Content Curation

This blog piece attempts at understanding the following

1. What is content curation?
2. Usefulness of content curation
3. How does one curate content?

What is content curation?

Content Curation is the process of finding, collecting and presenting relevant digital content pertaining to a particular subject to the user. A content curator may or may not create original content. She is the gatherer and presenter of content. Her main task is to sift through a lot of content on a given topic and separate the relevant from the irrelevant and present them in a quick readable format to the user.

Usefulness of Content Curation

The internet is a content gargantuan. It can receive and disseminate unlimited volumes of content from and to countless users.

This leaves the user grappling with the problem of content relevance. Here is when curated content comes to the user's aid.

Curating content on websites also proves helpful in improving SEO ranks. Pawan Deshpande in the article Winning The SEO Battle Through Content Curation says, "many are turning to content curation tools that help find, organize and share content online to ensure that their site is constantly delivering updated, highly topical, keyword-rich content — making it a natural winner in the battle of Search Engine Optimization"

How does one curate content?

As regular and active users of the internet we inadvertently create and consume curated content.

An RSS feed for 'virtual classroom' on a blogging site delivers curated content to you.

By creating separate Twitter lists for the celebrities, politicians and spiritual leaders that you follow on Twitter, you organize content around specific subjects, hence curate them. You can make your lists public and other Twitter users can subscribe to it.

There are several tools that curate content, like, Paper.li, Redux, BagTheWeb etc. Several web applications that we use daily deliver curated content to us. For example Flipboard (for iPad) delivers curated content to users.