on Quora because there were already lots of different answers.

People obviously adressed the question by naming their favorite newsletters.

But I started to see a pattern as the common point of a lot of these answers was: they were curated newsletters.

Context is always the key, especially for our community of curators that know that it allows instantly to give more visibility to your passion, expertise or voice.

We know that the digital environment created a very powerful context. The web has become the world’s largest pulpit.

Sometimes, you see very accurate advice on how to be sure you post “at the right time”, on social media networks. Apparently you should not talk when you want to, but when the web is ready to listen.

I don’t buy it. I think it should be the opposite: you should share when you want to, when it’s a good time for you, without worrying that nobody is going to hear you. The real time web is awesome because it keeps me in the know immediately. But it’s not the only rhythm. You cannot follow everything going on at the same time in the world, sometimes you just want to save something for later when you will have more time. Yes, later. I know it’s maybe a bad word in the State of Now.

Tech needs villains.

We had Microsoft for a while, Google for another. These days, it’s Facebook. According to some, Zuckerberg is not only after exposing publicly our most private data but he’s also into privatizing the Web to make it a part of Facebook: replacing Web sites by Facebook pages, email by Facebook messages, and so on. Some are worried. It’s true that Facebook’s growth is impressive. And more importantly its usage is massive. Even financials are amazing, with revenue well above a billion dollars from advertising and virtual goods, while social commerce could still bring huge additional opportunities.
Yet, I don’t think Facebook has it all. I know it’s massive but because of that we tend to overlook where it fails.

We know that many institutions are having to rethink themselves in this Internet enabled world. Government 2.0 is already a notion that officials are trying to fully grasp and explore, even if the dilemma between the open dialogue that the web implements and the nature of a state’s responsibilities make a balance hard to find.

Social Media lets everyone speak all the time. So what happens? Noise. Not only for the listeners, but also for those who want to speak. Here’s how we can create a new, curated and topic-centric Web to change that.

As content distribution evolves from subscription to curation, blogs ironically face the same challenge as the traditional media they used to disrupt.

Writing in 3500 BC made History. Literally: when Sumerians hammered the first clay tablet, mankind entered History. Knowledge could now be shared and stored, beyond the power of voice and traditions…

This post has been written by Guillaume Decugis, Scoop.it’s CEO, and has been published on Business Insider

A little more than a year ago, Wired Magazine published a story on Demand Media describing in details how what’s now being called Content Farms worked. It looked brilliant. No more articles produced in the vague by journalists with no idea of who would be interested in reading them. Demand Media had it all figured out: analyze Google and you’ll not only know what people are interested in reading about, but also in what companies are interested in advertising about.

But Demand Media and Content Farms didn’t stop here. They’ve pushed further the industrial rationalization of the media business: now that you know what content to produce, get it done fast and cheap by starving freelancers. And recruit SEO Top Guns to make sure your sites rank first in Google. No need for quality content produced by well-paid journalists: if you know how to perform search engine optimization, your low quality, rapidly-produced video or “article” will top Google’s results and dwarf playing-by-the-book regular media’s traffic.

If you pushed the model further, it was like imagining the future of media being a content factory (Demand Media and the likes), distributed by a search algorithm (Google Search) and monetized by an advertising factory (Google AdSense).

The Matrix.

And it might actually happen…

What’s interesting to me is that it might not. For a number of reasons and trends we start to see emerge.

Over the past few months, there’s been an interesting number of new developments with regards to Web Curation, following several predictions that this would be come a hot topic or even a “billion dollar opportunity“.

What’s this all about ?

A definition I like for web curation is Rohit Bhargava’s : A Content Curator is someone who continually finds, groups, organizes and shares the best and most relevant content on a specific issue online.