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?

My friend and former colleague Margot Bloomstein presented earlier this week at SXSW on the topic of Creation, Curation, and the Ethics of Content Strategy, drawing on interviews with museum curators about their craft, and arguing that true curation requires:

• Scope and Perspective: Determining what to include and what to exclude
• Cultivation, Aggregation, and Editing: The (often difficult) work of gathering the items to be part of the collection, which may be in private collections, other museums, or buried deep in archives
• Building the Story for the Target Audience: The curator focuses on specific audiences, in both the catalog (which appeals more to the serious collector/scholar) and the exhibit itself (which must address the specialist but also a general interest audience) and on telling those audiences a story. The curator hopes to add a new understanding of the subject for each audience, not just re-present what they believe they already know.
• Organization, Juxtaposition, Hierarchy, Emphasis: These are tools of the curator in telling that story. It isn’t just about deciding what is in or out of the collection but about how those items are contextualized, placed, arranged, and edited.
• Bias: A curator has a point of view, and deliberately foregrounds that point of view, often in a curator’s statement.

In other words, curation is not easy work. It is not something done by algorithms and automated software filters. Adding a twitter feed or rss import to your site which pulls in all mentions of your topic keywords does not make you a curator, any more than your word processing programs’ ability to string words together makes you a writer. (I’m reminded of Truman Capote’s dismissal of Jack Kerouac: “That’s not writing, that’s typing.”).

Truly curated experiences bear the mark of the curator’s hand (or curators’ hands).

What point-of-view is Groupon, or Living Social, or Gilt hoping to cultivate in the world? (The value of spas, manicures, and pedicures? The importance of cultural experiences like theater, whale watching, and the symphony? Whiter teeth? Exercise? ) Do they really cultivate and source rare experiences, or is it just a platform for aggregating deals together for presentation to an audience?

When you consider “curation” as one of your brand or company’s goals, can you define what your intent is in that creation? What kind of point-of-view you hope to expect?

If you aggregating blog posts and tweets on a given subject, but not exercising editorial control or influence, let’s just call that content aggregation. If you’re putting serious effort, vision, perspective, and consistency into choosing, arranging, and expressing a point of view through the act of assembling the collection, you just might be doing real curation.

Photo by ehnmark, cc-by license

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

The first is Who Pays for Content?: Re-evaluating Paywalls. As described in the proposal:

Everyone knows Stewart Brand’s statement that “information wants to be free,”. Less well known is the other half: “information also wants to be expensive.” If no one pays for content, and no one clicks on ads, how will we fund online initiatives, applications, and sites? What could drive users to pay for content? What has, historically, and how can we learn from that?

I think this is a very timely discussion that hits at the core issues for SXSW attendees – what funds the work so many of us do on the web? What models other than advertising and pay-for-content will work in the assembled web?

The other is What’s in it for me? Open Source and Interaction Design. This builds on the video podcast I did as part of last year’s extended content program. As an open source developer and advocate who has also long been a promoter of the value of interaction design, I want to broaden awareness within the interaction design community about why licensing matters. From the proposal:

Open source advocacy has generally focused on the perspective of developers, for whom access to source code is a real need and the opportunity to change or extend functionality is a practical possibility. But what about the interaction design community? In this talk I explore why interaction designers should care about free and open source software.

You’ll have to register to vote, of course. You can also leave comments here or in the panel picker itself.

See you in Austin in March!

• 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

It’s long – just over an hour – but really worth your time if you’re interested in the issue of value that crowdsourcing raises. I especially enjoyed the extended Q & A session – which benefits from the collective wisdom and critical thought typical of Berkman attendees.

Howe admits a kind of radical ambivalence about the phenomenon of crowdsourcing and the ways in which it disrupts some existing relationships by changing the value of certain kinds of labor.

His ambivalence comes through in two ways. First, he focuses on the “creative” end of crowdsourcing – examples like Threadless, Innocentive, and iStockPhoto – rather than the “menial” end of crowdsourcing – Mechanical Turk’s “Human Intelligence Tasks” like transcription, solving CAPTCHA’s for spammers, etc. How does the equation for crowdsourcing change when your imagined participant isn’t the “college kid designing t-shirts” but people in developing markets doing work for fractions of pennies?

Howe confesses he essentially ignored Mechanical Turk (and other arguably non-creative examples of leveraging large scale online labor) in the book – in essence because it didn’t fit, in his mind, the picture of motivation he saw in the phenomenon in which he was interested. But are there really two fundamentally different models of crowdsourcing at play here, or is it just two different participating labor pools: one predominantly first world, leisure class, participating for fun and recognition, and another more developing world centered, participating for financial gain?

Second, he’s also deeply sympathetic with those – increasingly including his fellow journalists – who are arguably displaced by the impact of crowdsourcing on the value of what they produce. What about established professionals in the field who see the market value of their work decimated in the process? On the other hand, what about those trying to break into the market, who have always found spec work a valuable mechanism for demonstrating their skills before gaining professional, full time employment?

It’s especially interesting where these two issues come together – crowdsourcing for employement. What if anybody, anywhere, with any standard of living, could do your job and compete with your for your value?

There’s a good, well edited video summary from a panel Howe moderated at SXSW 2009 on this topic, specifically focused on spec work in creative fields, and sites like Crowdspring and 99designs:

I’m reminded of the debate among programmers about offshoring, in which similar arguments still go on. Can the quality of the design produced at a crowdsourced spec site ever compete with that produced by a reputable, professional shop? How can a design that doesn’t come out of an intimate, strategic, and interative process involving lots of face time and discussion with the client ever be truly on target? On the other hand, if the consumer of said work can’t tell the difference, and the price is several orders of magnitude less, does it make sense to continue to argue they should pay the premium?

(See No!Spec for more on the arguments about the dangers of speculative work).

Finally, I also saw Howe give a version of this talk at Media Bistro’s Circus event in New York during Internet Week, a few months after the Berkman Center talk. In his Media Bistro talk, Howe focused much more directly on crowdsourcing in journalism, highlighting as an example the excellent work being done at Spot.us, a kind of crowd-funding mechanism for journalists.

Ironically, to see that video, you’ll need to subscribe to MediaBistro OnDemand, for $19/month or $180/yr. Apparently the downward pressure of crowdsourcing and free video from various sources (Berkman, SXSW) hasn’t yet forced MediaBistro to share videos from their conferences for free.

Does that make his talk at MediaBistro more valuable than the talk at the Berkman center or the panel at SXSW?

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.

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):

Managing User Generated Content

The age of content being managed only by authorized professionals is over. Users expect to contribute to, rate, review, recommend, filter, tag, and moderate their experiences on the web. What does this mean for designers and content management professionals? How do you encourage appropriate behavior and discourage spam and vandalism, without completely reverting to non-participation?

Open Source and Design: Ideologies Clashing

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.

Managing Your Online Identity Outside the Walled Garden

(Dual talk with Joshua Porter). This talk will cover 3 basic ideas: 1) What Managing Identity means these days and why it is important 2) Off-the-shelf technologies that help you manage your Identity 3) A DIY (Do-it-yourself) approach to managing your Identity…how you can roll your own identity services using existing pieces

The first is really an updated version of this talk from Web Content 2008, which seemed to go over well.

The second is inspired by r0ml’s series of OSCON talks over the last 3 years: rambling, philosophical, and entertaining in addition to being educational and thought-provoking. I’m sure I’ll fail to live up to his example but have fun in the process. I tried to update the description in the panel picker but failed – here’s what I was trying to add:

The context for me is in trying to articulate why free and open source projects have historically found it difficult to recruit / retain / attract designers as contributors. (Or, depending on your point of view, why open source projects have been so inhospitable to the design-oriented contributors who show up).

Thesis: Open Source and Design are philosophically incompatible.

Open Source is about enabling anyone and everyone to share the same code base. Open source pushes markets toward commodity status, leveling the playing field by making the same technology available to all. Design, by contrast, is about differentiation; standing apart from the crowd and being unique on the basis of creative innovation.

Besides, Open Source projects are ugly, and only engineers can use them. Well designed, beautiful, and easy to use projects have always come from proprietary approaches.

Antithesis: Open Source and design are profoundly similar in core beliefs. Open source and design are both based in solving problems based on known patterns. Good artists copy, great artists steal. Maybe some very small portion of “design” is about differentiation, but design is much broader than that subset. Also, many open source projects differentiate and innovate – sometimes on ease of use.

Besides, many open source projects are now actively pursuing design contributions, running usability studies, encouraging themes/skins, and working to compete with proprietary software on both “eye candy” and ease of use.

Synthesis: How can open source projects benefit more from the talents of the design community (across visual design, interaction design, information architecture, usability, and branding)? How can designers and design communities benefit from the lessons of free and open source software?

The third is a joint talk with Joshua Porter, whose book Designing for the Social Web is a must read. He’ll be talking about some of the “off the shelf” services available to help you manage your online identity (like Chi.mp), and I will be talking about the DIY approach, assembling together from free and open source software an online identity management toolbox.

Facebook is planning on allowing users to add activities from third party social networking site directly into their Facebook news feed, we’ve confirmed.

The problem is that their only talking about allowing users to *add* activities into the news feed, not to take their facebook news feed and take it elsewhere. As TechCrunch put it:

This is certainly an opening up of Facebook. And given that so many tens of millions of users spend so much time on the site already, it could remove the wind from the FriendFeed/Plaxo sails.

But don’t expect to see a RSS feed or widgets showing what you or your friends are up to any time soon. The data feeds that Facebook opened up last year do not extend to the News Feed. And from what we hear, Facebook hasn’t made a decision to open it up yet. Until they do, there is still plenty of breathing room for competitors.

But why is this even an opening up of Facebook? I can’t take my news feed and add it to my lifestream or use it on another site – all I can to is add data to Facebook’s walled garden.

Marc Canter, in the middle of his video about Data Portability, makes the point that our web based applications need to learn to spit as well as to suck – his choice of terms might be a bit visceral, but it does get the point across.

The scheduling application for SXSW (sched.org/sxsw2008) spits, but doesn’t suck. You can export your schedule in an iCal format, and group multiple sched.org calendars together (like this) but you can’t import an iCal schedule in, even to add events not in sched.org’s database to your calendar. (Though I guess you can pull both out to something like Google Calendar and get your unified view there). You also can’t, as Chris Messina pointed out, login with an OpenID.

Fire Eagle, right now, seems all suck and no spit. It can get my status from Dopplr, or from certain phones, but for now at least I don’t see any way to get it out. The site help says:

There are many applications that can use your Fire Eagle location! For example, you can use Fire Eagle to update your location on your Facebook profile; or embed a badge on your blog or MySpace that shows roughly where you are. Many more are coming. If you’re an engineer then maybe you could write one!

But when I go to the application directory, it looks to me like they are all coming, as in not available now.

Don’t get me wrong, I think Fire Eagle is a great concept, and gets a lot right – specifically the granularity of different privacy settings, in terms of how precise Fire Eagle can be in sharing your location. I’ve been looking forward to it since Marc Davis talked about at the Futures of Entertainment conference last November.