Curation versus Search

I love Twitter (you can find me at @dmarron). Indeed, I spend much more time perusing my Twitter feed than I do on Facebook. But it’s not because I care about Kanye West’s latest weirdness (I followed him for about eight hours) or what Katy Perry had for lunch. No, the reason I love Twitter is that I can follow people who curate the web for me. News organizations, journalists, fellow bloggers, and others provide an endless stream of links to interesting stories, facts, and research. For me, Twitter is a modern day clipping service that I can customize to my idiosyncratic tastes.

Several of my Facebook friends are also remarkable curators, as are many of the blogs that I follow (e.g., Marginal Revolution and Infectious Greed, to name just two).  So curation turns out to be perhaps the most important service I consume on the web. In the wilderness of information, skilled guides are essential.

Of course, I also use Google dozens of times each day. Curation is great, but sometimes what you need is a good search engine. But as Paul Kedrosky over at Infectious Greed notes, search sometimes doesn’t work. That’s one reason that Paul sees curation gaining on search, at least for now:

Instead, 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.