Real Curation Requires Effort, Point of View

Curator's Hand, by Marinmuseum, cc-by-nd, http://www.flickr.com/photos/marinmuseum/5345449107/

Many of today’s popular deal-a-day sites claim to be creating “curated” experiences for their audiences. Many social media publishers focus on “curating” the stream of blog posts, tweets, and other content objects on specific topics. But what does that curation really mean? What’s the point of view behind the curator’s decisions about what to include and what not to include?

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Who Pays for Content? What’s in it for Me? Vote!

Pardon the brief, self-promotional nature of this post, but I just realized if I don’t get one up soon I’m going to miss the deadline – voting for SXSW Interactive 2010 ends this Friday!

Photo by ehnmark, cc-by license

I’ve submitted two panel proposals this year – each is described below with a voting link.

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Crowdsourcing, Incentive, and Value

In this video, Jeff Howe, a contributing editor at Wired and the author of Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business, presents during a Berkman Center Luncheon on some of the key issues around the concept, including:

• What motivates the contributors in crowdsourced efforts? Specifically, to what extent are monetary incentives a driver as compared to extra-monetary ones?
• What about “crowdsourced” projects which are not creative or knowlege-worker oriented, but outsourced menial labor?
• How can or should “creatives” respond to the rise of crowdsourced alternatives?

Jeff Howe at Berkman Center on Crowdsourcing

Open Source and Design: Ideologies Clashing (SXSW Extended Content)

One of the panels I proposed for SXSW Interactive 2009 was on the intersection of open source and design:

Thesis: Open Source and Design are fundamentally philosophically incompatible. Antithesis: Open Source and Design are profoundly similar in core beliefs and approaches. This talk works to articulate a meaningful synthesis between these two positions.

The talk, unfortunately, wasn’t accepted for presentation at the conference, but they suggested that instead I do a shorter, podcast or video podcast version for the Extended Content program.

I did, and that content now has gone live on the SXSW site:

In our first installment of the Extended Content series, John Eckman tells you everything you need to know about open source and design. The differences and similarities, how they benefit each other and why they have trouble getting along.

Extended Content at SXSW Interactive

(Unfortunately they don’t allow embedding, so you’ll have to go there to watch it – and at least on two browsers I tried it on, you’ll have to wait for the whole thing to preload before it starts playing – so go get a cup of coffee or whatever while it loads).

It’s just shy of 20 minutes, and having been created back in February 2009 feels (to me) a bit outdated in spots – mostly the continued evolution of the work Mark Boulton and Leisa Reichelt have been doing with the Drupal community (not just on Drupal.org but also on Drupal 7 itself), which I encourage you to check out if you’re interested in the subject.

SXSW 2009 Panels Proposed

Last week, while I was on vacation meeting my new nieces and attending my 20th year high school reunion, the Panel Picker for SXSW 09 went live.

Although voting by prospective attendees is only “about 30%” of the decision making process, I figured I should promote my submissions here, and hope that readers of this blog might be interested in commenting on them or voting for them in the panel picker. (Although they call it the panel picker – no one can resist alliteration – it includes sessions which are solo speakers or dual speakers as well as more tradition 4-5 person panels).

So here are the sessions I proposed (links go directly to the Panel Picker):

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