CHAPTER 1

CURATION: WHAT IS IT?

When I was 13 years old, I was a magician. I don't mean card tricks and parlortricks. I was into the big stuff. Harry Houdini, The Great Thurston,illusionists, escape artists, and mind readers. And back then, there was noshortage of gizmos and books and apparatuses that a young boy could buy. Therewere catalogs and magazines that featured page after page of gleaming boxes,swords, silk scarves, and grandly adorned illusions. If you had an allowance,there was always some great new magic trick ready to help you amaze youraudience. In magic tricks, there was an endless abundance. What was a boy to do?

Well, there was a solution: a special place where magicians in the know went tosee the latest gear up close, watch demonstrations by great prestidigitatorsbehind the counter, and end up spending their hard-earned allowance money on theright new gizmo. It was called Tannen's Magic Store, on 44th Street inTimes Square. And although it was a four story walk-up, anyone who found theplace could be assured of a few hours of deft salesmanship and some insiderknowledge as to which magical flourishes were popular, which of the latest shinyillusions didn't work, and which patter would keep your audience mesmerized.Tannen's was nirvana for a young magician. Sure, the store had a catalog, butthat was for suckers. The smart money knew that if you trekked to the store,you'd get a better deal and buy the right stuff. I didn't know it then, but thefolks at Tannen's exposed me to my first truly curated experience. Theyseparated the good gear from the cheap knockoffs, they added a special aura ofknowledge and experience—and they turned a deck of cards with amimeographed set of instructions into a treasure. They added context, meaning,and knowledge. I loved that place, and I still do. Even as magic has fallen outof favor for this generation of boys and girls, Tannen's remains a curatedexperience that has kept it solvent, and special, since its founding in 1925.Buying a magic set at Toys "R" Us just can't compete. The difference between acurated retail experience and a generic one isn't limited to magic shops. Aswe'll soon discover, brands and retailers who are standing out in this noisyworld are increasingly replacing abundance with smaller selections of carefullychosen offerings.

CURATION COMES IN MANY SHAPES AND SIZES

There are some words that arrive in our world meaning one thing and over timemorph into a new idea.

Tweeting was a thing birds did, before Twitter. Now the word has new meaning. Itused to be that you could learn about people you were interested in byresearching them in print or by asking their friends. Now you Google them. Theremarkable pace of change is having an impact on more than our lives and ourinteractions, it's changing the very words we use to describe what we do.

Today, the word that describes much of what's changing is curation. It'sboth a new word and an old one.

In the past we lived in a world of disciplines. The senior editorial leadershipat magazines were known as editors. The folks who chose which TV shows played ona TV network were programmers. The people who picked which things would be onthe shelves of your local stores were retailers. Each of these professionsinvolved choosing the right items, putting them in the proper order, andcreating a collection that was appealing to an audience or consumer. Oh, andthere was that rarified individual who selected objects of art to present in amuseum or gallery: they were called curators.

Today, curation is the coin of the realm. Film Festivals curate their program.Web sites curate their editorial. The team at the shopping site Gilt Groupcurates the items it offer for sale. Curation was once a word thatseemed to mean highbrow, expensive, out of reach of mere mortals. But todaymuseum curators must compete with media curation at Newser, collections ofhandmade crafts at Etsy, or the curated collection of the best roll-on luggageat Squidoo. Certainly curation means quality, but now quality is in the eye ofthe beholder.

Curation, as we'll come to explore it in the pages that follow, comes in manyshapes and sizes. It is critically important to understand two things. First,curation is about adding value from humans who add their qualitative judgment towhatever is being gathered and organized. And second, there is both amateur andprofessional curation, and the emergence of amateur or pro-sumer curators isn'tin any way a threat to professionals.

Curation is very much the core shift in commerce, editorial, and communitiesthat require highly qualified humans. Humans aren't extra, or special, orenhancements; humans are curators. They do what no computer can possiblyachieve. There's far too much nuance in human tribes and the taste of groups andindividuals. Curation is about selection, organization, presentation, andevolution. While computers can aggregate content, information, or any shape orsize of data, aggregation without curation is just a big pile of stuff thatseems related but lacks a qualitative organization.

There are places where we're going to see curation happen first, mostlyeditorial enterprises such as Web sites, magazines, and other media. Andalthough it may seem like curation, as a trend, is declaring war on oldinstitutions we've known and trusted, the simple fact is that curation is goingto save these organizations, not destroy them. Not long down the road, curationis going to change the way we buy and sell things, the way we recommend andreview things, and the way we're able to mobilize groups of like-mindedindividuals to share, gather, and purchase as groups. Curated experiences are bytheir very nature better than one-off decisions about what to buy or whom totrust.

But the real power of the trend toward a Curation Nation is that, for the firsttime, we can see a future in which individuals can galvanize and publish theirpassions and knowledge in a way that will create value from personal passionsand niche expertise. Imagine a time when your love of travel, fine wines, andcollectable lunch boxes each provides a revenue stream. Okay, maybe not afull-blown stream, but a revenue trickle; when these microcareers are knittogether, your curated knowledge can evolve from a hobby to an avocation to oneof the many gigs that pay the rent, keep your kitty in cat food, or help yousave for a college tuition. Which is to say, curation is about somethingdifferent than disintermediation. In fact, it's about re-mediation. It's aboutadding quality back into the equation and putting a human filter betweenyou and the overwhelming world of content abundance that is swirling around usevery day. Curation replaces noise with clarity. And it's the clarity of yourchoosing; it's the things that people you trust help you find.

Curation is an exhilarating, fast-moving, evolving idea that addresses twoparallel trends: the explosive growth in data, and our need to be able to findinformation in coherent, reasonably contextual groupings. No one doubts thatwe're shifting, as author Clay Shirky says, from an era of content scarcity toone of content abundance. And while that seems on one hand bountiful, it's alsoquite impossible. Imagine trying to find a needle in a haystack. Now try to findthat same needle in a thousand haystacks. Now, try to find three related needlesin a billion haystacks. Yikes! If you think of those needles as words or ideas,forming a coherent sentence is flat out impossible. It's in just such situationsthat curation comes to the rescue.

CURATION TO THE RESCUE!

As we fumble around for a clear picture of the future, curation comes up in someplaces we might not expect. Looking for E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial or a bit of aflying saucer? NASA's Office of Curation (Yep, they actually have one ofthese—check it out at http://curator.jsc.nasa.gov) describes itsmission as "tasked to curate NASA's current and future collections ofextraterritorial samples. Curation includes documentation, preservation,preparation, and distribution of samples for research, educational, and publicoutreach.

Looking for some silky and sultry undergarments? The Canadian company Panty ByPost offers luxury women's panties curated by subscription. The combination of acurated collection and recurring delivery isn't limited to panties. There's asimilar offering from ShoeDazzle, a monthly subscription to a handpicked seriesof stylish shoes.

What if you find yourself hungry on a Saturday afternoon at the Brooklyn Fleaswap meet? Founder Eric Demby tells New York Magazine he personallycurates the food stands so you can count on a good tamale or great grilledcheese sandwich. Most people prefer having an array of interesting food optionscurated for them rather than settling for the always-risky sidewalk mystery meatfrom New York's ubiquitous street vendors.

Curation has always been the process of discerning quality. But in an era ofabundance, the definition of quality needs to evolve suit its intended audience.Do you want to know the best place to enjoy a Nascar race? Well, then don't askme, because I can't tell one driver from another. But ask a Nascar super-fan, ahighly engaged and deeply passionate enthusiast, and he'll have lots of adviceand pointers and links to help you get your bearings before you set out to thetrack. Are you a Nascar curator? Could you be? Someone's going to grab that gig,so maybe it should be you?

There are some places where curation simply works better than undifferentiatedlarge collections.

Certainly curated retail should provide a better experience than largeundifferentiated box stores. As Alex Williams explains in the New YorkTimes, "among designers, disc jockeys, club promoters, bloggers and thrift-storeowners, curate is code for 'I have a discerning eye and great taste.'"

But to be fair, the curation of art or shoes or even women's lingerie may not beanything new. This trend, from the hallowed halls of museums to banal retailshopping, is still very much about gathering groups of real things in the realworld. The place where curation is a new idea is within the bits and bytes ofthe World Wide Web. Because the Web is essentially still new, and the speed ofits growth and ubiquity is unparalleled in human history, there's ademand—even desperation—for new systems and behaviors to manage thetsunami of content that envelops us every day. From Facebook to Twitter toblogs, newsreaders, LinkedIn, text messages, e-mails, updates from Foursquare,voice mail, and now the iPhone's FaceTime video voice conversations ... the sheervolume of digital data available or assaulting us is both dazzling andexhausting.

Über-blogger Robert Scoble describes the flood of data that overwhelms him mostwaking hours: "I have TweetDeck running with the real-time streams and can seeit flowing down the screen—and I'm only following 20,000 people out of twohundred million people on Twitter, so I'm just seeing a little water in thegutter compared to the Mississippi River that could be going through my screen.And we're all trying to deal with this, we're all trying to find interestingstuff and share it with our friends. People need ways to deal with this constantstream of information."

The solution isn't to bail out, to get "off the grid," as some weary netizensproclaim. Fred Wilson, a New York venture capitalist and one of the folks who'sgot his pulse on the Web start-up community, routinely declares "e-mailbankruptcy" and empties his inbox. Overwhelmed with input, he waves the whiteflag of digital defeat and tells his potential correspondents they'll simplyneed to write again. Their previous e-mail was dispatched into the digitalether. That doesn't work, of course. And Wilson knows it. But lacking tools tofilter the flood, he's got little choice. That's all changing, though.

Boston science writer Joanne McNeil, writing on tomorrow museum.com,describes the emerging role of curator by suggesting we begin with the root ofthe word. "Start by thinking about the etymological roots of 'curate'—totake care of. Information surplus creates different challenges in preservationand archival record keeping. There are 'digital ethnographers,' slightly fewer'cyber anthropologists,' but media is most in need of digital historians likeJason Scott providing historical context. Someone who can determine the 'andthis' from the 'don't forget' in fickle Internet memes. Implied by the wordcurator is an intuitive sense of pattern recognition ... More visualthan a mere editor, the Internet curator requires a sense of the relationshipsbetween words, images, space, and shapes."

But I still haven't answered the question I set out to resolve for you in thischapter: what is curation, exactly?

THE ORIGIN OF CURATION

Let's start with where the need for a new word came from.

It's 1977, and as a young magician I was looking for some deep dark secrets. I'dfound my way to a closed, private collection of magicians' memorabilia andpersonal papers that was held at the Lincoln Center Library for the PerformingArts. Buried inside the white marble halls, beyond the public stacks and out ofview—the mysteries of the great prestidigitators were carefully recordedin formidable bound volumes. Only the intrepid students, hungry for information,could find their way to these secret stacks, and only then could they gainaccess. I arrived at the front desk and confronted a librarian who had no plansto let me into the Lincoln Center collection. To her surprise, I took amembership card to the Society of American Magicians out of my pocket. With theproper documents and a signature on a new Lincoln Center library card, I wasable to gain access to the secret shelves. Long, dusty, quiet columns of rarebooks. Dog-eared card catalogs produced with manual typewriters. Each dark oakdrawer organized by ritualized numbers. DDC: 793.8 LCC "Death and the magician";DDC: 793.80922 "100 years of magic posters," Card magic was 793.5. Those numberswere like a decoder ring; if you knew "793," you had a map to where the secretsof magic were kept. I knew the code. I was in.

In the past, organization was simple. Small groups of things where organized bya group of daunting and often stern people known as librarians. In 1876 MelvilDewey copyrighted a proprietary system of library classification: the DeweyDecimal System. The method organizes books in repeatable order for libraryshelves. The idea was that you could find the book in the same place in anylibrary in the world. And, for a period of time, Dewey was the Google of itstime. But the nature of the Web's openness swamps Dewey. Since librarians nolonger stand between content creators and library shelves, a rigid andinflexible taxonomy simply doesn't work. On the Web anyone can publish andanyone can access published pages, so the role of the human archivist needed adigital counterpart.

In 1998 two graduate students at Stanford University began to commercialize asearch engine known as Google. The company's mission was "to organize theworld's information and make it universally accessible and useful." The sheersize and openness of the Web made human categorization impossible. Today Googleruns over one million servers in data centers around the world and processesover one billion search requests and 20 petabytes of user-generated data everyday.

Dewey was a human system, with a rigid digital classification. Google replacedhuman classification with digital discovery and a "black box" formula thatranked pages based on a complex and changing algorithm that let Google determinea page of data's relative value for a particular search term. The concept ofpage rank was powerful, and it resulted in a taxonomy that created an entireindustry of consultants and advisors who helped Web-content makers increasesearch engine optimization (SEO).

That Larry Page, one of the Google cofounders, understood that the unit ofmeasure for Web content was pages rather than domains, URLs, articles, authors,sources, or any other dimension helped to shape the Web for almost 10 years.That the concept of page and Larry's last name were the same will godown as one of those great coincidences of history. While Sergey Brin, Google'sother cofounder, is no less brilliant, there's no useful way to create a measureof quality called a Brin—though arguably Dewey did that very thing back in1876.

We're moving along a continuum, first from human categorization (Dewey) toautomated organization (Google), and now the sheer volume of data—and thenuance and complexity of it—overwhelms search technology. We're at amoment when what is emerging is something totally new.

We are on the verge of a data tsunami. Really. "Between the dawn of civilizationthrough 2003, there was just five exabytes of information created," Google CEOEric Schmidt told the audience at the 2010 Techonomy Conference, in Lake Tahoe."That much information is now created every two days, and the pace isincreasing. People aren't ready for the technology revolution that's going tohappen to them."

Of course Schmidt is right. He knows the data better than anyone, as a verylarge portion of it is moving through the massive data centers that Google hasbuilt around the world. But it isn't simply the volume of data; it's the speed.The Web is now moving in real time: what happens now is deliverednow. Jeff Pulver is a serial entrepreneur who was an early investor inVonage, the Voice On the Net company that hit it big. Now Pulver only talksabout one thing, what he calls The State of Now.

Says Pulver, "Living and experiencing information in The Now is just differentwhen compared to the way we are used to experiencing things. Since the launch ofthe commercial Internet in 1993 we may have been on-line in real-time, but weexperienced access to information that was slightly old to ancient. Today accessto information has changed so much in the past year that today we are now livingin 'The State of Now.'"

Now means data comes at you fast, and it's harder to determinerelevance, accuracy, or even sourcing.

It is inevitable that we end up talking about needles and haystacks again.

"We are going to have more and more stacks of haystack and we are going to needpeople to find the needles in the haystacks," Scoble says. "You can see thatTwitter is moving. Where is the new human pattern in that Twitter stream that weneed to collect and save and talk about and argue about stuff like that? Andthat first process starts with curators who see a pattern in the world thatneeds to be discussed."

Andrew Blau is a researcher who has presciently foretold changes in mediadistribution and content creation. Now he's watching a new, historic emergenceof first-person publishing.

(Continues...)