Content curation

Content curation is selecting and presenting other people's work with your own framing, rather than producing everything yourself.

Curation is a legitimate form of authorship when the selection itself is the value. Choosing five things from five hundred, and saying why, is work — and for an audience drowning in volume it is often worth more than a sixth original piece.

What separates it from reposting is the framing. A link with no comment transfers attention to someone else and keeps none; the same link with a sentence explaining why it matters builds your reputation for judgement.

Attribution is not optional, and it is also self-interested: creators notice who credits them, and it is one of the cheapest ways to start a relationship.

In practice

A monthly roundup of five tools with one line each on who should ignore them is curation; a list of five links is a bookmark folder.

Common mistake

Curating without a point of view. Without selection criteria it is aggregation, and aggregation is a feed the audience already has.

Content curation

In practice

Common mistake

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