Pearltrees (a former consulting client) this week introduced the 2.0 version of its popular web page curation tool built completely with HTML 5.0 and with a completely different user interface and metaphor.

The tool now represents web pages as a series of rectangles in a "dynamic grid" allowing users to quickly organize and share their web collections. The prior interface was based on circles, or "pearls" connected in a molecular pattern to other "pearls." Sometimes new users thought it looked complicated and the user interface change simplifies people's first impressions.

Patrice Lamothe, CEO and co-founder of Pearltrees (above) said the new interface in the latest version makes the tool more powerful and useful because of the drag and drop features, improved sharing, and content discovery technologies.

He says that Pearltrees' current nearly 2 million users will be able to still use the old interface for a few months but it will be turned off later this year.

It's quite a risk for any web based service to make such a radical change in its user interface. Lamothe said that Pearltrees has consulted with its most active users and it believes nearly everyone will accept the new format as a major improvement. The new user interface is also reflected in the iPhone and iPad Pearltrees apps.

Moving away from Adobe's Flash platform has been a long standing goal at Pearltrees but it had to wait for the HTML 5.0 standard to become more widely supported. 

Pearltrees offers a free account and several paid versions that allow users to keep their collections of web pages private. Lamothe was initially against keeping collections private because he believes that a human curated web has great benefits for all. But he says we don't live in a perfect world and the addition of private pearl collections reflects the imperfection of our online worlds.

- - -

About Pearltrees

Pearltrees is a free, visual and collaborative library that lets you organize web pages, files, photos and notes to retrieve and share them anywhere easily. Leverage Pearltrees' community to discover amazing stuff related to your interests and enrich your account. Retrieve anything you keep in Pearltrees from your computer, mobile and tablet.
What makes Pearltrees unique ?

- Have everything you like at your fingertips all the time
- Access your pearltrees from anywhere: computers, mobiles and tablets
- Keep everything you like: web pages, files, photos and notes
- Browse your favorite things blazingly fast
- Discover interesting new stuff in your areas of interest
- Collaborate on your favorite topics
- Share all of this!

The ZERO1 Biennial, a three month long festival of art and technology begins today in San Jose with the theme "Seeking Silicon Valley."

This year the festival has expanded from its San Jose base and has events planned in San Francisco and across the Bay Area. There are more than 100 arts installations and 40 arts museums, galleries, and studios taking part.

Jaime Austin, Curator and Director of Programs for ZERO1, said that the idea for the theme "Seeking Silicon Valley" came from her experiences from meeting visiting artists at the airport and their wish to see Silicon Valley.

"I would drive them around to the eBay campus, and Yahoo! but there's nothing much to see, the architecture is like a business park, nothing to distinguish Silicon Valley from anywhere."

"I also realized that Silicon Valley is as much an idea as it is a place, and that people from all over the world have their idea of Silicon Valley."

ZERO1 has partnered with curators from South Korea, London, Amsterdam and Berlin, to help bring together a broad range of artistic opinions on the topic of "Silicon Valley."

The (e)MERGE Street Festival this Friday, September 14, 6pm to midnight is a great introduction to ZERO1.

More details:

ZERO1 Blog | www.zero1.org

Seeking Silicon Valley | 2012 ZERO1 Biennial

Press | 2012 ZERO1 Biennial

(Gopi Kallayil, head of Google+ speaking at TEDxBerkeley earlier this year.)

TED, the Technology, Entertainment, Design conference, has expanded its brand across the globe over the past two years, with hundreds of local TEDx conferences, and more recently, with its own books imprint, TED Books.

TED organizers always choose their speakers well and there is rarely a dud among them. It is excellent curation under the aegis of "Ideas Worth Spreading."

But choosing which authors to publish under the TED Books brand appears to be more challenging than booking a speaker for a 17 minute talk.

Evgeny Morozov, writing in The New Republic, tears TED Books a new binding with his demolition review of Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization - By Parag Khanna and Ayesha Khanna.

After taking apart the dreary technobabble and recycled ideas in Hybrid Reality, he attacks TED for agreeing to publish such "useless piffle about technology."

He exposes the Khannas' endorsement of "noxious political ideas" related to China, Singapore, and their anti-democratic positions related to Hungary, Thailand, and Argentinia.

He writes,

TED is no longer a responsible curator of ideas "worth spreading." Instead it has become something ludicrous, and a little sinister.

Today TED is an insatiable kingpin of international meme laundering--a place where ideas, regardless of their quality, go to seek celebrity, to live in the form of videos, tweets, and now e-books.

In the world of TED--or, to use their argot, in the TED "ecosystem"--books become talks, talks become memes, memes become projects, projects become talks, talks become books--and so it goes ad infinitum in the sizzling Stakhanovite cycle of memetics, until any shade of depth or nuance disappears into the virtual void.

Richard Dawkins, the father of memetics, should be very proud. Perhaps he can explain how "ideas worth spreading" become "ideas no footnotes can support."

He points to two TED books that along with Hybrid Reality are "literary rubbish."

-The Demise of Guys: Why Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It - by Philip Zimbardo

- Smile: The Astonishing Powers of a Simple Act - by Ron Gutman

Foremski's Take: I've been to a lot of local TEDx conferences and I spoke at one in San Francisco (photo below) on the topic of activist media. I like many of the talks I've seen, even though the quality of some TEDx events can be uneven. I very much like the people that volunteer to create the local TEDx events.

However, I've been critical of the "Golden Arches of TED" approach that governs the licensing of the brand, best observed in the typical 17 minute TED presentation -- a formula and format that at times seems to have become a parody of itself through common repetition.

TEDx should be experimental...

TEDx should be allowed to experiment, and that experimentation should represent the "x" in TEDx, rather than the "x" of an X Factor -- endless auditions in identical styles, all trending towards a monotonic mediocrity because there's nowhere else to go; there's no room to experiment, or to innovate.

Surely there's more than one format for sharing ideas? Shouldn't TED be more than just a well designed Powerpoint presentation?

Where are the TED conversations?

Another one of my peeves is that there's no engagement between speakers and audience, or audience with audience, offline and online.

There's no debate about the ideas presented. Each talk is a performance on a stage, usually in a large theater.

As the audience, we recieve the ideas in silence, from unquestionable experts; we're in the dark and largely invisible to the presenters, lit by powerful spotlights (top photo).

Sometimes the audience applauds, titters, often the audience gives a standing ovation -- but that's the extent of engagement between the podium and the seated.

It seems a wasted opportunity for moving good ideas forward, that there is only a theatrical performance, while hundreds of people sit so close to the action.

They attendees were willing to sacrifice much of their day to come to the TED events, they are motivated and interested in TED ideas, but they aren't allowed to contribute anything except their money, for a silent seat in a dark room. Unseen and unheard is not a good place to be.

I'm very hopeful that these wasted opportunities will become opportunities, to create a new TED, a better TED. I'm especially encouraged to see some of the local TEDx organizations shifting to smaller, salon-like events, where conversations are accorded as much space as the presentations, and where new ideas can be incubated.

McDonalds and TED...

As it expands its events, and moves into other areas such as books, podcasts, and prizes -- TED risks damaging the high quality of its brand if any of those ventures fail to meet the high standards associated with the TED brand. As many Fortune 1000 companies have discovered, It's not easy to maintain consistency at scale.

TED has no choice but to impose the same high standards of curation that it is known for, to TED Books, and in every single one of its ventures.

Protecting the TED brand from mediocrity is what comes with the territory, with the decision to grow global, and to franchise its organization.

It's a big job for McDonalds to ensure that its french fries taste the same everywhere. TED needs to do the same.

Tech, tech, tech, the Singularity countdown...

TED Books can be fixed but I don't think that the TED culture of apolitical, techno-optimist geek-philosophers, will ever change.

Mr Morozov rightly criticizes TED's decision to stay away from politics as a mistaken trust that technology alone, can solve big problems, without engaging any political process.

Since any meaningful discussion of politics is off limits at TED, the solutions advocated by TED's techno-humanitarians cannot go beyond the toolkit available to the scientist, the coder, and the engineer.

This leaves Silicon Valley entrepreneurs positioned as TED's preferred redeemers.

...

In TED world, problems of aid and development are no longer seen as problems of weak and corrupt institutions; they are recast as problems of inadequate connectivity or an insufficiency of gadgets.

...

And the gadgets do drop from the sky -- Nicholas Negroponte, having spectacularly failed in his One Laptop Per Child quest, now wants to drop his own tablets from helicopters, which would make it harder for the African savages to say "no" to MIT's (and TED's) civilization. This is la mission civilatrice 2.0.

It's a fun read with important things said: Evgeny Morozov: The Naked And The TED | The New Republic

(Bryan Rhoads, Editor-in-Chief of iQ at Intel's offices in the Presidio, San Francisco.)

Earlier today, I met the team responsible for this morning's launch of 'iQ by Intel', an online magazine featuring daily news and feature articles from around the globe plus original content from Intel.

The magazine is curated by Intel employees, choosing and sharing articles from a river of media content surfaced by special tools developed by Intel.

I was pleased to hear Bryan Rhoads, the mastermind behind the project, and its Editor-in-Chief, say that I was one of the people that inspired the venture with my writings about how every company is a media company.

Here are some of my notes from the meeting:

- The project began about a year ago and has about 160 Intel employees curating news and feature articles but the goal is to have more than 5,000 staff-those that have had social media training — take part in the daily selection process.

- 'iQ' is aimed at consumers. It is not about technology but what technology enables. The team liked my recent rant against "product journalism" in which I criticized the tech press for trying to scoop each other over leaked spec sheets for mass-produced products.

- The focus of 'iQ' is on tomorrow, on the 'how', on the types of things people can and will do with technology. The content of 'iQ' is not about the technology, it's about the context of that technology. Technology plays the role of a character in the story.

- There is a river of content surfaced in real-time by an algorithm, using a set of online sources vetted by Intel. From that river, content is chosen by Intel staff. There is also original content from Intel sources, such as Ken Kaplan's Intel Free Press, and The Creators Project, a joint venture with Vice Media.

- There are three sections: Media, Life, and Planet. Each story is color coded to identify its section. 

- About 50% of the content is original. The size of the tiles shows how much social media support each article has received. 

- There are plans to make the curation fun, and to introduce some game aspects to encourage more Intel staff to take part.

-'iQ' shares some back-end infrastructure with Intel's 'Cockpit' a social media monitoring tool it developed to track the flow of social media around key areas of focus for Intel.

- The interface is designed for touch screens. It looks much better on the iPad than on the desktop but it's a web app and not an app.

- There will be stories about rivals in the 'river' of content but because Intel staff don't like rivals those stories are unlikely to reach the front page.

- Most readers are expected to see individual story items, which will consist of a snippet of the original story and a link back to that source. 

- Traffic, and engagement by Intel staff, will be among the factors used to judge the success of the project.

- Readers will authenticate through Twitter. Readers can also share with their networks directly from the 'river.'

- 'iQ' has been well received by focus groups in Southern California.

- The project is about making best use of Intel capital -- its global workforce -- and engaging the social graph of Intel's staff. Intel employs the smartest people it can find, and 'iQ' will represent that collective intelligence.

(Some of the iQ team...)

 Exract from: iQ by Intel - iQ – A New Social Publishing Model

1. We have been inspired by writers and thought leaders such as Brian Solis(exploration of brand journalism), Tom Foremski (“Every Company is a Media Company) andJohn Battelle (writing on brand publishing), and by the AMEX Open Forum experience among other brands. Who better to help find and tell these stories than the engineers, scientists and visionaries who are helping design tomorrow’s technologies?

Our simple mission: Share and source content that inspires, educates, entertains and helps all of us to better understand our modern world. 

Technology is only as important as what people do with it. We hope iQ becomes a place where people get inspired to connect and collaborate with others interested in improving life and our planet through the benefits of Moore’s Law.

We’re pleased to have you with us on this journey.

Bryan Rhoads  - iQ Editor-in-Chief
Intel Social Media Center of Excellence

The iQ team:

• Bryan Rhoads - iQ Editor-in-Chief


• Luke Kintigh – iQ Managing Editor


• Becky Brown – Global Director of Media


• Renee Edwards – Social Community Management


• Jennifer Lashua – Consumer Social Media


• Ekaterina Walter – Global Social Network Strategy


• Kathleen Malone – Social Engagement & Media


• Regis Crawford – Social Programs


• Ali Ardalan – Social Tools & Analytics

(Photos by Tom Foremski.)

Friday evening I was at the de Young Museum in Golden Gate park to see The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk.

The museum is on a roll with its exhibits of leading fashion designers. The Vivienne Westwood show was fantastic, and the Balenciaga exhibit last year was even better. And this one is extraordinary, the best so far.

It's a superb curation and the presentation the work of designer Jean Paul Gaultier, dubbed "fashion's enfant terrible" is fantastically creative. I've never seen anything like it before.

The mounting, the display, the lighting are superbly tuned to the works displayed -- the de Young's staff should be congratulated for their skill in building this exhibit.

The designs are incredible for their innovation and creativity. And there's lots of them, he makes it seem so easy. But there is a huge amount of detail in each one of the many pieces, matching accessories, and ornamentation. Each outfit must have taken a lot of thought and work.

Jean Paul Gaultier launched his first prêt-à-porter collection in 1976 and founded his own couture house in 1997.

Emerging as a designer in the 1970s, he developed his own dress codes that reflected the changing world around him. The openly gay Gaultier uses his designs to tackle gender and transgender issues through androgynous, gender-bending styles, meanwhile delving even further into some of the darker areas of the sexual revolution.

Always provocative, he addresses issues of multiculturalism by bringing ethnic diversity to the Paris runway. Despite the gritty and sometimes controversial context of his collections, the clothes remain beautiful, superbly crafted with the finest dressmaking and detailing skills.

When you first walk-in, this is what you see. A dark blue space and in the distance a glowing row of mannequins.

When you get closer you can see the faces are moving, lips open, eyes close, some speak, or sing, others seem asleep -- then wake wide eyed. Images are being projected from carefully shielded projectors. The effect is incredibly wonderful, creepy, and brilliant.

Jean Paul Gaultier.

Would Hipsters wear these clothes?

The Group Accueil, a privately held, diversified corporation that had invested previously, led the round. The new capital will allow the company to scale the product and monetize the service.

"Pearltrees has leveraged social curation to create an open and collaborative interest graph of the Web" says Pearltrees' CEO Patrice Lamothe.

The company's unique social system lets users curate the web pages they like, connect to other users through common interests and organize topics curated by other users in a collaborative way.

The company's algorithm "TreeRank" interprets and exposes this graph through the product's discovery feature.

"As a consequence, Pearltrees harnesses the power of people to organize and discover the most valuable content on the web," adds Lamothe.

The current infusion of capital will allow Pearltrees to scale the product and to implement the company's freemium business model.

Since the company's launch in December 2009, Pearltrees has grown at a consistent rate of 15 percent per month.

More than 25 percent of users are American and 75 percent are equally distributed on all five continents.

Pearltrees has raised a total of 8.5 million Euros from a group of international entrepreneurs and angel investors.

About Groupe Accueil:

Groupe Accueil is a family holding company founded over one hundred years ago. It operates in publishing, software, trading, real estate development and agriculture.

At the latest meeting, our featured speaker was Matt Monday, a former Apple exec who lead the team that picked apps for the Apple AppStore.

He shared a lot of information, much of it was off-the-record -- a key feature of the salon, that people are able to share information in a setting that is off-the-record should they choose it -- and have the trust that the group will honor that request.

I'd love to share with you all the juicy details of how Apple curates the featured apps in its app store, what it looks for, and how to get to the top of the pack -- but you have to come to the meetings.

It's something that SFCurators Salon has as part of its DNA, you are strongly encouraged to come to the meetings to get the full benefits of belonging to this group.

. . .

Matt Monday has a very interesting startup coming out very soon, called Karma Store -- it finds the best charities, the ones doing the best work in each region and in each category of aid. It's all about bringing greater transparency to the sometimes murky world of charities, and identifying the ones that are making a big difference in their sector.

Here's a brief explanation:

You can follow Karma Store on Twitter here.

. . .

Patrice Lamothe, CEO of Pearltrees showed off the company's new iPad app, which has been a a top-ten hit since it was released earlier this week. [Pearltrees Launches iPad App That Lets Users Connect Through Their Curated Interests - SVW]

The iPad app is excellent and shows off a great way to view other people's curations of interesting subjects in a playful way, yet preserving all the great elements of Pearltree's desktop version.
(Pearltrees is a consulting client.)

. . .

It was great to see Ron Piovesan, currently working with Mozilla to help build an app store, launching in about nine months. He says that the effort is focused on web apps that can work across different browsers.

The interesting thing is that the app store is not tied to a specific platform but celebrates and curates the best apps that work across platforms and browsers.

. . .

Coming Up: SFCurators Salon has a series that is focusing on creators -- after all, without creators there's not much to curate!

Please join us Friday October 28 at 7pm for a special event at a wonderful space at Madrone Studios in the Mission, organized by Doug Millison. It will feature Jiri Szeppan, a Belgian artist working in a variety of media, using curation as part of his art process. Plus, we'll be having a Halloween theme, costumes are welcome!

Here are the event details: SFCurators Halloween Salon: "Curation & Our Art: An Illustrated Encounter"

. . .

If you'd like to find out more about SFCurators Salon and request a free membership please visit: http://www.facebook.com/groups/SFCurators/

. . .

Big thanks go to Edelman SF for the use of their offices and Edelman's Eva Rijser who donated her time to help make the salon a success.

Pearltrees, a French-based curation platform, today released an iPad app that lets users easily explore the curated collections of websites created by more than 200,000 people, via a unique visual and touch interface that serves a discovery engine based on interests.

The company has the world's largest community of online curators on its platform. Many work in teams to create a Pearltree, which consists of "pearls" -- each is a visual metaphor for a web page. Users can share and collect each other's Pearltrees, creating an ever expanding web topology generated by humans and their interests, rather than algorithms.

The free application takes full advantage of the iPad's touch interface to enable users to quickly discover collections of websites with simple swipes of their finger.

"This is the first time that you can see an interest graph in action," said Patrice Lamothe, CEO and co-founder of Pearltrees. "Users can discover the curation work of more than 200,000 Pearltrees users. There is no other application that does this."

Pearltrees is betting that many people are suffering from social network fatigue and the many chores of online relationship management. [Please see: The Tamagotchi Nature Of Social Networks]

"On Pearltrees there are no friends to collect or people to follow, it is solely based on your interests," said François Rocaboy, Chief Marketing Officer, co-founder of Pearltrees, and inventor of its "pearls" visual interface. "It's a way for people to curate their special places on the web, cultivating their own garden of interests, and taking their time to make a collection, a similar process to a curator in an art gallery. The iPad app is a great way to discover these curations."

The iPad app can be downloaded here.

And here is a screen cast, you really have to see it because it's a very visual app.

- - -

Here is an example of a documentary I put together using Pearltrees and found video footage from the recent Outside Lands music festival. I chose the best videos from sites such as Youtube, to try to recapture some of the excitement and the fun of being in a crowd of people happy to be among so much great music.

You are in the middle of the action. At times the camera swings in the air along with everyone's arms; sometimes you can't hear the music because everyone around you is singing; while an other clip shows happy fans singing on the bus that's taking them home -- all wonderful vignettes inexpertly captured.

Pearltrees allows me to quickly organize the video clips and it has a media viewer that makes it easy to show to anyone, without them needing a user account. And it looks really good on the iPad.

Even better, my curation of Outside Lands can be easily shared and collected by other Pearltrees users. If I make changes to my Outside Lands documentary, those changes are automatically published to everyone that has that Pearltree in their collection -- it's a powerful and unique media publishing platform. Which is precisely why I chose to work with Pearltrees in late 2009.

Please take a look at my Outside Lands found-footage documentary. (And please let me know if you'd like to team up with me, I've still got a lot of curating to do, and many hundreds of videos to review. But it's a fun project.)

Outside Lands 2011 - Found Fan Video Documentary in Outside Lands 2011
- - -

About Pearltrees:

Launched in December 2009, Pearltrees has gathered more than 200.000 collectors and more than 10 million pearls. The company has been growing at average rate of 15% month over month, with over half a million visits in September.

Since being founded, the company has been recognized by OSEO in Europe as a "leap forward" and was selected as one of only five companies for the Launch Pad at Web2.0 Expo in 2010.

Pearltrees has raised 3.8 million Euros from a group of international entrepreneurs and angel investors.

---

Useful Links:

Direct Link to Pearltrees for iPad in the App Store: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pearltrees-for-ipad/id463462134?mt=8&ls=1

Demo Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zDkwN-_ySg

Short screen-cast: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXU-IKS7KdA

Screen Shots: http://bitly.com/opOsVz

I really enjoyed being at Outside Lands but there was a ton of music that I didn't get to see, so this project also gave me an opportunity to see those other acts.

I found a lot of great footage uploaded by fans and I curated it into a collection that continues to grow as people upload more clips.

Yes, many are shaky, some of the videos are shot extremely well but the sound isn't very good but the content often makes up for the shortcomings because of the enthusiasm of the crowd, the vantage point, the singing of the fans...

For example: Arcade Fire singing "Wake Up."

Take a look at my highlights Pearltree here.

And here is the whole Pearltree:

Outside Lands 2011 - Found Fan Video Documentary in Outside Lands 2011
Let me know if you'd like to team up and work with me on this project.

We pulled our chairs into a large circle to get away from the traditional arrangement of speakers on a podium and audience down below. This is a salon of peers not podiums.

Our speakers for the evening were dotted around the circle and I acted as a moderator, armed with a large black spoon, which served as a talking stick (and whacking stick if needed :).

Going along with the idea of a "salon of peers" we sourced our speakers from within our group. Each spoke for about five minutes sharing stories about real life curation, what they look for, and how they do it. This was an evening to discuss the process of curation rather than curation tools.

Christine Mason McCaull spoke about how she helped curate local TEDxSF events; Ken Kaplan spoke about how curation is used within Intel; I stood in for Tom Abate and spoke about the role of curation in the newsroom.

The circular format was great in that it more easily allowed everyone to speak and share their stories -- not just the speakers. We covered a lot of ground and discussed more aspects of curation than I knew existed! It really is a fascinating topic.

One theme that we kept coming back to, was a discussion of novelist Gabriel García Márquez' quote: “Everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life, and a secret life,” and how that was reflected, or not, in the things that we curate and share throughout the day.

We spoke about curation as a way that shows off our public lives, crafted to say something about us, and that we are judged by the quality of our choices; and there's the private self, where a more truer nature can be expressed without worry about what clients, or others might think.

The boundaries between public and private lives seem constantly shifting especially with life streaming trends, which these days seem out of favor in some quarters. So, where are the boundaries between our public and private lives?

We have no trouble knowing where the boundary with our secret lives exists but where is the boundary between our public and private lives? Is it different according to profession, or age?

That was just one part of a great evening and a wonderful mix of people. I really like the way this group is coming together. Shel Holtz was there and he recorded much of the discussion but you really had to be there. Because it was all about conversation, which is rare.

The fast paced nature of our days doesn't encourage conversations -- we interact in brief spurts rather than converse. But with a talking stick (spoon) in your hand you are free to speak without interruption and stop when you are done. There's time to listen and think and then speak. I loved it.

I was buzzing with ideas when I got home and I woke up still buzzing, finding scrawled notes scattered around my apartment as I tried to capture some of those ideas at the point of where I was standing at the time... More to come.

If you are interested in the next SFCurators Salon find us on Facebook and request to join -- you'll be the first to hear about the next meeting and also a lot more. I'm cautious about opening it up to too many people because I really like how this group is coming together and I'm worried about bringing in too many people, too quickly. It's like making a fine mayonnaise, you need to add the oil slowly, if you dump it all in, it separates and is ruined.

Here on this site, we've been using Pearltrees to curate some of the best tech stories of the day over the last few weeks. To do so, we've been using Pearltrees' embed function. That feature, too, received some nice updates today. Embeds now allow Pearltrees users (and non-users!) to pick the most interesting "pearls" and copy them to their own accounts with just one click. In addition, posting a pearltree from an embed to Facebook now also just takes a few clicks and users can sign up for Pearltrees right from the embed as well.

Best of Today (6/29) in null (null)- - -

You can get a free Pearltrees account here, sign up is very quick.

[If you are interested in discussing digital curation with a group of like-minded individuals please request a membership in SFCurators Salon here. We will have another meeting in about two weeks.]

The event was sold out with about 650 tickets for the Yerba Buena location, a larger theater than the Academy of Sciences, where it used to be held. The mix of people was eclectic as always.

There were at least two or three talks where I wished for the return of the old Vaudeville stage hook, or maybe a remote controlled trapdoor. Most of the rest of the talks were interesting, intriguing, and some were even brilliant.

But it was a packed afternoon, from noon to 6pm, a bit too long. Also, my friend Jim pointed out, it would have been nice to have a 1 minute pause between talks so that you could think about what you'd just heard and maybe have a quick chat with the person next to you.

TED talks are a form of modern theater within an old school format in that it's a one-way stage. The only interaction is through live tweets and that's a poor channel because it distracts from the stage. I don't know how you can make TEDx events more interactive but maybe that's what the 'x' in TEDx should stand for, experimental rather than a formulaic format.

However, the formulaic format of TED talks is pretty good, so maybe the organizers know not to mess with what works.

Among the standout performances:

- Dr. William Thomas speaking about geriatric science and how we follow anti-aging gurus when we should embrace our senior age as "Elderhood" a vital life stage.

- Eythor Bender and his eLEGS exoskeletons, he showed a woman paralyzed from the waist down walking onto the stage. I spoke with one of the wheelchair bound testers of this remarkable contraption. I asked how many months does it take to learn how to walk in the exoskeleton? She said it's just hours! Very impressive.

Andrés Torres got several standing ovations for surviving 12 years in the minor leagues of baseball before making it big in the majors.

Scott Hess spoke about the differences between Gen X and Millennial generations. It was a funny and insightful talk.

But I don't see that there is much competition between the generations he describes, it's a case of both generations learning from each other and both are benefiting from that process -- it's "and" and not "or."

Simon Mainwaring. O.M.G. Social media marketing claptrap that was so bad that it had me convinced, at one point, that I was watching a performance art piece that was a parody of an egotistical "brand marketing expert."

Dave Kim with his violin and box of tricks was excellent.

Shereef Bishay talked about how to structure work relationships differently and learning from how open-source projects are organized, plus other commercial models. I'd love to hear more about this subject.

Mel Robbins is a great motivational speaker with some direct advice for getting to your goals. "Set your alarm 30 minutes early and when it goes off you have three-seconds to get out of bed!"

I've been quite successful with my routine: I set my alarm 18 minutes early, and reach for my iPad and I start each day with a TED talk. It gets me out of bed and keeps me in bed -- it's win win. And it comes with a cherry on top because of the positive mood I always get from a TED talk.

BTW here is my current favorite: Tales of ice-bound wonderlands: Paul Nicklen

The best part of the event was when it was over and there was a chance to meet and talk with the audience and performers. In past TEDxSF events few people stay around afterwards. This time it seemed as if everyone stayed for hours. Strangers formed spontaneous discussion groups, salons were formed on the-fly... All great stuff.

TEDxSF is a great example of a type of curation that is uncommon: curating people. Choosing the people that present at the event, and also choosing the people that are allowed into the event (everyone has to apply).

It's a form of curation that is difficult but rewarding when done right and the TEDxSF team seem to be really hitting their stride.

- - -

Here's the event program and links:

Events | TEDxSF

TEDxSF Membership Application

Here is a Pearltree about TEDxSF.

Prior events:

TEDxSF: The Edge Of What We Know...

Captain Of The Sea Shepherd - Paul Watson Stole The Show At TEDxSF...

TEDxSF - Little TED Just Like The Big TED

This year there has been a tremendous amount of buzz in Silicon Valley about curation. Magnify.net CEO Steven Rosenbaum recently published a book, Curation Nation that has sparked a tremendous amount of conversation on the topic. Likewise a post by Brian Solis has been retweeted thousands of times, my company, Pearltrees has just surpassed 100k curators and 10 million page views a month, while in the past two years nearly a dozen companies that incorporate digital curation into their models have launched.

With all the attention curation has suddenly received people are probably wondering whether this is just another fad or is it something bigger? Is curation something more important than just the day's newest flavor; is it something that's going to have real sticking power? In short is curation something that really merits our attention?

First, curation is one of the underlying principles of the Web. This was recently discussed in an excellent post by Patrice Lamothe called "The Web's Third Frontier" In short, when Tim Berners Lee originally conceived of the Internet, he envisioned 3 principal functions:

The true history of the Internet is all about technologies and companies that made them mainstream. As a result, over the past 20 years what we've seen is the democratization of the first two of the three principles above; hypertext and Google made it possible for anyone to access any type of document, and it's difficult to argue that platforms like WordPress, YouTube, Twitter and even Flickr have done the same thing with respect to the dissemination of documents. As Twitter Co-Founder Ev Williams said at least year's Web 2.0 Summit, one of his overarching goals was to democratize publishing "by lowering the bar about as far as it could go".

Secondly, we have very strong evidence that curation has begun a similar process towards democratization, and that what we are seeing now is that curation is following an adoption curve similar to blogging. This has happened with Web 2.0 and it's why you now have to deal with friend requests from Grandma.

So what is this evidence?

These points all converge to give us a picture that we have crossed over from professional users to early adopters within the curation field.

Third, in recent months we have seen highly influential investors begin to focus on curation and also to make significant bets on the space. In fact, in a recent Huffington Post article on the topic, Steve Rosenbaum, the CEO of Magnify.net and one of the most outspoken proponents of the curation trend, quoted Russian Mega Investor Yuri Milner as saying "I think the next big theme is basically curation."

Similarly, Fred Wilson, another prominent investor - and one that is often seen as being particularly astute when it comes to predicting where the web is going - has also written a post about curation wherein he talks about the value of curation in social services. His contention is that curation improves the signal to noise ratio in social web services that he says have become "messy and hard to navigate". While yet another high profile thinker and investor, Paul Kedrosky, contends that curation begat search which is being replaced once again by curation.

Clearly there are forces at play here - mainly curation gaining mindshare with investors, and their subsequent deployment of capital into the curation space -- that are starting to provide the impetus for curation to truly take hold. Provided that these astute investors make their bets on the right entrepreneurs in this space, I believe it is highly likely that at least one of them will become the company Scoble suggests will come from capitalizing on the curation opportunity.

So is curation here to stay? I think it's safe to say it is. Curation is part of the DNA of the web from its very origin, we have strong evidence to support the contention that curation is at the beginning of the democratization process, and finally investors have identified this trend and are providing the capital to ensure that this process continues. Given these facts I'm growing ever more confident that curation is not just the flavor of the month, but a rapidly growing trend that represents both a clearly developing third phase of the Internet as well as a huge opportunity for entrepreneurs and investors.

[Oriella Survey: Most Journalists Shun Social Media And Blogs - SVW]

No one is asking journalists to throw away the tried and true ways of researching and verifying stories but to add new skills that will improve their reporting. Those new skills include curation and the use of media technologies to tell stories in ways that haven't been told.

How to source a video

A great example of how journalists can verify social media sources and put together different types of content comes from journalist Mark Little, one of the founders of Storyful, a site that offers curation tools and a publishing platform.

Mr Little has written an excellent post that draws on his 20 years experience as a reporter and he explains how he approaches the tricky issue of verification.

Without a doubt, verification is the greatest challenge. It's also the greatest opportunity for 'social journalists' willing to leave the confines of traditional news organisations and perhaps even create their own.

He describes what he calls a "light-bulb moment" that occurred when he was working on a story about Egyptian protestors engaged in a pitched battle on a bridge across the Nile.

Our curators discovered the video on Facebook and quickly contacted Mohamed to confirm he was the original creator of this remarkable footage.

The team used Google earth to check the location of the bridge and Mohamed's vantage point. Using social media channels Flickr and Panaramio, Storyful compared Mohamed's video with other user generated content shot on ground level.

Finally, the curator asked Mohamed for his permission to upload the video to YouTube and pass it on news organisations. Mohamed sought only a credit in exchange for the free use of his video.

Over several months, Mr Little managed to distill a procedure of how to verify video content from citizen reporters, into an easy to follow list:

- Review of the uploader's history and location to see whether he/she has shared useful and credible content in the past, or if he/she is a "scraper," passing other people's content off a their own (location is a big clue: don't trust uploaders in Japan to post video from Syria).

- Use of Google street view/maps/satellite imagery to help verify the locations in a video.

- Consultation of other news sources or validated user content to confirm events in a video happened as they were described.

- Examination of key features in a video such as weather and background landscape to see if they match known facts on the ground.

- Translation of every word that comes with a video for additional context.

- Monitoring social media traffic to see who is sharing the content and what questions are being asked about it.

- Develop and maintain relationships with people within the community around the story.

This is a common sense approach to verifying content from sources that you don't know. Yes, it does take some extra work but that's what journalists are paid to do. Journalists should not be shunning social media.

LinkedIn for scoops

Some training is available. For example, Krista Canfield at LinkedIn helps train journalists how to use LinkedIn as a reporting tool. She says she has trained journalists from The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.

Here is one of her tips for journalists researching stories on LinkedIn:

As a journalist, you may not want people to know that you're following a company. If you want to follow companies in stealth mode, here's what you do:

1. Hover over your name in the top right hand corner of LinkedIn

2. Click "Settings" when it appears in the drop down menu.

3. On the next page, under, "Privacy Controls," you should see a link that says, "Turn on/off your activity broadcasts." Click that link.

4. Uncheck the box next to, "Let people know when you change your profile, make recommendations, or follow companies."

You can find out more here: LinkedIn for Journalists

A reporter is a curator...

A reporter can be seen as a curator of the information contained in a news story. The reporter decides what content, from which sources, and in what order, should be included in the news; the story then creates the context for the news.

In pre-Internet times reporters published a story and they couldn't easily see how it was consumed and discussed. In the online world we are spoilt with many ways to measure readers, and see the effect of a story in different communities in near real time.

For example, I nearly always Tweet my headlines to my readers. Sometimes readers will retweet with a different headline, sometimes it's a much better headline. There have been times that I've gone back and rewritten a story and changed the headline because my readers had picked out a better lead.

That's just one small benefit to paying attention to social media and trusting your sources. Mr Little says it well:

The only way a curator can ultimately sort news from noise is to join the social media conversation which emerges from news events. Not just listen, but engage directly, openly and honestly with the most authentic voices.

Every news event in the age of social media creates more than a conversation, it creates a community. When news breaks, a self-selecting network gathers to talk about the story. Some are witnesses - the creators of original content - others are amplifiers - passing that content on to a wider audience. And in every group are the filters, the people who everyone else looks to for judgement.

The reporter has to see themselves as part of this extended network of people -- they all play a vital role in news gathering and publishing. They make the product better.

The team beyond the newsroom...

Journalists are used to working as part of a team--they are a cog in the production process, which includes editors, news editors, sub-editors, producers, photographers, layout designers, etc. No one works alone in the news business.

Journalists just need to get comfortable extending that team beyond the newsroom.

But that takes time, it takes time to "curate" your sources, because you have to establish levels of trust and connection. Trust takes time.

That's why the sooner journalists start embracing social media and blogs, and learning some of the new toolsets, the better. The better for all of us too since we will get better and truer reporting, and higher quality content.

Quality content will stand out like a towering emerald skyscraper, high above the black waters of the unrelenting tsunami of mediocre content.

Here's a reminder of what great reporting looks like: Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone: The People vs. Goldman Sachs | Rolling Stone Politics

They weren't murderers or anything; they had merely stolen more money than most people can rationally conceive of, from their own customers, in a few blinks of an eye. But then they went one step further. They came to Washington, took an oath before Congress, and lied about it.

We need more journalists like Matt Taibbi, who are able to tackle big, and hugely important issues.

If journalists can extend their editorial team beyond the newsroom, and include the citizen journalists, and the "amplifiers," etc, they will become far more effective, and we might get a new generation of highly skilled journalists, a new generation of Matt Taibbis...

---

Storyful. » The Human Algorithm

Oriella Survey: Most Journalists Shun Social Media And Blogs - SVW

Rolling Stone Politics | Taibblog | Matt Taibbi on Politics and the Economy

After all, how hard can it be to collect a few links and publish them?

However, "cheap" content doesn't mean it's good content. Cheap content is easy to spot because it carries little value. Curation, is more, much more than just finding some links and publishing them.

For curation to be done well it needs context. Publishing some links is of not much benefit to anyone if you can't explain why this content has been chosen, it requires some rationale for the choice and also: it needs to take the story further.

If you take a look at the work of museum curators, for example, the fantastic Balenciaga and Spain currently at the DeYoung in San Francisco, you see a tremendous amount of context around each exhibit. The curators of that exhibit show off their mastery of the subject by creating a compelling narrative around the works of art.

That's what curation online also has to demonstrate: mastery, passion, knowledge, and expertise. Without such additional layers, a curated collection of links is just a collection of links. Which is why curation cannot be easily handed off to a junior, or an intern, unless they really know their stuff.

Otherwise, you could simply create curated content via some filters, some keywords, etc. That's a task better accomplished by a machine, and that's what "aggregation" is, it's machine made, it's not curation.

I've written about this distinction before, aggregators versus curators and it is worth repeating because it is the human labor that's important, that's where the value will be found in any online enterprise. Servers and software can accomplish many wonderful things but there are many human activities that they are not good at doing.

You have to figure out where the value of your curation is, what can you provide that an aggregator cannot? Human labor is not cheap but it's how value is created and if you cannot determine where the human value is then you are in deep trouble.

Also, the Googlebot won't give you a higher rank if all it sees are a bunch of links. Google loves original content and it loves new content.

Curation is most definitely not a source of cheap content and it will be readily obvious to readers if some sites try to use curation in a way that adds nothing to the original content.

The point of curation is to provide meaning to the deluge of content out there, not to add to it.

[How Curation Can Rescue Great Content From The Tyranny Of The Timeline - SVW]

Of course, the content is still there in the archives, it is reachable, and it is searchable; but only if you know it is there.

Search is an awkward instrument for retrieving content in an archive, simply because you often don't know what is in the archive.

Search is great for finding specific items but it is terrible at surfacing great content.

Maybe one of these days we will be able to ask a search engine to find "which are the best articles about curation?" Maybe search technology at Google, with its legions of experts, will one day be able to deal with such simple queries.

But in the meantime there is no sense in waiting when we have the curation tools to do it now.

Last week I wrote about how to use Pearltrees to collect your own content and save it from the obscurity of your archives.

(Of course, you can use other curation tools, but Pearltrees allows you to save literally anything online, and make it easily shareable with the single largest curation community, of more than 100,000 people.)

There is a much larger opportunity: curating great content from a variety of sources and saving it from obscurity.

This is an important job, and I see more and more people doing it: curating subjects that they care passionately about.

And you don't have to be a professional curator to do it. In a similar way that blogging meant that you didn't have to be a professional writer to publish your articles, curation today is a meritocracy: you are judged on the result and not on your qualifications.

I can curate my favorite essays from SVW, but if I curate my favorite essays from SVW, and other sites and sources, then my curation efforts are of much greater value.

And there's a lot of pleasure in curating across a broad range of sources. A curation of Picasso's works is wonderful, but a curation of Picasso and his contemporary artists, is even more wonderful.

Context always plays a key role shaping content, and curation is one of the best ways to capture context. But that's a topic for a future post...

It tended to discourage me from writing some posts because I didn't want to lose better, or what I thought were more important posts, from the home page.

Because once articles enter the archives it is like disappearing into a deep well. They are gone. And search won't help because search only works if you know something is there.

This tyranny of the timeline, where each new post pushes one more post into obscurity, still continues today and it has accelerated as the amount of new content rises to ever greater levels.

That's one reason why I published my book, "In My Humble Opinion: Notes from a SIlicon Valley Watcher." It was a way to rescue some of my favorite essays and posts from the oblivion of the archives.

Online curation is another way to do it. Here is an example: I made a Pearltree that contains my favorite essays/posts from the past few months:

Google's Search For Quality... And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance

Some Thoughts On The Social Distribution Of Mass Media...(SoDOMM)

The Demise Of Social Media And The Return Of Mass Media

The World Has Room For Only Nine More Googles... Or 1,000+ Startups

Support Good Journalism And 'Pay The Wall'

Muckraking: A Disappearing Form Of Journalism?

Wow. Twitter's Response To Bad Press: Unfollow

Analysis: Here's Why Demand Media Valuation Is Greater Than NYTimes...

Saturday Post: The Evolution Of Homo Extrovert

Curation And The Human Web...

Aggregation Is Not Curation - There Is A Big Difference

Yes, you could bookmark this page and come back to it, but with the new generation of curation tools there are better ways.

For example with Pearltrees, you can grab my collection of essays and add it to your own (free) account. You can then add your own favorites or delete ones you don't want. You can edit the curator! And there's built in sharing services that make it easily accessible to others.

And you can do this with any good content you find on the Internet. Through curation you can save it from the obscurity of the timeline. You can save it for posterity and for others, or simply for your own uses and pleasures.

As content mills such as Demand Media, (and as others follow suit) continue to churn out a Tsunami of mediocre content -- the deluge is swamping all content. The black waters of the media Tsunami will carry away the good and the bad. And search cannot help.

Curation becomes the only way to rescue great content and keep it safe.

- - -

SVW Essays

I set up the group with my colleague Oliver Starr as a place where like-minded people could discuss the topic of curation, which has become a hot topic this year as search falters, and as curation tools and services come out of beta and into more mainstream use. (Please see: Pearltrees Reaches Key Milestones: Largest Curation Community - SVW)

The meeting was held in Specs', a bar that happens to also be a funky museum. The location in North Beach, just across the street from City Lights Bookstore and Vesuvio, always conjures up for me the great intellectual and literary traditions of the area.

This was the stomping ground for the Beatnicks, and some myths even locate the origin of the name to Specs'. North Beach still carries this culture of engagement, its warren of small streets, cafes, family restaurants, encourages debate and discussion. And that's exactly what we had last Thursday.

As people started to arrive we sat around one of the large round tables at the back of the bar and got straight into a fascinating discussion of curation and what it means. I learned a lot and came away with many pages of notes that will fuel many future articles.

I liked the format: instead of listening to a guest speaker we got to listen to each other. And everyone got a chance to speak. And everyone seemed to enjoy themselves.

Afterwards, we went next door to Tosca Cafe to see Mr Lucky, Ralph Carney, and fellow musicians in some great cocktail cabaret. (Short video here.)

It was a great night to be in North Beach!

I've set up a Facebook Group where we can continue discussions and share links: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_190497964325519

Here is a Pearltree for SFCurators Salon that will grow to be an archive of our meetings, and members can 'team up' to add content.

And everyone that came that evening is an official co-founder of SFCurators Salon!

Here are my co-founders:

Oliver Starr - @OWStarr
Aurelia Ammour - @aammour
David Spark - @dspark
Renne Blodgett @@MagicSauceMedia
Murray Newlands - @MurrayNewlands
Roger MacDonald
Heidi Isern Chisem
Alastair Goldfisher - @agoldfisher
Steve Farnsworth - @Steveology
Kevin Lawton - @CrowdfundBook
Lydia Sugarman - @lksugarman
Samantha Sleeper - @samanthasleeper
Janine Shiota - @jnshiota
Christine McCaull - @xtinem
LaurieAnne Lassek
Zach Morvant - @zachsbeardsays
Chris Knight
Todd Tate - @toddtate
Brian Zisk - @zisk
Alison Murdock @svrocks
David Rozelle
Heddi Cundle - @HeddiCundle
Lisa Montanino - @LMontanino
Steve Kerns - @stevekerns
Annie Kim
Carla Schlemminger @carlainsf

Twitter List: Twitter / @tomforemski/sfcurators-salon

I'm looking forward to more conversations. And maybe I'll see you at the next meeting...

This makes Pearltrees the largest curation community on the web. That's a great achievement and it comes at a great time because curation has become a hot topic as Internet users struggle to find spam-free content.

Patrice Lamothe, CEO of Pearltrees, said: "Passionate people need a place to organize and share the digital items they like. The social magic of Pearltrees is that people can discover others passions and can base their exchanges on these common interests. It represents a new form a social interaction."

Oliver Starr, chief US evangelist for Pearltrees (and former Techcrunch employee #1) said: "The strong, consistent growth of Pearltrees' community shows that people enjoy playful ways to organize digital items. It also demonstrates the popularity of the "team" social feature that enables people to curate the same pearltree together in real time. With the release of our new social features we have seen a real acceleration in the growth and development of our community."

A key feature of Pearltrees' community growth is that it has been steady and consistent since its launch in December 2009. This is not a flash-in-the-pan phenomenon as has been seen in the sudden and often temporary popularity of online services such as Quora, Instagram, Foursquare, and others.

Later this year Pearltrees will release an iPad version. There are also plans for a private version for businesses seeking to curate content for internal use.

The ultimate vision of Pearltrees is to build a human web -- a parallel curated web that lifts the best content out of an ocean of mediocre, search engine optimized commercial content.

- - -
Please see: Social curation finds an audience: Pearltrees reaches 10M pageviews | VentureBeat

VCs are beginning to talk publicly about "curation" which means they are telling startups what type of companies they are looking to fund in the hopes that someone will create those companies.

For example, Fred Wilson, the New York-based VC recently wrote about curation:

I'm a big fan of curation in these services. Twitter has lists. Etsy has favorites. Tumblr has tag pages. These are all variations of curation in services that have a lot of noise in them.

Steve Rosenbaum, author and founder of Magnify, a curation service, recently pointed out that Yuri Milner, the superstar Russian investor, told the Wall Street Journal:

"I think the next big theme is basically curation."

It's becoming a wise strategy to add "curation" to your pitch deck.

But "curation" can be applied in a wide number of ways. It seems that anything that involves some human interaction via a share, ratings, or like button could be classified as curation.

Mr Wilson's examples of curation are basic features that can be easily to virtually any web service. This means that there are plenty of startups that could just as easily reposition themselves as "curation" companies to attract future funding.

Clearly, curation has to be about something more than simple lists or clicks. For example, Facebook "likes" by my social network aren't very useful because they are too general and don't provide much context.

The successful curation startups will be the ones that provide context and are able to deal with everything that you can find on the web, not just Tweets blog posts, or video. Pearltrees is a rare example of this form of comprehensive curation.

So is there a danger of a bubble forming in terms of a coming flood of curation startups?

Yes, but the danger is all on the VC side, for users it's all gravy -- there will be a cornucopia of curation services and choice is always a good thing.

But as in all of these markets, there is a lot to be said for the first mover advantage especially if you have built a large user community. Building communities is tough, it takes time. There are no shortcuts.

And that's the biggest challenge facing new curation startups: users. Yes, you might get great exposure when you launch and snag thousands of sign ups but next week you are old news -- what do you do then? How do you keep users coming back to your service?

You need to invest beyond your development team. You need to invest in targeting the right users in the hopes that they will spread the word organically. You need evangelists, and you need a marketing strategy that moves beyond the early adopter techies because that's a frighteningly small and a frighteningly fickle group -- always ready to move onto the next trendy service.

Your curation service has to be relevant to a broad, non-geek crowd otherwise it will fail.

But that kind of marketing isn't cheap. The noise level across all media is huge and it's becoming ever harder to keep punching through the noise and reaching people.

Edelman, the US PR firm, recently conducted a survey as part of its Edelman Barometer report, which found that people need to hear a marketing message five to nine times -- and from different sources -- before they take notice.

This raises the stakes considerably for any startup, not just those entering the curation space.

The VCs had better start factoring in considerable marketing costs instead of thinking that social media marketing has made marketing (almost) free.

- - -

Please see: Is Curation A Flash In The Pan?

I'm thinking of Quora as one example. But also Digg, MySpace and many others...

And whenever there is a burst of hype around a topic it seems to be a precursor to a shortened life span.

Curation has recently emerged as a hot topic so does that mean it's days are numbered?

Take a look at this Google Trends graph:

You can see that interest in the topic was fairly level for much of last year but is now on a sharp upward trajectory since the beginning of this year. And it looks like it has plenty of momentum going forward, clearly the topic has legs.

But is curation a flash in the pan? A trendy topic that will become old news as people move onto the next Internet meme?

I don't think so. This is a topic that won't go away anytime soon because it is quickly becoming hugely important to the future of the Internet and the user experience.

We're experiencing a media tsunami that search alone cannot handle. We need curators to help organize and interpret the digital world.

Curation will do for search what search did for the web -- made it usable and useful to millions of people.

We now have the tools and services that make digital curation easy and accessible by any Internet user. The amount of curation is increasing tremendously and that means the user experience of the Internet improves tremendously because people are finding and pointing to great content.

This is why I don't believe that curation will go away because it will be a vital and integral part of the Internet itself, it will be define the quality of the web user experience for everyone.

Yes, we will eventually see fewer posts on the subject of curation. But that will be because curation will disappear into the wallpaper of our digital worlds, so ubiquitous that it's not worth mentioning.

Curation will be something that we do without even noticing that we are doing it.

- - -
Here is a Pearltree on "What is curation?"

The Next Big Trend? It's All About Curation - Steve Rubel

You Might Already Be A Curator... - SVW

Curation - The Third Web Frontier - SVW

For example, the South by South West Interactive conference that is winding down in Austin, Texas attracted a lot of people, sharing lots of ideas, conversations, product launches, and more.

Take at look at MobyNow's real-time aggregation of all the social media at SXSW and you'll see what I mean, the masses of tweets, photos, etc. And that's what aggregation is good at -- finding everything that's relevant or related is easy.

But aggregation isn't that great at documenting a unique experience of an event such as SXSW in digital form. That's where curation steps in, it can make sense of a mass of information in a useable format.

Curation can help to create a specific snapshot. And like snapshots in our photo galleries, curation creates and conserves memories.

For example: In the future, kids might ask "What did grandpa do at SXSW in 2011?" They could search the Internet and come up with a mess of tweets, photos and posts. But without much context, and without editing, that would be a poor answer to that question.

However, if grandpa had curated his time at SXSW using some of the many digital curation tools available, the answer would be much richer and much more interesting.

The recently launched Memolane does a good job in creating a timeline of a person's tweets. It's a step towards documenting a person's life -- at least in tweets.

My friends over at JS-Kit, Khris Loux and Chris Saad, like to talk about the "synaptic web." This might be an approach that will one day improve machine understanding of culture and context.

But in the meantime, a little human labor exerted in the form of curation can make a big difference in surfacing meaning out of the chaos of the Internet.

Digital curation will find many expressions and people will find many new uses for these tools because curation helps make sense of a dynamic, ever changing Internet.

And as our lives become more digital, we will all become curators, in one way or another.

Take a look around your home and you will likely see many curations:

- Your book shelf is probably a curated collection of your favorite books -- you got rid of the ones you didn't like.

- Your coffee table or books in your living room. These are likely the books that you want your visitors to see, they say something about you, it is a carefully curated expression of you.

- The same with your music. I know that most music collections are digital and live in your iTunes library but many people still love to show off their collections in their homes, especially their vinyl.

- The artwork on your wall. Wall space is a limited commodity, so that means you've made some very deliberate choices.

- Photo libraries. With digital photos so easy to take it is easy to amass a huge number of photos. This means you have to get rid of many photos because the collections become unmanageable very quickly. Your editing of your photo collection is a curation.

- Browsing the Internet you probably have your bookmarks, which is a curated list of web sites.

Curation appears to be a natural human activity. Collecting and displaying things is a common human trait across all societies.

But curation does require some sort of semi-permanent display platform. Books have bookshelves; paintings have walls; sculptures have pedestals.

Curating the Internet isn't very useful unless the curation can be built on a platform that enables others to view, browse, collect, and connect.

It is only fairly recently that we've gotten the tools for effective curation on the Internet. This year you will see a flood of curation tools and services. Which one will you use?

- - -

Here is a Pearltree on Curation.

Take a look at this post on the BBC College of Journalism blog:Social media: what's the difference between curation and journalism? The post takes a look at a discussion between journalists on the topic of using video from Libya:

On Friday, 'mainstream' media made a bad mistake when it ran images of fighting in the Libyan town of Zawiyah - Reuters picked up the video from social media, which claimed/believed it was legitimate 'today' footage. Other news organisations then picked up the material and rebroadcast it until they discovered it was from fighting in exactly the same location but from the previous week.

The discussion was between "Neal Mann, @fieldproducer, a sharp and savvy Sky journalist who mixes old-school cunning with new media nous, and Andy Carvin, @acarvin, National Public Radio's social media strategist and arguably the doyen of new media journalism."

Mr Carvin has been a machine in his non-stop Tweeting on the Middle East revolts and has helped to disseminate a lot of the news from the region.

Is his work "curation" or "social media?" Clearly, it's both, and the two can overlap. What they both have in common is that you don't need to be a journalist to be a curator or be involved in social media.

But is curation journalism?

It's an old question and one that I've had to answer many times since leaving the Financial Times in 2004 to become a "journalist blogger." Many people asked me about other blogs and asked "Is blogging journalism?" and "should journalists be licensed?"

My answer has always been as follows: "If it looks like journalism, and it consistently looks like journalism, then it most probably is journalism. We don't need journalism to be verified by others."

People will sometimes confuse curation and social media with journalism but that's OK, it helps educate people about how to handle information they see on the web.

I see curation as vital part of journalism but curation on its own is not journalism. Curation is one of the things that journalists can do well because they know their subject areas well. And curation provides a valuable supporting function to a reporter's beat.

- - -
Here is a Pearltree on Curation and Social Media (Pearltrees is a consulting client.)

Story: Curation And Social Media

Paul Kedrosky writing on Infectious Greed: Curation is the New Search is the New Curation

What has happened is that Google's ranking algorithm, like any trading algorithm, has lost its alpha. It no longer has lists to draw and, on its own, it no longer generates the same outperformance -- in part because it is, for practical purposes, reverse-engineered, well-understood and operating in an adaptive content landscape. Search results in many categories are now honey pots embedded in ruined landscapes -- traps for the unwary.

But is search really that bad?

I can argue that search today is so much better than it was five and ten years ago. Today search has to deal with so much more:

- The number of web pages has risen enormously, indexed all that content is impressive in itself.

- Search has to be able to deal with the hundreds of thousands of people and web sites that are trying to game the search algorithm.

- Search has to deal with so many new types of content.

- Search still remains relevant to most users, Google says its tests show that search quality remains high.

So why is curation on the rise? Here are a few reasons:

- Because we can. We now have a wide range of curation tools, from Pearltrees with its visual metaphor and strong social features; to Storify, which enables easy publishing using Tweets and video.

- Curation is something that everyone does every day of the week in terms of the web sites they visit and their interest in specific subjects. People are making choices every day on the Internet and today, it is easier to share and distribute those choices and in turn, improve the Internet experience for many others. We have the tools to easily capture that daily curation.

- Today it is easier to create curation that can be shared. Creating a list of web sites is the most primitive form of curation. Bundling those web sites into a Pearltree, and then inviting others to help build that Pearltree; or making it easy for anyone to grab that Pearltree and add it to their own collection, are crucial features that have helped move curation forward.

- Curation is within the reach of any Internet user, they don't have to be journalists or professionals, in order to curate a topic an d make it useful to many.

The future of search is not curation but a future that combines the best of both -- and that will lead to a much better Internet experience for all users. (Hat tip François Rocaboy (@frocaboy)

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Here is a Pearltree on "curation" by author and teacher Howard Rheingold:

Curation
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Please see:

Curation - The Third Web Frontier

Curation And The Human Web...

Aggregation Is Not Curation - There Is A Big Difference

The first form of search is Google, and this will continue to be important, as much from habit, and as much as there isn't much of a choice.

The second is tapping into your own socal network to find what you need. This is limited to the subjects that your social circle knows about and depending on its size, and the time of day, it might not yield much.

Also, there is a less trust in "peers" as a recent Edelman survey found, and more trust in "experts."

The third way to search is by looking at content that has been curated by "experts." You don't have to be an accredited expert but you have to be passionate about your topic.

Pearltrees, for example, has a large community of such experts. (Pearltrees is an advisory client.)

Curators derive a pleasure from their activities, and it is also a form of altruism to collect the best information, and that's why the product of curation is usually well thought out and highly relevant.

Curation, at least so far, is relatively spam free. That's because it doesn't lend itself to be easily created by algorithms or affected by spambots. Machines are good at aggregation, but aggregation is not curation.

However, curation is not immune to spammers and this will become a greater problem as the role of curation expands in terms of the number of creators and users.

And it depends on how Google will evolve its search algorithm. The search giant has been talking about looking for signals from a wide variety of "social" and other sources to include in its algorithm. It could tap into the various curation communities to look for those signals.

The original Google algorithm was heavily based on PageRank, which looks at the links in a web page as a form of human-powered curation of what's important.

As it continues to look beyond links and include other signals such as that in Pearltrees communities, or the content that people are sharing on Facebook and Twitter, the spammers could move over to those communities in an effort to game the Google ranking system.

For example, Demand Media, uses SEO techniques to make sure that its content ranks high in Google results. Although it is not a spammer, as such, Demand is a good example of how it is possible to use scale across a large amount of content to make it stand out in Google.

Demand has more than 17,000 writers, it could easily harness this army to move into curation and to set up curated content that is in tune with Google's algorithm changes.

And others could do the same to varying degrees.

It'll be interesting to see if the curation community can resist the coming influx of spammers and how that will be done.

- - -

Please see:

Curation - The Third Web Frontier - SVW

Curation And The Human Web... - SVW

Aggregation Is Not Curation - There Is A Big Difference - SVW

If search is becoming less useful then how will we navigate the web?

The answer is by curation, by using the recommendations of others acting as curators.

Paul Kedrosky writing on Infectious Greed:

... the re-rise of curation is partly about crowd curation -- not one people, but lots of people, whether consciously (lists, etc.) or unconsciously (tweets, etc) -- and partly about hand curation (JetSetter, etc.). We are going to increasingly see nichey services that sell curation as a primary feature, with the primary advantage of being mostly unsullied by content farms, SEO spam, and nonsensical Q&A sites intended to create low-rent versions of Borges' Library of Babylon. The result will be a subset of curated sites that will re-seed a new generation of algorithmic search sites, and the cycle will continue, over and over.

But we need good curation tools. The most comprehensive one I've found is Pearltrees (Pearltrees is a consulting client) and here are my reasons:

- Pearltrees allows you to curate anything that is found online. That's not true for most other curation services.

- Pearltrees has a team feature that allows groups of people to curate a subject.

- Pearltrees curation can be added to other Pearltrees, it is shareable and searchable; it is durable; it is automatically part of a community in ways that a "curated" list of sites on a web page isn't.

- Curation by itself is not an ideal substitute for search. You do need algorithms to help in navigation. And this is another area where Pearltrees has something unique: a powerful search algorithm that surfaces the content of similar Pearltrees -- which is a great way of discovering new, spam-free content.

But there is one area where curation cannot help search -- in real-time content. This is an area that will always be vulnerable to spammy SEO tactics because you need machines to index real-time content and that means being vulnerable to the many gaming techniques used by spammers.

The big question for Google is if it has lost the war with spammers or merely a battle?

Google can lose the war but it can never win it -- it's a war that cannot ever be won. Which means curation will become ever more important in our relationship to the Internet.

What would you curate? What's your expertise?

- - -

Here is a Pearltree on "curation" by author and teacher Howard Rheingold:

Curation
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Please see:

Curation - The Third Web Frontier

Curation And The Human Web...

Aggregation Is Not Curation - There Is A Big Difference

Pearltrees this week launched a "Team" version of its curation service that allows groups of people to collaborate on curating a topic. Up until now each Pearltree was the responsibility of one person.

Alexia Tsotsis at Techcrunch reported:

Ideally this goes down as such: You really care about fashion so you search for fashion in the Pearltrees search box and are confronted with really elaborate visual cluster displays of fashion blogs, each blog its own “pearl.” You decide that anyone who likes The Sartorialist is probably a good egg and click on the puzzle piece in the Pearltrees detail window in order to ask if you can join the team.

If the team leader accepts, you then can see all the Pearltree curation happening as it happens as well as comment on individual Pearltree decisions. You can also share your team curation easily via Facebook and Twitter.

Pearltrees is part of a growing number of companies that offer curation services. Others include Storify, Curated.by, and more are coming on the market in 2011. Pearltrees distinguishes itself from the others in that anything that is on the Web can be curated. Other services are limited in what you can curate, such as curating just Tweets.

In addition, pre-fetching of web site content means that it is possible to browse a Pearltree faster than surfing from site to site.

At the Le Web conference in Paris this week, Pearltrees will demonstrate a version that uses a touch interface.

Foremski's Take: Curation will become one of the most important topics in 2011 because there is a limit to what algorithms and software can do in terms of helping to organize and navigate the Internet. I like to define curation as the human layer on top of the machine/algorithmic layer.

Techmeme, the news aggregator, is a good example in that it uses an algorithm to collect links to breaking news stories but also has 6 people reviewing and choosing the links that it publishes.

Pearltrees' team capability extends the usefulness of the service in that groups of people can collaborate on building more comprehensive collections of web sites.

I've been talking with PR firms about using Pearltrees to create a press kit consisting of links to an announcement; links to background information; links to video and audio materials; links to images, etc.

A reporter, for example, could grab that media kit Pearltree and use it in preparing a report. The dynamic nature of Pearltrees and its real-time capabilities means that if there is an error in the press kit, or if there is new information and it needs to be updated, the new information is automatically propagated in real-time to everyone that has the press kit Pearltree.

Over the next few weeks I will be launching some team Pearltrees and looking for help in curating various topics related to Silicon Valley. Here is the first one: a Pearltree for Silicon Valley PR firms (below).

If you would like to be part of this team just create a free account and send me a join request and I will add you to my team. Or create Pearltree for you PR firm and I will add it to this one.

Silicon Valley Tech PR Agencies
- - -

Please see:

Curation And The Human Web...

Aggregation Is Not Curation - There Is A Big Difference

Curation is important because we are reaching the limits of what can be achieved through algorithms and machines in organizing and navigating the Internet.

Aggregation looks like curation but it's not. (Please see: Aggregation Is Not Curation - There Is A Big Difference - SVW)

I define curation as a person, or a group of people, engaged in choosing and presenting a collection of things related to a specific topic and context.

Aggregation employs software (algorithms) and machines (servers) to assemble a collection of things related to a specific topic and context.

Aggregation tools can be employed by curators but the human act of curation adds a layer of value that aggregation alone cannot provide.

A good example is Techmeme, the news aggregator run by Gabe Rivera.

Techmeme uses an algorithm to find and publish links to the most important tech news of the day.

For many years it was just Gabe and his algorithm. But now the site employs six people sifting through the results thrown up by Techmeme's algorithm and looking for news that machine aggregation alone cannot find. (Please see: Techmeme is six people now . . . - Techmeme News.)

Techmeme added people because it can produce a superior, curated product, than by machine aggregation alone.

Contrast Techmeme's curated approach with that of Google News' aggregation. At the bottom of each Google News page you will find this statement:

The selection and placement of stories on this page were determined automatically by a computer program.

And that's the reason Techmeme wins out over Google News because the quality of machine selected stories is not as good as that of a team of people curating the news together.

The human element is important but it's expensive, which is why Silicon Valley tech companies favor software and machines. Silicon Valley investors fund businesses that are scalable, that can be expanded by simply adding more servers and software.

People-based businesses are not scalable in the same way - you need to hire more people to do more. People add complexity, require management, vacations, and labor costs always trend up. In comparison, servers and software costs keep falling and their productivity increases.

The cheapest way to add a human layer is to improve machine aggregation by taking clues from what people do online, what they share, what they write, and what they discuss.

That's why tech companies talk about the "social web" and social graphs. These are ways of improving their technologies without having to employ people.

A good example is Flipboard, the popular iPad application. It searches for content by looking at what a person's Facebook friends and Twitter followers are sharing, and then publishing the content in an easy to browse magazine format.

However, such approaches reach a natural limit. Social networks share a wide variety of different content. Variety is ambiguous but curation needs to be focused.

Also, the technology of aggregation constantly trends towards becoming a commodity. It becomes a baseline rather than a differentiating factor. The value-add becomes the human layer.

And there are additional challenges to machine based aggregation: it becomes ever more easily gamed, as can be seen in the quality of Google search results and its unending battle with people seeking to manipulate the its results.

Google is forced to keep changing its algorithm in a bid to shakeout those that figured out how to game its system.

Techmeme, with its human curators, doesn't need to worry about others gaming its algorithm because commercial spam won't get published -- except by its sponsors.

The evolution of the algorithm and machine can be viewed as a way to use technology to distill the human essence. What is it about us that cannot be qualified and quantified within an algorithm?

I see curation as a one part of that human essence, a natural human activity that cannot be matched by technology. And curation is where the value lies in improving the organization and usefulness of the Internet.

- - -
Here is a Pearltree on "Curation."

Curation
(Please note: Pearltrees, a startup offering a visual and shareable curation service, is a client of my consulting services. If you'd like more information on Pearltrees, or SVW consulting services, please contact me: foremski (at) gmail.com.)