Filed under: content communities, creativity, Digital culture, Emergent media, geek, Research Methods, Social media, steal or borrow info, unbusiness | Tags: Content curation, curation, matt langer, Neil Perkin, noah brier, Only the dead fish, Percolate
I was trawling through my usual channels of content this morning and came across these posts on curation. Certainly a lot of conversation in the bloggersphere has been stimulated by the posting of the curator’s code. The code states that we should “keep the rabbit hole of the Internet open by honouring discovery”.
Not only should we be honouring original sources, but we should be honouring the people who find interesting stuff and re-tweet or re-post it. We should celebrate not only the creators and authors, but those that distribute, magnify and amplify their work. The connectors, so to speak.
This concept of curation is being bandied about a lot lately. We talk about websites and brands curating content; using third party content as a jump point for new conversation. We talk about brands and retailers curating product, filtering out the rubbish and selectively choosing niche or narrow channel products that are centred around a particular interest or cultural space.
In my other life at Eco Outdoor we talk about curation being one of our key focuses and we’re in the stone business. When we say that we’re talking about curation in the most traditional definition of the word – we select the most interesting and unique product (sometimes you don’t know why its interesting or unique unless you’re in the stone game), and we organise it in a way that inspires people to use it differently or create really unique design form or pairings. We tell the story of the product, how it fits into the world from whence it came and why we think its important or significant or special. The focus here is that we travel the
world looking for and selectively choosing what we present and how we put it together.
I guess you could say that Innovation Feeder curates content, although really it’s just sharing what takes my fancy. I started it when I was working in the social trends / innovation space as a way of collating data, organising other people’s thoughts that I would want to refer back to and even organising my own. It was like an online memory and imagination bank.
So when is a blog not curating? When it writes all its own content I guess. There are some that believe it better to write original content than re-post, and there are scales and a spectrum in re-posting itself that differentiate between gathering tidbits like a bountiful bowerbird and scattering them amongst the pages, versus your classic “Look what I found mamma” straight re-post of content. Is there a hierarchy of one over the other? I think in this age, conversation flows on many different levels and if the content is relevant and engaging, who cares on what level of the spectrum it falls? And as Matt Langer points out, is it curation or simply sharing our thoughts and discoveries online? Is curation merely the act of sharing and distributing (albeit selectively)? or must it have some ontology or semantic continuity?
Traditionally curation has been used in the realm of ‘art curation’ where art is selected by an art historian who selects significant pieces and places them in context to identify why they are significant and to what extent. Who ‘places’ the art in context and helps us understand the story and content surrounding it. The term curation has long (well long in online terms) been used outside of the realm of art, but the question remains > What do we define as curation in the online space? By identifying our act of sharing as selective, by filtering (with our own self supposed good taste) the good from the bad – is that curation?
Some other links to check out:
Curation is the New Search is the New Curation
Anyway, as usual online, I digress. Here’s a great collation of opinions on the topic by Neil Perkin. Regardless of whether you agree with the definition or not, I love Percolate‘s idea of stock and flow of content. The flow of ideas and conversation being the currency by which we remind people that we exist versus the stock we create from the realms of our own minds and imaginations. It gives credence to these different modes of conversation and the ways in which they operate uniquely for different purposes. Following here is Neil’s collection of opinions and ideas, re-posted.
Filed under: Digital culture, Future of Work, Gen Y, Get another life, Innovative stimulus, Lifestyle trends, Looking for insights, Research Methods, Social media | Tags: innovative recruitment methods, online identity & persona
A great post from WSJ via Yahoo on the changing nature of recruitment . . .
Union Square Ventures recently posted an opening for an investment analyst. Instead of asking for résumés, the New York venture-capital firm—which has invested in Twitter, Foursquare, Zynga and other technology companies—asked applicants to send links representing their “Web presence,” such as a Twitter account or Tumblr blog. Applicants also had to submit short videos demonstrating their interest in the position. Union Square says its process nets better-quality candidates —especially for a venture-capital operation that invests heavily in the Internet and social-media—and the firm plans to use it going forward to fill analyst positions and other jobs.
Companies are increasingly relying on social networks such as LinkedIn, video profiles and online quizzes to gauge candidates’ suitability for a job. While most still request a résumé as part of the application package, some are bypassing the staid requirement altogether.
We all know about the dangers of posting too much about yourself online but how many candidates have considered what a positive, active and engaged persona online can do for their future job prospects? If you’ve ever had the task of hiring new staff you’d know that a resume tells you surprisingly little about a person. Yes it details their experience and at what level they’ve worked, it can tell you whether they’ve committed to education or jobs for any significant period of time, but it can’t tell you much beyond that.
After many mishaps at our end we’ve taken to Googling all prospective staff members prior to the second interview. It doesn’t necessarily tell us any more than we already know unless they have a significant web presence, but it does go some way to colouring in the picture of the person.
A résumé doesn’t provide much depth about a candidate, says Christina Cacioppo, an associate at Union Square Ventures who blogs about the hiring process on the company’s website and was herself hired after she compiled a profile comprising her personal blog, Twitter feed, LinkedIn profile, and links to social-media sites Delicious and Dopplr, which showed places where she had traveled.
John Fischer, founder and owner of StickerGiant.com, a Hygiene, Colo., company that makes bumper and marketing stickers, says a résumé isn’t the best way to determine whether a potential employee will be a good social fit for the company. Instead, his firm uses an online survey to help screen applicants. “We are most interested in what people are like, what they are like to work with, how they think,” she says.
Questions are tailored to the position. A current opening for an Adobe Illustrator expert asks applicants about their skills, but also asks questions such as “What is your ideal dream job?” and “What is the best job you’ve ever had?” Applicants have the option to attach a résumé, but it isn’t required. Mr. Fischer says he started using online questionnaires several years ago, after receiving too many résumés from candidates who had no qualifications or interest. Having applicants fill out surveys is a “self-filter,” he says.
IGN Entertainment Inc., a gaming and media firm, launched a program dubbed Code Foo, in which it taught programming skills to passionate gamers with little experience, paying participants while they learned. Instead of asking for résumés, the firm posted a series of challenges on its website aimed at gauging candidates’ thought processes. (One challenge: Estimate how many pennies lined side by side would span the Golden Gate Bridge.)
It also asked candidates to submit a video demonstrating their love of gaming and the firm’s products.
Nearly 30 people out of about 100 applicants were picked for the six-week Code Foo program, and six were eventually hired full-time. Several of the hires were nontraditional applicants who didn’t attend college or who had thin work experience.
At most companies, résumés are still the first step of the recruiting process, even at supposedly nontraditional places like Google Inc., which hired about 7,000 people in 2011, after receiving some two million résumés. Google has an army of “hundreds” of recruiters who actually read every one, says Todd Carlisle, the technology firm’s director of staffing.
But Dr. Carlisle says he reads résumés in an unusual way: from the bottom up.
Candidates’ early work experience, hobbies, extracurricular activities or nonprofit involvement—such as painting houses to pay for college or touring with a punk rock band through Europe—often provide insight into how well an applicant would fit into the company culture, Dr. Carlisle says.
Plus, “It’s the first sample of work we have of yours,” he says.
Filed under: creativity, Digital culture, Emergent media, Future of Media, Futures, Futurists, geek, People you should know | Tags: Caterina fake, David rowan, Eric Wahlforss, Networked society, on the brink, Soundcloud, wired
A transformer from Nike sent me this link to “On The Brink” which discusses the past, present and future of connectivity with a mix of people including David Rowan, chief editor of Wired UK; Caterina Fake, founder of Flickr; and Eric Wahlforss, the co-founder of Soundcloud. Each of the interviewees discusses the emerging opportunities being enabled by technology as we enter the Networked Society. What does it really mean to imagine borderless opportunities and creativity, new open business models, and why do people talk about today’s ‘dumb society’? Check it out…
Filed under: creativity, Digital culture | Tags: ceativity, creative thinking, steve jobs, Wired Magazine
Now I’m not a super techie but I must admit, when Steve Jobs passed away I was devastated. Maybe I’d read too many Silicon Valley articles, books and biographies. Over the years I’d churned through the lives of Steve Wozniak, Paul Allen, Bill Gates and the rest of the tech revolutionaries. I’d poured over business articles on the business innovation and cultural articles on the social influence of Jobs’ breakthroughs. The guy was a genius. Forget Apple [although clearly Apple is where it is today due to the unfailing vision of Jobs], but NeXT technology and of course, Pixar. As Apple and indeed the rest of the technology world start to imagine a world without Jobs, I thought it might be a timely moment to reflect on one of his more well known quotes on creativity. I love the idea that creativity is not some abstract thinking that only creative people do. Some heightened genius that just pops into the heads of those “creative types”. The more we look around, the more engaged we are, the more we think, the more we imagine and hypothesise and try new thinking on for size, the more we join dots in different ways. Hell the more dots we see. We know Apple wasn’t perfect, we know Jobs’ management style wasn’t always popular but one thing’s for certain, the guy certainly thought differently. I wonder whether we’ll ever see another man of Jobs’ creative and intellectual magnitude in our lifetime..
“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. “Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.” – Steve Jobs, Wired, February, 1995
Filed under: Digital culture, Emergent media, Future of Media, Geek stuff, Google, Looking for insights | Tags: Bill Gates, Google, Lynette Webb
The future of search is verbs
I like the simplicity of this statement. It’s a catchphrase for the concept that most of the time people aren’t searching for information just for the sake of it, but because they want help in making a decision or carrying out some action.
Here’s the quote in full, as reported by Esther Dyson:
“Bill Gates uttered one of the smartest things he has ever said: “The future of search is verbs.” But he said it at a private dinner and it never spread. To me, the meaning was clear: when people search, they aren’t just looking for nouns or information; they are looking for action. They want to book a flight, reserve a table, buy a product, cure a hangover, take a class, fix a leak, resolve an argument, or occasionally find a person, for which Facebook is very handy. They mostly want to find something in order to do something.”
Via www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/dyson23/English
Image via Flickr CC thanks to Andrew Hefter www.flickr.com/photos/andross/3353830887/
I have borrowed the above little post from Lynette Webb the Google Insights Manager who I have posted about before here and here. For those of you who don’t follow her on Flickr, get on it. She’s got some great pithy one liners from smarty pants peeps and pairs them with poignant pics [not sure why the alliteration but run with me on this one]. Anyway, she’s worth a look in.
Filed under: Digital culture, Innovative stimulus, Social media, Thinking | Tags: Digital culture, Google, lynete webb, online
For those of you who don’t know Lynette Webb, the insights manager at Google – you can read the previous posts here and here. For those of you who do, here’s another doozy:
“The idea for this slide came from a recent article in the NYT about how the internet is impacting literacy:
“Clearly, reading in print and on the Internet are different. On paper, text has a predetermined beginning, middle and end, where readers focus for a sustained period on one author’s vision. On the Internet, readers skate through cyberspace at will and, in effect, compose their own beginnings, middles and ends. Young people “aren’t as troubled as some of us older folks are by reading that doesn’t go in a line,” said Rand J. Spiro, a professor of educational psychology at Michigan State University who is studying reading practices on the Internet. “That’s a good thing because the world doesn’t go in a line, and the world isn’t organized into separate compartments or chapters.”
It’s a nice thought. When you think about how you read, surf, scan, think and communicate online . . it’s anything but linear. In fact, there’s a sense in which much of the activity that happens online is about joining the dots and redrawing them, than it is reaching some tangible end or defined goal. I like Lynette’s pics because they also pick a poignant point and sum it up perfectly with a great quote and an emotive image. She’s a great resource for inspiration stimulus if you want to get people thinking differently, especially about the impact of the net.
Check out the live link here
Filed under: Digital culture, geek, Social media | Tags: bud caddell, mika arauz, undercurrent
Ok I’ve discovered more mind candy, this time in the form of a couple of strategists who work at digital think tank Undercurrent in the US. The first one is Mike Arauz and he blogs about anything and everything digital. This is an RSS cracker so get on to it, take a peek and whack it in your reader. He also posts a lot of diagrams. Diagrams look smart and are nice to read. I love a good diagram. Here’s a snippet of some of his posts :
__
I’ve been thinking a lot about fans. Not just the average viewer, reader, or customer; but, the devoted people who on some level see their affection for something someone else has created as part of their own identity. When we think about how the internet has changed the communications landscape, it seems that fans have taken on an increasingly important and central role in the making or breaking of brands and entertainment properties.
Fandom has a long and storied history (and there are plenty of people who are much more qualified than I am to talk about it), and in the past couple years I think we’ve started a new chapter. The most obvious example of this change is Comic-Con, the huge conference for sci-fi disciples and super hero devotees of every persuasion that has turned into the must-attend super-showcase for every aspiring new movie, TV show, or video game. I’ve also seen fan culture creep into the marketing world. In my own work I often use the word fan in place of consumer, when I talk about reaching a core audience of people who care most about a product or service.
I think that the reason why we’re seeing this interest in fans, is that we’re recognizing how powerful a mobilized fan community can be. If they love you, they will make you a hit. If they hate you, they will prevent you from ever having a chance.
But, relationships between fans and the creators of the work that has earned the fans’ devotion are complex, and the diverse roles represent varying degrees of active participation.
There is another reason why I love this blog. On it I have just found a fabulous link to geeky data heaven. Check out this puppy. For those of you who love a good statistic, this will be the time sucker for 2009.
Another fella from Undercurrent who also writes is Bud Caddell and he blogs at what consumes me. Anyway these two are worth taking a peek at if you’re looking for a little geek buzz uptop.
Filed under: Advertising, banking, Digital culture | Tags: citibank, generation forward, MySpace
Citibank recently launched a new credit card in partnership with MySpace targeted at young adults which it terms “Generation Forward”. It’s launched a sexy ad talking bout this generation, offering some reward type arrangements for good behaviour and offers an interest rate reduction for paying on time.
The idea has been slated by many already as an empty promotion that not only offers a complete firfy if you read the fine print, but that the “generation forward” positioning is actually at odds (in philosophy) from how Citibank itself operates.
The idea of a bank rewarding younger people for responsible repayments is a nice one. The idea of putting a line in the financial sand between the generations which caused the financial crisis and the new generations coming up the line is also a nice one. All in all it seems to be another marketing program that didn’t quite hit the mark due to it’s inability to deliver any real change beyond a sexy campaign.
On the banking scene,I wonder if anyone will build on the idea and do it for real? I wonder if a bank could actually take the positioning and deliver on real savings for younger people as a loyalty exercise? If they could find more innovative ways to provide value and earn more coin for themselves, whilst providing a genuinely responsible and transparent credit plan for young people in the process…Now that would be impressive.
If you’re interested, here’s a little more commentary on the topic:
Filed under: Digital culture | Tags: Age of Conversation 2, AOC2, Drew McLellan, Gavin Heaton, Get Shouty, katie chatfield
Ok for those of you who haven’t heard, the Age of Conversation2 is out now at lulu.com.
Another gem edited from Gavin Heaton and Drew McLellan, the peeps over at Lulu have described it like this . . it’s a daring challenge to the business community. Gone are the top-down, command and control messages that held sway through the 20th Century. In are a raft of new techniques that start with listening, responding and action that set the scene for a continuing and evolving dialog about brands, experience, business and community.
All those who participated in the latest book are listed below. Well done to everyone involved, fantastic effort.
I was brain surfing at Get Shouty and had to pass on Katie’s latest ditty about AOC2. Very entertaining…
Yo AOC2 let’s kick it
Nice/nice – maybe (x2)All right stop collaborate and listen
Conversation is back. (Not a brand new invention!)Media dollars are acting tightly
But information flows daily and nightly
Will it ever stop yo I don’t know
But if you turned off the TV would you slow?To the extreme you rock a media plan like a vandal
People’s attention’s not a moth to a candle
They don’t go rush to the speaker that booms
Advertising kills your brain like a poisonous mushroom
Filed under: Digital culture, Geek stuff | Tags: Kevin Kelly, Mike Walsh, San Francisco, The digital future, The Fourth Estate, Tim Berners Lee, web 2.0, Web 2.0 Summit, Web trends, Wired Magazine
An interesting post here from Mike Walsh who writes The Digital Future that’s definitely worth a read if like me, you’re wondering where to next…
So what’s next for the Web?
[Mike's post starts here]
Another 'interesting snippet' from Google's Insights Manager Lynette
It was the unspoken question of many who gathered at the Web2.0 Summit in San Francisco this week. For Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired magazine, it all came down to a number – 6,527. Or, the exact number of days until now since Tim Berners Lee made the first webpage. All the innovation, the new wealth, disruptions in traditional media and the millions of Wikipedia entries – a seemingly impossible scale of human endeavor – had been created in that relatively short span. So, what are we likely to see in the next 6500 days?
For a start, it’s becoming clear that 2008 will be an inflection point for the industry. In her annual high altitude scan of the new media landscape, Morgan Stanley internet analyst Mary Meeker pointed out that relative amount of time that consumers spent on websites has changed dramatically. When you look at the metric of global minutes, over the last two years YouTube and Facebook have gained over 500 basis points of relative share, at the expense of traditional portal incumbents Yahoo! and MSN. (more…)
