Sunday, March 11, 2012

Curation Nations of Europe

I'm currently experimenting with various curation tools as I look into practical ways authors can share ideas in a second-screen world. Just looking at the exponential growth of YouTube, you can see there's a market for building channels of curated content. They use relevant content (which may be audio, video or text) mixing material they create themselves with content they get from the net. That's why the best coverage of the iPad announcement didn't come from the tweeters inside the Apple press launch (who only had time to repeat the headlines from what Apple was telling them on the stage). Channels like This Week in Tech watched the event from a distance, and mixed that with considered analysis from people I respect. Broadcasters are having the hardest time understanding that they need to do more WITH the audience than for them. There are lots of people trying to figure this out in the news sector, whether it be TV, on-line or radio. Most of this is still dominated by the people who are connected with rolling news networks where the definition of success is still that they were first. I am more interested in the future of factual features, working with investigative journalists who are trying to share clearer stories, curating thoughts into a compelling narrative. At this weekends SxSW, I bumped into a talk by Steve Rosenbaum, who was marketing his book "Curation Nation". Actually what he's doing is advising people on how to curate and share clearer stories. His TEDx talk last year turns out to be a concise summary of what he is up to.



I am currently on a quest to find people in Europe who want to do the same. It's concise storytelling, but then using relevant platforms. It's challenging because the tendency in Europe is for people to make bad copies of ideas they see coming out of the US or Israel. The VC's are almost always focused on building shops of some kind. I'm more interested in building channels where people share ideas worth doing. 

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