Author: Clinton Forry

Two posts brought to my attention the discussion starting to take root about the worlds of content aggregation versus content curation.

A post on the Poynter blog back in early October points to the work of journalists engaging in curation via Twitter as a way of “filtering the signal from the noise.” The phrase used was “curation is the new aggregation.”

A more recent post on the Simple-talk.com blog by Roger Hart delves more into the world of content curation in a broader sense, stating that it is a bit of a flavor-of-the-month. I would disagree with that sentiment, having discussed this for years.

My experience with curation is more specific.

Daily, and sometimes twice daily, it is my job to draw from a set pool of content, radio programs’ arts and entertainment segments, and publish them into a CMS with text and audio. There is even a daily podcast, my pride and joy, the PRI: Arts & Entertainment podcast.

Over the past few years, publishing content in this manner makes me a curator of sorts. Not an aggregator. And here is why.

Curation goes one step beyond aggregation by adding an active, ongoing editorial component.

Curation and aggregation are similar in but a few ways. They both want to take lots of content and put it in a place [framework, feed, database, etc.] and they both seek to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Most importantly, they both require a strategy. Why is this content being put together? Who will use it? How will they use it? Are they getting it somewhere else right now? What are the staffing impacts? What are the potential outcomes?

Imagine if the Minneapolis Institute of Art populated their museum based only on aggregation. The people in charge would have noted that the above velvet Mr. T metadata indicated it was a painting, an original, from the 20th century, and possibly placed it next to the Van Gogh or Mondrian. All automatically.

With aggregation the velvet Mr. T painting might end up in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in a totally un-ironic or un-post-modern way.  Aggregation, why would you do that?

• Aggregation is automated
• Aggregation collects content based on criteria in the form of metadata or keywords
• Criteria can be adjusted, but remain static otherwise
• Follows a preset frequency of publishing [as available, weekly, etc.]

Sure, this scenario is unlikely to unfold, but I set it out there to illustrate the point: aggregation excludes the important, active, and ongoing editorial approval from the process of gathering content.

Aggregation has its place. It is easy to set and forget. It requires considerably less staff resources. With carefully selected criteria and sources, it may actually serve the purpose you seek.

There is much more to effective curation than putting similar stuff in a single place.

There are contextual cues that no amount of keywords or metadata can surface.  Sentiment, branding, and time frame issues: a raw aggregating apparatus is blind to them all. Not to mention the fact that the more open aggregation schemes can be gamed in all sorts of bad ways.

Aggregators may have curatorial aspirations. If they could have the same refined output as curation, they likely would. However, that would require more oversight, turning into something else: curation.

So. What does curation look like, then?

• Curation is, in part, a manual task
• Starts with sources to parse
• Evaluates content individually based on established editorial criteria
• Weights content based on context, current events, branding, sentiment, etc.
• Publishes approved content on appropriate schedule

Again, both aggregation and curation can be bad ideas unless there is a workable content strategy in place.

For a good example of a great curatorial strategy, look no further than the true home of the velvet Mr. T, The Velveteria Museum in Portland, OR:

According to Wikipedia, the concept of physical things being constructed out of smaller, indivisible units, or elements, has been around for about 2,600 years.  Science confirmed this about 200 years ago.  Atoms can be broken down further, but any division past that atomic level and the element ceases to be an element.

Why the science lesson?  What does this have to do with content?  I have taken us all back to the science classroom because elements and atoms are a rather fitting analogy.  This element is not on the periodic table: it is known as…Content.

From a production point of view, content has almost always started from the single, discrete piece.  From there, each piece has been combined to make a larger component.  For example, think of a newspaper article: an election story might appear in the politics section of the Monday edition of the local paper.

For newspapers, selling single stories at the newsstand was a tough proposition.  Selling the politics section was too narrow of an appeal.  But, if you put that into a larger framework, a whole newspaper with sports scores and weather and classifieds and advertisements, it starts to make more sense.

The same hierarchy existed for many years on public radio.  A six minute feature was produced, then included in the larger framework of an hour-long show, and on a select day, broadcast on a radio station.  The production direction from small piece to large framework was it.  That was before the advent of on-demand listening and podcasts.

For some, peeling off one layer of that hierarchy to adapt to online consumption habits was seen as enough.  If producers took an hour-long show and placed it online, the work was done.  No additional production required.  Easy.  Take the same hour-long chunk that airs on radio stations and make it available online via on-demand and podcasting.  But that is not serving the needs of the people that actually consume the content.

Using the newspaper example again, imagine that you want to share an article with a friend.  Do you point them to the stack of old newspapers in the garage from the last month? Or the whole newspaper from Monday?  Or the Politics section from Monday? The easier way would be to clip the article out, and give them that specific thing you wish to share.  Your friend will know exactly what you want them to see.

The same thing happens in public radio.  Some programs are two or more hours long, built out of smaller segments.  Wouldn’t it be ideal to have those segments in an easy-to-share format online?  And wouldn’t it be great if you could comment on those individual segments?  Of course.  There are plenty of reasons to publish content at the segment level for consumption online:

• Accurate, focused metadata can be attached
• Proper taxonomy can be applied in the CMS
• It is SEO-friendly, increasing discover-ability
• It becomes much more easily shared via social media
• Easier to output via API, RSS, podcast, widgets, etc.
• Quickly becoming industry standard and convention
• People are beginning to demand it of content producers
• It just makes sense

There are reasons NOT to do it, too.  Some obstacles you may encounter:

• Not in current workflows
• More attention is required
• More steps in publishing process
• Current CMS not equipped to handle it
• Current outputs not configured to handle it [website, feeds, etc.]
• Greater opportunity for user-input error

The benefits are far too great not to put forth the effort to overcome the obstacles in the way of segment-level nirvana.

Author and blogger Seth Godin has made a mantra out of the phrase “Ideas that spread, win.”  If your idea, in the shape of content, can spread, it can win!  Not a jackpot lottery win, but the kind of win that content wants: to be consumed and shared easily.

Atomic segment-level publishing, FTW!

As some of you may know, I am on Twitter under not only one, but two aliases: @wd45, my personal account, and @PRI, for my company.

Anyone that manages multiple Twitter accounts will tell you that the third-party applications out there, like Seesmic and TweetDeck were a godsend for easily managing them. Mostly. TweetDeck makes is almost too easy to make a…mistake.

I maintain a firewall between these two accounts for more than one reason — I am interested in maintaining my own identity on the @wd45, with ridiculous pictures [see this or this] posted to Twitpic, the easy Twitter-linking, photo posting service. Things that I post there might not interest someone that follows the @PRI account.

The @PRI account services the needs of the company, and I have been quite diligent about what makes the cut and what does not. People expect certain things from the company, and they will be expecting that same level of quality and consideration from the @PRI tweets.

This has been a super-successful venture, with two happy mistakes.

Once, a follower had sent a real direct message (a DM, in Twitter parlance), to which I responded via the same, private channel. Or so I thought.

She had offered a note of praise for the company. I looked at her profile page to ensure that the account was real, and noticed that the URL in her bio was yoga-related. In the interest of forging that personal, real-person connection, I said:

Thanks for listening. I practice yoga twice each week as well as daily meditation. I don’t know what I would do without it.

That was not a DM.

It went to the 5,000 or so followers the account had at the time.

Realizing my misstep, I quickly evaluated my options:
-erase it, hope noone notices
-send out an ‘oops’ message and hope that folks ignore it

I chose the latter, but folks did not ignore it. The first response said, “Yeah, I thought that was pretty random. :)” About a dozen people were thrilled by it. Some even said “It is nice to know that you are a real person.”

This could have been an isolated incident, meant as a heuristic tool. Never again would it happen. Vigilance must be maintained!

It was, until this week. I was excited to post a somewhat personal thing to @wd45. September 23 was John Coltrane’s birthday. I was going to show my jazz acumen to my followers by saying this:

You might notice that it is on the @PRI account. Oops again.

There were seven re-tweets, and one other related response.

Again, this reinforces the notion that people want that personal, real-life connection with those they follow in the social media realm; even brands.

Three items happened in the past week that made me think that I stepped out of a time machine rather than the bus.

1. The Beatles had their albums reissued on CD
2. The iPod Nano update included a FM radio
3. The Chevy Volt electric car will now include a hitch so that it can be pulled by horses

OK, one of those things is silly. The other two are just bewildering.

The Beatles catalog of albums was reissued on 090909. [Yes, clever, Revolution No. 9]. This is of interest, from my perspective, for two reasons.

First: In the late 1980s, the Fab Four’s albums were all issued on CD, just like all of the other rock giants – Elvis, the Stones, etc. And there was mixed response. That was fairly early in the world of the CD; people were starting to get the hang of properly mastering for the medium. Prior to that, things were mixed and mastered with LP or cassettes in mind, leaving the CDs sounding thin compared to the old LPs everyone was used to hearing.

The record companies and artists [or their estates] realized this, and reissued the entire catalog of other major selling artists once again, twice, or even three or four times over. While working in a record store in college, I witnessed on a few occasions complete reissues of all of the albums of both Miles Davis and KISS [to mention a couple of disparate examples]. Add a bonus track, add a new set of liner notes, better the sound, and you have money in the wallet. Easy peasy. Not so with the Beatles.

The Liverpool Lads had to wait for quite some time before the catalog was given a more just edition. The audiophiles and Beatlemaniacs will be buying these, and folks that missed them the first time around, but there is another group that will not. THE KIDS.

We have talked about it here in the past, and album sales reinforce this time and again. Kids consume tons of music. Kids aren’t lining up for CDs anymore. Kids will, however, buy the video game that features those songs. Smart move with the Rock Band thing.

Even Apple is feeling the heat when it comes to the decline in music sales. In a bid to remain relevant, they announced, also on 090909, that the iPod Nano would now include an FM tuner. I thought it was a nice feature on the Zune, when it rolled out. I am sure it was a selling point for the seven or eight people that bought Zunes. But for the newest iPod? Seems a little late for the party.

Paid Content ran a piece about this very situation, citing a Forrester study.

I am well aware that the user base for the iPod Nano is larger than non-CD-buying teens, but Apple is a company that has staked its claim on the cutting edge.

All of this leaves me as bewildered as if Chevrolet would have actually put a horse hitch on the Volt.

The Beatles catalog should have been reissued properly years ago. And the iPod should have included an FM tuner from the start. The question remains — why now?

I like to take things slow sometimes.

I never bought a VCR – the one I used for years was won at the University of Northern Iowa Jazz Band concert. It was a door prize. The grand prize.

I did spend three bills on a DVD player back in 1999, though. I am not always behind the curve.

Fast forward [ha! pun intended! OMG!] to 2009. I have canceled both my OUTRAGEOUSLY EXPENSEIVE Comcast Digital Cable package and all of its on-demand video capabilities. Also on the scrap heap is my Netflix membership, victim of one too many scratched-beyond-playable DVDs delivered [and more often, simply unwatched].

Some family is visiting, so what am I to do? Time to make good on that promise of being moderately technologically literate and use the internets to entertain my guests. I had two options, as far as I was concerned: iTunes or Amazon. I like both because I have established accounts with each. One click or two, no need to fetch my wallet, and I will soon be viewing.

After looking at iTunes, it appears that I will need to wait until the 1.21 gigawatts [or GB, if you must] completes downloading before my viewing can begin. Moving along…

Amazon has the option for download, but also the on-demand feature. [I got used to the on-demand feature with Netflix — one of the reasons I kept that subscription for so long.] I clicked and we were off.

Picture quality was fine for me and my 9-year-old non-HDTV. As a matter of fact, the quality was as fine as my DVD player through an S-Video cable, a feat that still boggles the mind.

Is there a parable here?

When it comes to something as fleeting as rental entertainment, the on-demand is going to win out in many households. Downloads will have their place where connectivity is lacking or portability is priority. But, as long as people are plopping down in their living rooms, this will be the pick.