Curation is today's buzzword, you see it everywhere. A couple of years ago only very few people were using it, mostly David Galbraith, founder of Curations - a network of sites: Wists Oobject Cribcandy Popgloss Yokiddo Smashingtelly.

Curation is a valuable service and it helps to organize a set of 'things.'

Prospecting is the next stage. Prospecting means discovering value where there seemed to be none. Digging through tons of dirt to find a rich seam of great stuff.

Prospecting will be increasingly important in 2010 because there will be millions of tons of 'dirt' produced. The noise level in the online media world will grow exponentially. 2010 will be a hockey stick year for dross media.

Prospecting will be increasingly important and I hope to do my share by finding rich viens of great content, great media, and great ideas.

Here is an example: a rich vein of original research from Hewlett-Packard's Social Computing Lab. This is an incredible treasure trove of scientific research - not some social media maven's hunch but repeatable research on the bahvior of very large numbers of people. It's pure gold.

Here's a list:

»Feedback loops of attention in peer production
Fang Wu, Dennis M. Wilkinson and Bernardo Huberman
Why does the distribution of user contributions obey a power law?

»Stochastic Models of User-Contributory Web Sites
Tad Hogg and Kristina Lerman
Fans, the law of web surfing and users' interests combine to promote and rate stories on Digg.

»A Persistence Paradox
Fang Wu and Bernardo Huberman
How persistence does not lead to success

»Effects of feedback and peer pressure on contributions to enterprise social media
Michael J. Brzozowski, Thomas Sandholm, and Tad Hogg
Attention matters in motivating contributions to enterprise social media. But some types of attention matter more.

»Social networks that matter: Twitter under the microscope
Bernardo A. Huberman, Daniel M. Romero and Fang Wu
the social network that matters is not the one you declare.

»Predicting the popularity of online content
Gabor Szabo and Bernardo A. Huberman
popularity, youtube, digg, attention, predicting future downloads.

»Social network collaborative filtering
Rong Zheng, Dennis M. Wilkinson and Foster Provost
User-generated social networking links can be as predictive as algorithmically identified "neighbors" in recommender systems

»Crowdsourcing, Attention and Productivity
Bernardo A. Huberman, Daniel M. Romero and Fang Wu
How to solve the digital commons dilemma.

»How public opinion forms
Fang Wu and Bernardo A. Huberman
How web discourse evolves. To appear in the Proceedings of the Workshop on Internet and Network Economics-2008

»How Do People Respond to Reputation: Ostracize, Price Discriminate or Punish?
Kay-Yut Chen, Scott Golder, Tad Hogg and Cecilia Zenteno
How people use reputation information.

»Popularity, novelty and attention
Fang Wu and Bernardo A. Huberman
Whether to use popularity or novelty to elicit attention

»Novelty and Collective Attention
Fang Wu and Bernardo A. Huberman
How does novelty affect the attention of large groups

»Comparative Advantage and Efficient Advertising in the Attention Economy
Bernardo A. Huberman and Fang Wu
Comparative advantage in the attention economy can be used to maximize the revenues a company gets from advertising.

»The Economics of Attention: Maximizing User Value in Information-Rich Environments
Bernardo A. Huberman and Fang Wu
Deciding what to display.

»Bootstrapping the Long Tail in Peer to Peer Systems
Bernardo A. Huberman and Fang Wu
How to provide any content over the web while avoiding free riding.

»The Dynamics of Viral Marketing
Jure Leskovec, Lada A. Adamic and Bernardo A. Huberman
How effective is viral marketing?

»Management Fads, Pedagogies and Soft Technologies
Jonathan Bendor, Bernardo A. Huberman and Fang Wu
What makes fads come and go?

»Social Structure and Opinion Formation
Fang Wu and Bernardo A. Huberman
How do opinions form?

»The Dynamics of Reputations
Bernardo A. Huberman and Fang Wu
How reputations get established, grow and decay.

»Status as a Valued Resource
Bernardo A. Huberman, Christoph Loch and Ayse Onculer
Why do we seek status?

»Competitive Dynamics of Web Sites
Sebastian M. Maurer and Bernardo A. Huberman
Competitive dynamics on the web unfold in surprising ways, leading to a sudden transition to winner-take-all markets.

»The Economics of Surfing
Eytan Adar and Bernardo A. Huberman
Information providers can exploit the differences in surfing behavior exhibited by web users.

Happy prospecting!