Future of Curation Networks

One of the hottest social networks right now is Pinterest. It his a nice spot at the need for organising huge amounts of information and our look out for beautiful inspirations. One important aspect is a high rate of female adoption, that continues to drive the adoption of eCommerce. Hence Pinterest is interesting for commerce, as some sources indicate that every click to an webshop site is worth an average of $5 in purchases.

What I am interest is the communal aspect of the service. It heavily focuses on recipes, travel imaginary and to some length fashion. For anyone interested in these, the site is interesting. However, the huge and growing adoption of Pinterest might eventually be the downfall. It might not be able to hold up to its community and therefore loose users to more highly niche focused communities. Curation is not curation if will not be able to edit out the unnecessary noise. Even following feature will not be enough eventually.



So what if we look this from another perspective. What is we think curation as a disruption to marketing, rather than just another social network. Currently online marketing is push with high volumes of banners. What if marketers would enable cashpools for users to create curated contents around topics, and earn real revenue from their curation work.

I think by creating well operating service that enables focus around nodes of interest or brands, we can enable these nodes to create actions that are fulfilled by the crowd. This crowdsourcing will boost highly focused and curated content for relevant target groups. All evolving around the node, rather than in a huge mass of different content. That is the real disruption potential of curation.

Marketers, remember. This could also make the world better by distributing revenue around to the best users. Do not think people are willing to work for free forever. I’m most certainly going to look at niche-curation content platforms as a powerful way to encourage a meaningful interaction with prospects and buyers.

Social Curation and Evening at REVS Fashion Mag Launch Party

Yesterday I spent an nice evening first at BonnierDevCamp talking about Social Curation. There is more about it in this blog, but I thought to share the slides I used. My focus was five points to cover the current change in the media industry and what opportunities social curation brings. I'm happy that the 30min talk turned into a discussion with active interaction with the hackers. I all up for you guys hacking the media into the digital future.

The five points were:
1. Media is under digital revolution and will follow the fate of music.
2. Social Curation's value is in filtering out noise to focus on niche interestgroups.
3. Enabling readers to use their own voice has huge advertising opportunities.
4. Through these bloggers have opportunity to become a shaping force in the media industry.
5. Mobile is the most personal device and therefore very good for media consumption.

Also after the break you find a nice picture of REVS magazine launch party. It a rather artistic magazine coming out from few of my friends. Nice picture and all, but I see them having hard time making this into a business...well it is very artistic.

Social Curation and Mobile

View more presentations from Teppo Hudson.

Bonnier Lounge


Revs visuals

Freedom is... the ability to choose

Philosophy

"I'm not afraid. I'm standing on top of this building, watching the storm approaching. I am not scared, taking on any weather it takes, cold or warm. We walk this world together afterall".

Filmmaker Pedro de la Fuente @pfuente, a good friend of mine, is currently working on to make people think what is freedom? I would start asking what is the value of freedom. To start, lets say loyalty has an important aspect. Loyalty to believe and to trust that the other will or can go out to do what is decided. When you trust, you can propose freedom.


This summer I've had the freedom to go fishing at 11pm

Loyalty and freedom

The key to understanding freedom is to recognize and respect that people are deeply loyal to themselves and those they love, but not to products, brands and governments (as society could be understood). They are loyal to their own values and the (relatively few) people and causes they truly believe in. What looks and feels like loyalty to a government, product, brand, company, etc. is driven by what that product, service, brand says about who we are and what we value.

If I buy from you, with money or by action, it’s not because I like you but because I like myself


This summer I've had the freedom to enjoy time in the park with my girl

Value of freedom

I also discussed this in a study on branding (pdf here). The value of freedom can be understood through an idea of post-modernism: the need to order the world into easily identifiable ranks and categories. Categories are society's way to interpret, to contrast and compare objects. The values signify the person's identity and leads to an active enjoyment of the specific object. The value of freedom is, therefore, the emotional interaction in a world of free choices. In a post-modern society, the citizen freely collects signs that signify the self.

The value of an object is the ability to create emotional loyalty, which emerges from the signification of the self. Hence the value of freedom is about the option to choose.


This summer I've had the freedom to enjoy a cup of tea with magazines.

6 business opportunities with social media overload

Business


Mashable here has a great article about "Sharepocalypse", or how social media overload will generate an expanse of new problems. However, this will generate a new opportunity for social assistance — a new category of software and services — and therefore, a ripe environment for startups.

Social Relationship Management (SRM): : Services that help people create, organize and manage sets of social network relationships — for example, sets of people to follow and/or share with on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, etc.

Social Awareness: Services that help people keep up with their social networks, especially among a user’s friends.

Social Curation: Services that help people organize and make sense of their streams and messages.

Social Personalization: Services that help people sift through the network noise for information most relevant to their particular needs and interests.

Social Analytics: Services that help to measure online social behavior and trends, optimize engagement, monitor activity and communicate more appropriately.

Social Automation: Services that help to automate activity in social networks, like automatically updating your status, helping to increase your influence, suggesting what to share, matchmaking, alerting, and using bots to intelligently interact with and assist users.

Because social assistance will become so necessary, both vertical and horizontal social assistance could mean interesting opportunities for startups. Ventures that provide vertical social assistance for particular networks, like Google+ and Facebook are going to be early build versus buy acquisition targets. These are rapid innovation opportunities for individual developers or small teams.

Putting Power in the Hands of Citizens in the Digital Age

Business

I am attending and speaking at The Finnish Institute in London organised Community TV Expert Meeting, held at FACT Liverpool. This is a roundtable event trying to promote cooperation and best practises of Community media.



One idea forwarded during the day is to look back at community media of 70s and 80s. Curation and social identity through pirate media stations gained traction in these centuries. So we argue that, putting power in the hands of citizens will be one of the first choice for curators and media.

Community television is a throwback to a time when cable technology was new and the web was not yet born. It allowed anyone to create a program that could be seen on cable. Community television was the youtube of its day; but things have changed. Downloading and streaming have precipitated a complicated restructuring of the television industry, brought on in part by new viewing habits. Traditional TV now seems to be on the wane. But there are some things that are harder for the internet to replace.



Most television takes more than one person to make. The internet cannot replace the studio space, hands-on training and possibilities for in-person collaboration and mentorship that community television allowed for. It won't replace the sense of place provided by a community production studio; a space where people can gather, work, learn and create together.

We are at a critical moment when traditional media ownership is more concentrated than ever, and yet we have perhaps the most participatory medium in history at our fingertips. As such, citizens need access to media literacy, knowledge and media production skills more than ever before. Community media centres--modeled on the idea of recreation centres and local libraries--may be a crucial piece of the digital divide puzzle

Finally an nice overlook of Liverpool from the rooftop of FACT.

Value of Curation

Business


(source)

Why is curation so important for the future of web content publishers? I believe the content curator is the next emerging disruptive role in the content creation and distribution chain. With increasing amount of information shared, curation is tremendously valuable service to anyone looking for quality information online: a subjective and qualified selection of the best and most relevant content and resources on a very specific topic or theme.

I could argue that a content curator is someone "who continually finds, 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."In the real-time world of the Internet, this is critical.

The idea of curation goes back to the art world, where galleries have for decades used professional curators to shape the experience of the visitor. This is the key element. As a curator, one has to think about the gallery visitors. The individual experience from the accessibility to the end thoughts about the art pieces are extremely important. And as the possibilities are endless, curation brings a lot of value to the experience. Afterall, I very much enjoy the explanations about the gallery's arts, on which I can build my own view.


(source)

When we go back to online media, the value gained is not any different. Mastering how to create niche-targeted compilations of content is indeed one of the key lifesaving strategies that online publishers can adopt to offer greater value, even at a price, to those interested in it.

We live in a world where attention has become so scarce to become as valuable as currency. The ability to organize, select, compile and edit the most valuable information on anyone topic is ever needed.

Hence, I am well underway on working on a solution for this. :)

The value of curating online

Business



A good friend of mine has launched a curated online news media Topiikki, which aims to give you the most relevant news items, whether in blogs or in a more traditional news sites.

This makes me think about the slow transition towards curation in online media, as opposite to rather than just aggregating content. It is nothing hugely new, but just as in arts, the importance of value and meaningfullness found within a huge mass of content rises to the top. This is in the heart of the move on from web 2.0, where people and content are more connected.

The Digitalisation is not about move from analog to digital, it is a move from scarcity to surfeit. The best curators are nodes and connectors, guiding you to a more insightful understanding of what you are seeing (or reading) around the world. Like art curators have for centuries, great online news curators have a knowledge to balancing content and value.

Edit: Mikko Järvenpää blogged about the same theme, going a bit more indepth with this issue.

Media Conversations | Future Talks

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