Robin Good on curation

[Music] [Music] hello this Howard reinold we're talking with Robin good

about curation so um Robin I loved your your series of articles I I highly recommend them and I just wanted to get directly from you a few thoughts about

curation online starting with what what do you think the importance in the place of curation is uh today for for anybody who's

online I think uh you could see it this way uh we've reached somehow the limit of uh understanding and making sense of

information just by going out to Google typing out a query and getting a listing of things that could be relevant to us I

think we this is like you know having being hungry and going to McDonald's you know it's fast food information but uh I I want something more like when I go to

a restaurant I can choose the type of restaurant the type of foods the quality the level the type of customer service and so on so I am looking for a new

level of accessing information whereby I'm not just trying to list and rank information but I'm trying to make sense of information this is what people want

more and more because one article by itself or a link or a resource or a video sometimes is just a little opening hole into understanding that topic while

if there was some kind of intermediate layer whether done by an algorithm or by people contributing and working with an algorithm to collect things that make

sense on a certain topic I think we would be in a in a in a position to inform and learn much faster and much better than we can do

now what qualities do you think a curator ought to have well he's got to be somewhat of a

very curious person and a passionate person in the area where he wants to curate I don't think you can just go about curating a topic because you wake

up and that's the thing you want to do Well you certainly can and gain confidence with it with time but it it would be best that you go and curate something that you're already very passionate about that you've been

exposed to so that you have some sensitivity some antennas that allow you to understand what is good what is better because then it becomes a point

of who are you doing this for are you just an artist painting something for yourself or are you creating something for a specific audience as uh trying to

intercept a specific need and resolve it with that uh channel of information so I would think that knowing the audience and being an expert on the topic helps

someone curate whatever type of information items he has at his disposal that that's I think are the key elements then you you got to be very transparent

and uh give full credit to whoever you're gathering in and expose actually the best qualities of these sources and people and add something of your own

that is the Tim quality of the curator is like the one for a DJ I mean what's the difference between putting a mixtape and a live DJ I think those same

qualities apply somewhat to a Content curator that is the ability to listen closely to what type of audience at the moment he's serving and then providing a context so that the type of information

is or she's collecting makes sense to them so you may have to change titles you may have to change descriptions images order how Justus toose things but

you have to customize that flow for the purpose theme and public you're doing that for so who who you are should come

come through to to some degree your your sensibility and your your point of view ought to not be completely suppressed when you're you're

curating there may be different instances and situations business-wise uh uh uh pure research and

information activities uh it may vary I wouldn't be so sure that all the time you would have to bring out your personality but uh there is no way that

you cannot somehow stand in some position so there would be a generic position and maybe a more uh defined positions for those who have I don't know to take political stances or

research things where there are opposing views but again there you may be a great curator by just standing out for your position or maybe even a better curator by curating all the positions that are

out there and allowing people to discover which ones fits best for them I mean both of them are valid to me all right what what is your advice to to to people about how to go about this and I

know you have a very detailed workflow can you just someone wants to go ahead and start curating and they've got a passion for a subject and some knowledge about it what how how do they go about it

the first thing you want to do is to collect your sourer your the places where you're going to gather that information you want to start from some

basic so these may be some blogs uh some video channels some Twitter personalities fan pages anything

especially that is capable of producing an RSS feed is very useful for curating and creating channels of information dedicated to a specific topic you you

want them to become familiar with something that is key technically before it was difficult to understand is what I call a persistent search that is the ability to

set out a search for a topic and be alerted anytime something comes up so that you can discover new things but you can discover also new sources for

information that you may not be aware of and then when you bring together different sources once you know the once you're going to discover

gradually the core part of your job is to select to pick those that really count and again to customize them personalize them for your audience for

the specific uh communication objective you set out for yourself with that Channel or stream of information you're creating so the job

to describe is as simple as that you you you may want then to to share this information to package it up and distribute it in different ways but the

core elements are basically those ones there so many people then just worry about hey what is the tool that can do all this stuff in a simple way without

needing me to know HTML RSS tags uh persistent searches and so on so let me get right to that and that uh is if I were to advise a tool that I'm not

associated with commercially that I think helps anyone who's a novice to get good grips on what curating information can do and it can be done is the one

you're using yourself since a few days and that's scoop it s c o o p doit that's a very simple to use free tool

that allows you to aggregate filter search and put together information even lay out and publish it within a workflow that is extremely easy

and almost intuitive to pick up and I also like kind of the community feature of scoop it in that the um there are people can can recommend sources to you

and then you have a stream of sources besides the ones that you've gone out and and found that you can go through and you can either U use them you can discard them or you can say I don't want

to use this Source anymore so your stream becomes smarter as you as you you curate it it's a tool I like a lot

too yes there are actually very many tool in the if you recall on 2005 uh was the the month of the year I think March

or April I was in San Francisco with you on Mountain Time P we were talking for the first time and the beautiful scenery about what we're discussing now that is

news cation and you were looking at me at me and wondering whether um that made any sense I'm so glad that that this time has passed and this has become a

reality I was so excited last year and in the last few months where about 60 different cation content creation tools have come out I've created a a map

you've probably seen which I update every week and what is surprising is now all these different areas for Content creation because we started thinking RSS

creating content and news creating news Raiders as I call them specific thematic channels but now there's a universe of other possibilities that is there is

video curation there is um product curation there is fashion curation which is fantastic go and see this set that's

called polyvor p o l y v o r e and see what people can do curating together different fashion elements like shoes

and jewelry and other gadgets and create the curated uh sets that are really uh interesting and Visually appealing

so I think the Horizon is in understanding that basically anything can be created doesn't have to be only news you can create stuff that doesn't be doesn't have to be connected to

Twitter or stuff that happens right at this moment I mean even collecting and curating what is out there for the past how we've gotten to the idea of curation

from the beginning until now it's something useful and I think the direction of the future is if not for Google for us to create an alternative

type of Google where we can collaboratively curate the information that is out there think for a moment if

uh instead of depending of secret algorithms to decide for us what is relevant we could choose individually

each one of us which are the ranking elements we want to use or tap into your ones and the one of my friend and the other friend and create our own

ecosystem of uh curated algorithms curated collections of information of how to make sense of reality instead of depending of somebody who depends on

profits and exclus exclusively on its own earnings to decide what's best for us I mean that's absurd for me because the world now lives in an economy of inform

we depend so much on it that it's not just a matter of doing a business online it's a matter of allowing each one of us like to breathe or get water to be able

to access information and make some good use of it uh I don't know if you uh agree with this or not but to me it's a planetary question that people should

start addressing yes that's why I I think that a a fundamental literacy about curation is something that everybody ought to know about it not just for Specialists just like there are

are websites that get a lot of traffic there are also many many many websites that may not get the huge amount of traffic but we wouldn't have the really

rich uh ecosystem online if we didn't have so many contributors so I really like your your vision which you you present uh so enthusiastically and

passionately of of really population of of curators that it's it's not just for the individuals it's for the the whole system um make it much much richer uh than it than it is

already yeah we want to have different points of view we just I mean should information ranking be a fundament

fundamentalist religion because what is that I mean if there is one entity that secretly knows what is true or not isn't that religion so I don't want to depend

on some religious organization to decide what's out there and I want to be able to tap on different points points of views I want to be able to contribute to help other people understand what I've

have discovered and the system we have now does not allow me to do this so more and more I'm looking for people who can be gateways to the information I need

and this must be trusted people so we need a a Google of the people for the people a a an army of individual curators doing this for ourselves that's

what we need yes this is wonderful thank you so much and and thank you for your wonderful hospitality in Rome I will never forget it and and hope to see you

there again soon all right thank you our

it was pleasure bye-bye you too bye

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