All the rage in fashion this winter? Curation*. Tool after tool after tool. Splices of networks, filters by geography, interest, type of media or time of day. I turned on a self-publicizing service called Paper.li not too long ago. There are readers, there is sharing, but there are few ‘subscribers’ so in my eyes they must be missing a few things.

Here’s a sample publication I put together for Themeefy (bummer they probably have to pronounce that correctly for people). It was quite a bit of work figuring out how to ‘simply’ put it together.

http://www.themeefy.com/miniature?tid=47205

For some people, curation is what they hear in the hallway at school or work. For some, it’s Twitter from 7:00 to 7:10 am. For some, we rely on Facebook or other destination sites to use their own algorithms to determine what’s ‘important’ for us. They use things like ‘most shared’, ‘most discussed’ and ‘most liked’. Often what’s most discussed is not what is most important or interesting to me, however, or even you, so that fails in a lot of ways too.

How much time are we spending curating each day? Doesn’t this defeat the purpose?

* Why do I have to add the word “curation” to every dictionary in every program I have? Certainly curation has been a word used in other industries for many years.