I wrote The Elements of Content Strategy because as the internet worms its way further and further into our lives, digital content becomes centrally important to the ways in which we live and work. And it follows that content strategy—the practice of planning for, designing, and managing content—is also getting closer to the center of both web projects and entire organizations.

So I wrote this book in the hope of providing a compact, useful reference—both for those of us already doing content strategy work, and for those who want to know more about working with (or becoming) content strategists. Like the two superb books that precede it at A Book Apart, Elements is meant to be a handbook, in the literal sense, which the OED has, charmingly, as “A small book or treatise, such as may conveniently be held in the hand.”

But it’s also meant to be a book kept close at hand for use during spells of intensive effort. In that way, it’s a book I wrote because I needed it myself, if only to remind myself of things I’d already learned: not just deliverables and processes, but principles, rationales, and traditions that might be called into service when weird new problems arise.

Old-School Publishing for the New World

What can I say about A Book Apart, except that they have been ideal publishers in every way? Jeffrey, Jason, and Mandy do extraordinary work with an attention to editorial rigor and design integrity that is unsurpassed in our field, or most others. It’s also a genuine honor to join Jeremy, Dan, and (soon!) Ethan on the ABA shelf.

Beyond this, though, I hope that the viability of A Book Apart’s approach is a sign of good things to come. On one hand, it’s a very new-school publisher, built on a web-based brand and the ability to sell books directly to readers with little friction. But on the other hand, it’s a very old-school house, built on editorial and design values too often abandoned by the traditional presses.

Many of my favorite books of the last few years have been published by small presses like Unbridled, Akashic, Subterranean, and the astoundingly great Small Beer, or by micro-presses like Temporary Culture and Graphics Press. In a moment of economic disaster for so many publishing and media companies, these presses demonstrate that old-fashioned editorial care is still viable if you make it the center of what you do. The existence of publishers like these, within our industry and outside it, fills me with optimism.

I am so grateful to Jeffrey, Mandy, and Jason for giving me the opportunity to write precisely the sort of book I wanted to write, and for making my manuscript into such a beautiful little object. I hope the result proves useful enough to reward their confidence.

In the post, I mentioned something I’d made for a client project: a diagram that traces the mental path we want to encourage a particular group of site visitors to take. Not specific interactions, pages or tools, but a process of gradual engagement with ideas, eventually leading to the decision to act. I’d never made this particular thing before, and I’d never seen anything quite like it elsewhere.

I can’t show you the thing I made, but here’s an example that I sketched out for an imaginary conservation organization that wants to educate students about habitat loss and related activism when they visit the site to complete school assignments.

Pretty simple, right? A project with a dozen or a hundred pages and only a few target audiences wouldn’t need something like this. But before I could proceed with the content recommendation for this large, complex, and intellectually crunchy project, I needed to distill all the things we’d been saying and thinking about this audience’s progression through the site’s ideas.

I made it as an internal tool, but when I showed a dim iPhone photo of it to client stakeholders, they found useful, so I ended up including it in my content recommendations.

A Diagram Named Sue

When I showed the client my sketched-out version on my phone and then hastily re-drew it on their whiteboard, I called it a “user engagement model,” which is reasonably accurate, but also jargony. In my blog post, I called it:

a cognitive model that translates pieces of the organization’s mission into a conceptual blueprint for deepening user engagement with the site

That’s both vague and awkward, but it does describe  the thing and what it does—or at least, what it did for me on this project. A Google image search for “cognitive model” produces a variety of hideously formatted diagrams about how people think; the one I made is also about how people think, and specifically how we imagine them thinking their way through the information presented on a website.

But because I didn’t have a non-proprietary example to post, the mention produced confusion. So just to be clear, I’m not talking about a mental model. Nor am I talking about “the features of an information system,” as one commenter suggested.

Have You Seen This Boy? He Is Very Ugly.

I’m certain that I haven’t created anything new by drawing up this diagram when I needed it, and I expect to continue using the tool on other projects that need a nudge toward clarity.

So here’s my question for you, internet: Have you made or used something like this? And if you did, how did you use it? (And what did you call it, anyway?)

Related

content strategy is to copywriting as information architecture is to design
—Rachel Lovinger

Content strategy plans for the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content.
—Kristina Halvorson

And my newest favorite is:

Content strategy is just content planning.
—Elizabeth McGuane

Also, Rahel Bailie has a fantastic post about the definition of content itself.

In real life, content strategy falls somewhere between traditional editorial leadership, communication strategy, and information management, all of which have their own distinct connotations. It’s easy for discussions of terminology to float off into abstraction, so instead of talking about “content strategy” or what “a content strategist” does, I’m going to say what this content strategist does.

What I Do

Right now, I’m working on a few projects. One is very large and is a good example of a big, serious CS project, so I’ll talk about it in detail.

I’ve already collaborated on a quantitative and qualitative content audit for this project, which involved many thousands of pieces of content spread across several divisions and databases.

I’ve also already done high-level content recommendations, which included a description of major assumptions and concepts that would affect future content, structural design, visual design, and development choices. These recommendations included:

• a cognitive model that translates pieces of the organization’s mission into a conceptual blueprint for deepening user engagement with the site
• proposals for major new communication approaches and content-related features, including initial requirements for a proposed back-end system that would support specific kinds of content creation and management, all of which are linked to goals articulated by the client before and during the project’s initial phases
• audience prioritization and high-level plans for meeting the content needs of each of the site’s major audiences

Now I’m working on the next round of content strategy work, which will include:

• detailed discussions of the content in each of the site’s major sections, keyed to the wireframes that we’re developing—this includes clear documentation of the goals, style, format, sources, and upkeep needs of each major class of content on the site, and will eventually turn into content templates
• notes on new content that needs to be created and existing content that needs to be revised before launch
• a discussion of the editorial calendars (yep, plural) that will be in place before launch and will guide content creation and review in the future
• a snapshot of existing web publishing workflows in use throughout the organization and a discussion of new publishing workflow models and processes that the client may wish to adopt
• a discussion of underlying content-related business rules that affect workflow and content management
• a proposal for integrating appropriate, useful social/interactive features into various parts of the site

None of this work deals with all the content strategy aspects of off-site content, social media, email, mobile integration, and so on—we haven’t gotten there yet. Someday, there will also be a style guide, much of which will be integrated directly into the CMS and workflow documents so that people can actually see and use it. And all of this work happens in collaboration with the client, with the web consulting team I’m part of, and with a specialist consulting firm acting as our partner on this project.

Edited to add: This project also included a very substantial research phase, which was run by the UX team while I tagged along taking notes.

For two other clients, I’m collaborating on product development. For one of those clients, I’m also developing messages and writing copy. For another, I’m doing ad-hoc project management and sometimes general, old-school web strategy work.

Oh, a certain amount of staring off into space, which turns out to be essential for keeping the brain juicy enough to do all of the above.

That’s what I’m doing now. Strategic and tactical. Planning and execution. Also sometimes cake.

That Thing I Said I Wouldn’t Talk About

If you’ve read this blog before, you probably know that I’m an etymology nerd. It’s my main defense against ill-tempered, shortsighted prescriptivism. Here’s a little bonus geek-out.

“Strategy” is derived, of course, from the Greek word strategos, which means, roughly, “general” or “highest ranking military leader.” Strategos is derived from two other Greek words: stratos, which is used to mean “army” but literally means something like “the thing that is spread out” and agos, which means “leader.”¹ The OED, bless its adorable face, defines the modern sense of “strategy” as:

The art of a commander-in-chief; the art of projecting and directing the larger military movements and operations of a campaign. Usually distinguished from tactics, which is the art of handling forces in battle or in the immediate presence of the enemy.

Quite.

In Summary

The central message of content strategy in 2010 is that it’s not enough to think tactically about content. To serve our clients and readers, we have to look beyond individual battles and ensure that the whole array of individual campaigns and choices works together to meet a clearly defined set of overarching goals.

Notes

If A Book Apart hadn’t been interested in this project, it wouldn’t be happening. This isn’t “a content strategy book” slotted into their lineup; it’s a specific project conceived to take advantage of their ambition, editorial chops, and unswerving commitment to their readers.

Which is to say: I’m writing this book because I think we’re at an inflection point.

Yes, content strategy is a real thing that real clients and employers really need. But beyond that, we’re in the infancy of a ubiquitous internet—one fully integrated into our lives and environments. The publishing world has been bitten by a radioactive wombat, and we don’t know if journalism’s going to die or mutate into something speedy and awesome. Our brains are changing in ways we don’t understand. Content work matters—yes, now more than ever—and as this thing spins faster, we’re going to need every advantage we can find.

Some propositions:

• Our practice revolves around a set of shared assumptions, grounding principles, and professional ethics. These are every bit as important as the tools and methods we use.
• We don’t have time to reinvent everything, and we don’t have to. Our discipline is rooted in old-school, long-lasting professional fields that offer practices and approaches we need and can immediately use. This also means that people from these allied fields make great candidates for content strategy positions.
• Just as porn built the internet, commerce has been the impetus behind the development of content strategy; we have to get commercial content right. We must also remember that our educational, cultural, and governmental institutions are increasingly dependent on the online world. These are not afterthoughts or fluff jobs for idealists, and they demand that we know how to be user advocates.
• The economics of content is our problem, after all. Unless we understand resources and costs, we can’t build sustainable publishing processes, teams, and systems.

My aim is to produce a short, clear reference that deals with the roots, principles, core skills, and central processes of content strategy in ways that content people will find helpful, and that designers, information architects, and project managers will be able to use as they work with and around content.

This is where you come in. I’m finishing up the draft of the manuscript now. If there’s something you want to know about content work, but aren’t getting from your current resources, let me know. This is a short book, so I won’t be dealing with anything comprehensively, but I don’t want to miss whole areas of interest, especially for people who don’t do actually content work. So leave me a comment or find me on Twitter or send a note to erin@ this domain name, and I’ll do my best to give you something you can use.

In case you missed any parts, here they are:

• Intro: Content & Curation: An Epic Poem
• Part 1: Curating the Deck Chairs on the Titanic
• Part 2: Between the Click and the Curator
• Part 3: The Curate and the Curator
• Part 4: Slouching Toward the Curatorial
• Also relevant: Credo: Addendum.

Curation as Storytelling-via-Filter

This revivified form of link-blogging is getting loads of attention as an easy way of (somehow) making money and expressing a personal vision. Here’s the 10-second version of my posts on this sort of curation:

• Content curation is not a quick fix or a cheap way to solve your content problems, because if you do it well, it takes time, and if you do it badly, you’re already losing.
• If content curation fits into your overall content plan, then by all means, do it—but commit to doing it well. It’s only by trying to do it better than anyone else that you’ll create something that continues to interest your readers after the first rush of interest has subsided.
• “Feed the beast” is not a strategy. If your content plan revolves around creating huge heaps of content, then unless you have genuinely accepted the long-term responsibilities and expenses of a publisher, you probably need a new plan.
• If someone tries to get you to pay for curation tools or services, remember that this is just one part of what bloggers have been doing since the late 1990s, and budget accordingly.

And one more for content people, specifically: we shouldn’t be jerks to people who do real curation in museums and galleries. Their work isn’t sacred, but neither is it trivial, and using their jargon without understanding where it comes from is a dilettante’s move.

Digital Curation (aka TL;DR)

If there’s one thing that researching and writing this series has pounded into my head, it’s that this web thing we do is not an isolated, special activity. A valuable and immediately useful inheritance is ours if we look beyond our ring-fenced specializations.

To people who aren’t already neck-deep in things like enterprise content strategy and document management, digital curation may seem intimidatingly technical or unwieldy. But until we routinely leave our clients and projects with a solid understanding of long-term publishing and content management costs, needs, and processes, we’re glossing over a really important part of content strategy.

Our natural allies in digital curation, information science, and museum work offer us the chance to learn about field-tested tools and approaches. We should take it.

How to Win at Internet

If you can use the second kind of “curation” to plan for and get more out of the work you do with the first kind—by “curating” your own content as well as that created by someone else, by reusing your work in smart ways, and by creating digital storage and tagging structures that support new publishing activities—you’ll almost certainly have created something sustainable and genuinely useful.

What’s Next

I realized after about the second post that I wasn’t going to be able to talk about anything like the full set of resources I’ve been using, lest the length of my posts turn all of you to stone and get me kicked off the internet. Rather than making a giant list of links, I’m just going to post short discussions of curation-related resources and how I’m using them as an informal series over the next few months.

Big thanks to all of you who commented, wrote thought-provoking posts and emails, and retweeted the crap out of this, and to Peter, who skillfully edited my posts on the fly, even when they were much too long. Unicorn-colored space princesses, every one of you.

In the previous post in this series, I suggested that we in web-land tend to use the phrase “content curation” to refer to two distinct activities, and then talked a bit about how we got to the current state of collective hypervigilance about the filtering/mosaic form of content curation.

Today, I want to begin talking about professional curators, what their work might have to do with ours, and how we can get better at our jobs.

I Know It When I See It

As noted extensively elsewhere, there has been a bit of a kerfluffle about the use of the term “curation” to refer to “real-time” filtering/link selection. Before we turn to the world of professional curation, I want to take a moment to acknowledge that we, the web-making industry, have been pretty careless with the term in ways that have—understandably, I think—got up some curatorial noses.

For example:

Content curation has emerged as a new and powerful way for marketers to seamlessly sift through the flood of content available to prospects. Like the owner of a high-end art gallery, you have to sift through the information from across the web and “curate” it to ensure that it is relevant to the customer.¹

In addition to abusing the human capacity for figurative language—seamlessly sifting a flood?—this comment implies that curation is a customer service process intended to ensure relevance. Many professional curators are doubtless interested in audiences, but I think most curators would bridle at the notion that their work centers on the act of culling irrelevant material.

Another post provides a revealing glimpse of what curation means to someone immersed in the jargon of online marketing. Language nerds may wish to avert their eyes.

Content marketing is the hype as it uses content as a currency to get attention of your audience or potential customers instead of paying for advertising. The main drawback of content marketing is the requirement of creating content. For most people creating new original content is just too demanding.

Content curation is aggregation in context. Thus instead of creating content you only have to find, evaluate, sort, filter through the glut of already existing content, then copy and aggregate this content and publish it by your channel in a different format. . . . If you have some creativity adding on your own point of view is still possible in order to have some personal input.²

If that doesn’t make you twitch, consider yourself uninvited to my slumber party.

Finally, there’s Scoble’s now-famous info-molecule post, in which he explains that just about anything you do, up to and possibly including sneezing into a tissue, is curation:³

Look at this post here, I can link to Tweets, and point out good ones, right? That’s curation. Or I can order my links in a particular order. That’s curation. . . . Or I can forward those links to you via email. That’s curation.

A curator is an information chemist. He or she mixes atoms together in a way to build an info-molecule. Then adds value to that molecule.

Reading these posts, I can see why museum and gallery curators might reach for their revolvers.⁴ The New Curator post I keep linking to includes a reference to a small, informal survey about the primary function of a curator, and the article’s author reports that “not a single person said ‘selecting.’” I sympathize with the desire to distance one’s profession from seamless flood-sifting, but the survey responses did include the following, which hover awfully close to the practice of selection:

Making choices.
Steven Lubar, Director, Brown University’s Public Humanities program

To help people sort through an excess of information/choices and to shed light on objects that might be missed; to sort wheat from chaff.
Kirsten Teasdale, Museum Educator, The Conference House Assoc.

Making choices, making predictions, making connections.
Suzanne Fischer, Curator of Technology, The Henry Ford

If these responses are indeed representative of the field, museum workers clearly do consider prioritization and—yes—selection to be an important part of a curator’s work. Not the only thing, but an important piece of the whole.

Most of us can probably agree that making an ordered list doesn’t constitute curation in any meaningful sense, and I agree with Leslie at the Clutter Museum when she writes that you cannot simply “click to curate.” But somewhere between a grocery list and an exhibition, curatorial skills do come into play. So what’s the difference? Where is the transition between aggregation and something curatorial?

Another handful of survey responses from New Curator provides the missing link:

To act as ‘story keepers’ and to encourage people to interpret the world we live in from different perspectives.
Catherine Manning, Curator at the Migration Museum, History Trust of South Australia

Explore and create connections that artists, academics and the public do not (yet) see.
Francesco Spagnolo, Director of Research and Collections, The Magnes

To draw connections, bring meaning out of the seemingly meaningless.
Emily Hummel, Public History MA student, American University

Connections, meaning, story-keeping. Yep.

Stories All the Way Down

Maria Popova manages Brain Pickings, which is one of my favorite examples of content curation. She makes a good case for using the language of curation to describe the importance of the ability to recognize interestingness:

Curation is all about pattern-recognition, seeing how various and diverse pieces of content fit together under the same taste umbrella or along the same narrative path, so the guiding principle has to be the sole storyteller with a strong point of view.

And the art of curation isn’t about the individual pieces of content, but about how these pieces fit together, what story they tell by being placed next to each other, and what statement the context they create makes about culture and the world at large.⁵

I think that’s an excellent formulation of the curatorial aspects of online filtering-as-storytelling. This sort of content work—that which relies on pattern recognition, storytelling, and the nebulous but centrally important quality of the good eye—is not an analogue of the much larger skillset of the professional curator, but it does aspire to the curatorial. And despite the denigration of “taste” as an element of curation, it does seem relevant: not in the sense of “good taste,” but as shorthand for a particular kind of predictive synthesis.

An Aesthetic Science

Some people can look at a roomful of nearly identical objects and pick the one dress, the one pair of sandals that will sparkle in the eye of a fourteen-year-old girl from Long Island. Similarly, some people can “just tell” which objects will be enhanced through juxtaposition with other objects. Their brains are doing a kind of pattern recognition that synthesizes zeitgeist and history and context and aesthetics and produces something that seems oracular. (Some people do it with math, and that one can really spook the crowd.)

But these processes aren’t literally ineffable, they’re just complicated stories told in deceptively simple ways. Aesthetic “taste” is shorthand for the ability to go straight to the answer without consciously doing all the work required to get there. To some people, some things belong together, and when you put them next to each other, they tell a story.

At its best, this kind of curation arranges units of content into an emotionally or intellectually compelling exhibition that is more than the sum of its parts. In reference to the failings of the controversial 52nd Venice Biennale, one critic discusses the alchemical potential of exhibition curation:

The alchemy of good curating amounts to this: sometimes placing one work of art near another makes one and one equal three. Two artworks arranged alchemically leave each intact, transform both and create a third thing. This third thing and the two original things then trigger cascades of thought and reaction; you know things you didn’t know you needed to know until you know them; then you can’t imagine ever not knowing them again. Then these things transform all the other things and thoughts you’ve had. This chain-reaction is thrilling and uncanny.⁶

Alchemy is such a great figure for this process: it walks and quacks like a science, but at the core, it’s all correspondences and symbolic resonance and story.

That’s a piece of what one sort of curatorial work aspires to achieve. And if you ask me, it’s what we should hang over our desks as well, whether we call ourselves curators or bloggers or editors or tropical penguins. Whether the frisson is emotional or intellectual, if we’re not making the hair stand up on their arms in a flash of recognition, we have work to do.⁷

In the social media world, posting an ordered list of tweets may feel like curating, but it’s a sad shadow of what curation can be. No matter how many top-ten content-curation skills lists are published, the human ability to spot patterns, synthesize contexts, and tell compelling stories will always be less like combining one atom of oxygen and two of hydrogen and much more like turning the symbolic base metals of the physical world into something that glows in the the mind.

Doing It Wrong

Given all this, it’s awfully fortunate that we have access to the world of traditional curation, and to people who have been thinking and writing about these skills and ideas for so long. Unfortunately, we’ve so far chosen mainly to ignore that world, except when we pop up to slander it. From an article on content curation written by someone who works in PR:

There is a certain level of “intellectual snobbery” in existence from the point of view of traditional museum curators (the “purists”). Many museum curators have PhDs in their area of expertise, and believe that it is only with the highest level of education, and many years of research and experience, that one can be a true curator.

Museum curators argue that, when applied to digital content, the term curation is a bit of a stretch, and that content curators are simply filters of information. Marketing influentials disagree and believe that, using a high level of industry expertise, content curators can provide the same value as a museum curator to their own industries.⁸

This is what my maternal grandfather would have called horseshit. It’s an unacceptable oversimplification of a complex field that includes professionals with a wide range of perspectives, and unfortunately, it’s hardly the only example of this tactic.⁹

If you don’t know what a “museum curator” does, as so many “marketing influentials” (which is so not a noun) clearly do not, how can you responsibly suggest that you will “provide the same value” in a commercial setting? The answer, of course, is that you can’t—that you’re relying on your readers’ short attention spans to keep them from noticing that you’re constructing a straw man, labeling it “CURATER,” and then alternately kicking it and suggesting that you’ve arrived to do its job.

So let’s just stop.

The Moral Obligation to Be S-M-R-T (er)

If we pick three links on a topic and put them in a particular order, then no matter what we call it, what we’re doing is linking. This is what the web was built to do, and it can require a certain amount of focus and care. But if we genuinely believe that what we’re doing is curatorial, we should be ambitious for our work and intellectually curious for ourselves, and try to learn from the people who’ve held that title for so long.

Luckily for us, we don’t have to rely on an dated cartoon image of a curator—or to keep guessing about what we imagine curators do and think—because there are plenty of professional curators having interesting conversations on the web.

You could do much worse than to begin with the online writing of Elizabeth Schlatter, Deputy Director and Curator of Exhibitions at the University of Richmond Museums in Virginia. Schlatter has written several lucid and balanced articles about the response of museum and art curators to popular uses of “curation” by web people, marketers, and other groups of people not traditionally trained in curatorial work.

Her article “A New Spin: Are DJs, Rappers and Bloggers ‘Curators’?” includes thoughtful and widely diverging perspectives from a range of professional curators, and is essential reading for anyone who wants to consider content curation within the context of traditional museum and gallery curation.¹⁰ Here, Schlatter quotes Troy M. Livingston of the Museum of Life and Science in Durham, N.C.:

I think the threat to curators is that if we allow anyone to participate, will that lessen the value of what curators contribute? There’s a sense of resistance and fear perhaps in the curatorial profession because of this. [ . . .] The real difference between this idea of Curating 2.0 and traditional curating is scholarship. That kind of expertise to study objects and put together an exhibition for cultural and education purposes is very different than the kind of curating going on in Web 2.0.

In another recent article, Schlatter considers the ways in which “real” curation (my term, not hers) is changing:

the spectrum of what can be defined as “curatorial activity” is simultaneously being expanded in two diametrically opposed directions. At one end, the word “curate” is being used to describe myriad activities not pertaining to museums or art, while at the opposite end is the increasing specialization of the practice as exemplified by introspective theorizing and institutional criticism as well as proliferating academic programs.

This climate of introspection within the curatorial world has provided a wealth of ways to think about the nature of real-time content curation. Here are just a few jumping-off points—you can expect quite a few more to appear in the remaining posts in this series.

Curators on Curation

The New York Times has a light but encouraging article on the current generation of young curators that serves as a nice introduction to the popular end of the curatorial conversation, despite including the hilarious phrase “taught classes in scholarly subjects like letter writing.” Easily twice as interesting, though, is the article’s superb multimedia companion piece, which includes brief audio interviews and images from exhibitions.

One curator interviewed, Clara Drummond, returns explicitly to the storytelling functions of curation:

I think you have to have an interest in storytelling . . . I mean, it’s sort of an old-school idea about what it means to be a curator, but I think that still stands—it really is about telling an interesting story.

On the abstract/theoretical end of the spectrum, Maria Lind, director of the graduate program and the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, ponders the scope of “the curatorial”:

At its best, the curatorial is a viral presence that strives to create friction and push new ideas, whether from curators or artists, educators or editors. . . . The curatorial involves not just representing but presenting and testing. It is serious about addressing the query, What do we want to add to the world and why?¹¹

In a fascinating joint interview between controversial curator Jens Hoffmann and artist Julieta Aranda, Hoffmann situates his work in terms of “temporary alliances” between artist and curator that produce “grand narratives that are bigger than the sum of their parts: exhibitions with an epic dimension, if you will, which reconnect to my formative years as a theater director.”

The relevance of these notions to practical concerns like the relationship between online content creators and the people who want to “curate” their work is obvious.¹²

In a 2007 article, Hoffmann is more explicit in his consideration of curatorial work:

Ask 20 people what they think a well-curated exhibition is and you will get 20 different answers. Curating remains a very young profession. It has not yet managed to develop a clearly defined identity, any form of theory or even standards by which to measure quality. This is further complicated by the fact that curating has diversified over the last decade. There are now multiple coexistent discourses on curating that are often not related to one another at all. Many have grown to be very sophisticated and specialized: from the art history–led discussions around collection displays and museum exhibitions to the debate around art in public space, and from the arguments around biennials to disputes regarding the idea of the so-called “creative curator.”

Now that curating has become popular—just look at the number of curating courses offered around the world—in the general eye it is often simply understood as the practice of flipping through art magazines, walking through art fairs or biennials and selecting artworks that will illustrate a clever theme or idea that the curator has thought of. That curating is more complex—something that in fact has a lot to do with experience and the ability to be multi-talented—has not yet reached everyone.

The curator should bring a sense of staging to the exhibition, with the intention of creating a unique experience for the audience and for the works of art. Above all, the curator should have a vision.

I couldn’t agree more.

More Paths

References & Notes

• Content strategy is as obviously important in web development projects as UI design or project management. Someone must deal with content, and anyone who believes otherwise is unlikely to produce good websites.
• The modern practice of content strategy arises from a number of venerable professions and takes its core principles from editorial, analytical, curatorial, marketing, and managerial work. This doesn’t mean that it “is” any of those things.
• In particular, content strategy is not a subset of marketing. Marketing is one application of content strategy.
• Many marketing people are brilliant, ethical, and very good at their jobs. Some are not, and their influence can be very destructive. The former group should not be held responsible for the actions of the latter, but we should not be expected to pretend that the latter does not exist. (All these statements apply to many other professions, but marketing’s the one I’m focusing on in recent and upcoming posts.)

Onward.

One of the snarls in the content curation discussion is a problem of definition: leaving aside the ethical, aesthetic, and logical questions about the relation of museum or gallery curation to the online world, what do we—web people—mean when we say “content curation”?

Completists may wish to scan the Content Strategy Google Groups thread¹ or the Brain Traffic blog’s curation post comments² to get a feel for the definitional debate, but I’m going skip to the end: it’s pretty clear we’re using one term for two very different activities:

1. Content curation as filtering, selection, remixing, or mosaic. When someone says “real-time curation,” this is what they mean. When someone tries to sell you “curation software,” this is the activity they propose to support.
2. Content curation as the collection, preservation, and ongoing stewardship of content. There are about four people talking about this kind of curation, but those four people are very smart.

Trying to discuss these two activities at once is like making cherries jubilee while hang gliding: fun, but eventually the wrong thing’s going to catch on fire and we’re all going to die. So I’m going to take them sequentially.

Today’s post and its sequel concentrate on the first sort of content curation; the subsequent pair of posts will deal with the second sort. After that, there will be either a wrap-up post with mini-interviews or a long page of velvet paintings.

Filtering Is What We Do

Like the Japanese object-collection game Katamari Damacy,³ the internet is full of things. We need information mediators—spam filters, search engines, journalists, bloggers, friends, family members, government agencies, corporations, non-profits—to tell us what matters.

Happily, information mediation is already a central human function. Our brains filter out vast quantities of sensory info and pass along the relevant bits so that we can function without being distracted by the texture of our tee shirts or the scent of the ink in our pens. We’ve long had human and technological information mediators in place to help us replicate this mental process on a larger scale, but as Clay Shirky has pointed out, these filters have begun to fail.⁴ And thus we see a host of automated, semi-automated, and human attempts to turn Way Too Much Information into Just Enough Information.

This is all pretty straightforward until financial incentives rear up and send us careening into Bat Country.

Social Media Ruins Everything

“Content marketing” is a subset of online marketing and refers to the practice of publishing content online to attract the attention of potential buyers. At its best, content marketing helps organizations develop more useful content and fix broken publishing processes; at its worst, it boils down to such magical thinking as “social media will save you from the recession.” In either case, the field is made up of a voluble online community with the incentive to continuously reformulate its tenets to keep up with a rapidly evolving internet.

Here are a couple of definitions of the filter/mosaic sort of content curation from social media and content marketing people:

A Content Curator is someone who continually finds, groups, organizes and shares the best and most relevant content on a specific issue online. The most important component of this job is the word “continually.”⁵

Content curation is the act of continually identifying, selecting and sharing the best and most relevant online content and other online resources . . . on a specific subject to match the needs of a specific audience.⁶

I define content curation as the process of assembling, summarizing and categorizing and interpreting information from multiple sources in a context that is relevant to a particular audience.⁷

This sort of “curation” is an integral part of what bloggers, journalists, editors, and people with Tumblr accounts have been doing for lo these many years. Its recent cultural prominence is related to the rapid expansion of online publishing, but its sudden popularity on social media websites in particular can be traced to the moment at which organizations began to realize that “creating interesting content” is difficult, expensive, and highly competitive. As marketers sank beneath the weight of unrealistic content production schedules, some began to suggest that instead of creating content, businesses might simply quote from and link to content produced by others.

And thus were born companies, experts, and products dedicated to automating a kind of content curation that—if done poorly—simply replicates the irresponsible waste of human effort represented by the portals of the late 1990s. Except, you know, in “real time.”

Now Panic and Freak Out

Many consultants have suggested that if businesses want to succeed online, they should become content curators. So should they?

The simple answer is no. No one should reflexively pour time and money into “real-time curation,” because reflexes are a lousy way of making business decisions. Furthermore, when it’s used as a supposedly inexpensive substitute for a real content strategy, this kind of content curation is the definition of pounding sand down a rat-hole. You get tired and dirty while accomplishing nothing, and the rat has long since faffed off to watch Hulu. (There is a larger assumption at the root of this misapprehension of online content dynamics, which is that all companies should try to pump out as much “interesting content” as possible as a matter of course. But that’s a subject for another post.)

On the other hand, done well, this kind of curation can be useful to readers and can therefore be an effective marketing tool. Of course, doing it well requires a lot of time and money along with (yes) actual human skill. And the good news is that if you have a real communication strategy and the resources to support an online publishing process, you’re probably already curating content.

Doing It Well

The social media/content marketing fuss about content curation may have led a few marketing teams down the garden path, but it’s been a great favor to the larger community of people who make, publish, and tend online content. We have an opportunity to discuss this subset of online editorial work with a large, passionate group of people from many disciplines—and to learn from actual curators, whether they’re thoughtfully writing about the nature of curation itself⁸ or suggesting that we all have our thumbs removed.⁹

This matters because we genuinely do need to get better at this work. Our readers need it. Our clients need to know how to do it, and to understand the difference between doing it well and doing it poorly.

And that’s what tomorrow’s post will be about. In the meantime, your homework is below.

(Now online: Part II. See also: “Credo: Addendum”

Bonus Smarts

Notes

NEWSPAPERS: “The youngs say they’re curating things, even though they do not work in museums.”

SOCIAL MEDIA/CONTENT MARKETING PEOPLE: “Content curation is the new old newness. You must pure-play some content curation to leverage your thought leadership. It has good info-molecule and is lemon lemon easy thing. AHHHHH.”

NEWSPAPERS: “THIS will save newspapers. This and iPads.”

ACTUAL CURATORS: “YOU ARE FOUL OOZE OF DECADENT COMMERCE.”

CONTENT STRATEGY PEOPLE: “So, you know, this ‘content curation’ thing with the content is sort of what we already do. Here in content strategy where we are content strategists. But it’s not just really about making lists, because you need strategy. For your content. Hi.”

EDITORS: “Wait, isn’t that just—? No, no, forget it. We’re going to the bar.”

ACTUAL CURATORS: “OOZE.”

10,000 BLOGGERS: “Controversy! Curation! Monorail! Jazz hands.”

Names were called. Realizations were had. Many exclamation points went to their deaths.

Watch This Sloth

Now, the debate over terminology and who gets to be a curator doesn’t really grab me—Scoble can call himself World-President Viceroy of Fancy Space Publishing and I will still be okay—but I do think there are some interesting and useful ideas in all this froth.

Since I blog in geological time, I went off to the woods and wrote a five-part series on content curation, which I’ll post every business day or so for a week starting on Monday morning. In those posts, I’ll talk about two very different kinds of online content curation—curation as filtering/mosaic/storytelling and curation as collection/preservation/management—along with ideas, skills, and perspectives from the art and museum curation worlds that may help us do better work.

Edited to add: links!

• Part 1: Curating the Deck Chairs on the Titanic
• Part 2: Between the Click and the Curator
• Part 3: The Curate and the Curator
• Part 4: Slouching Toward the Curatorial
• Part 5: Curation Conclusions
• Also relevant: Credo: Addendum.

Apéritifs

Users don’t read
Users only scan
Users haven’t got
No attention span

I hate to get vulgar when it’s not even Friday yet, but this is bullshit.

Even in this current incarnation, there’s a critically important dodge:

Because users are in a hurry to find the very piece of information they’re looking for which is exactly what they normally do when reading newspaper articles and non-fiction books. They scan to skip the irrelevant.

In other words, people read on the web almost exactly the way they read anywhere else: they skim till they find what they need. This is manifestly not the same thing as “users don’t read,” and claiming that it is will almost certainly lead to stupid content and UX choices. The whole anti-reading campaign is based on a fundamental misunderstanding about the ways in which people read printed text, and the difference between their behaviors as online and offline readers.

In fact, people read more deeply online than they do in print, and on the web, “scanners” tend to read about as much text as “methodical readers.” Go read the whole Poynter EyeTrack ‘07 report site. It’s excellent, as is Leen Jones’s post on the subject.