The Scoop.it Content Curation Blog

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.