I founded OneSpot because it was becoming clear to me that a new style of media was needed to thrive and grow in the unique environment of the Web. This new style of publishing embraces the abundance of content out on the Web and uses it to serve their readers better. The best sites that follow this model create some original content, but primarily curate: they select and link to their favorite content from around the Web. They then improve the experience by adding summarization, context, commentary, and community. New brands like Engadget, BoingBoing, Huffington Post, and Real Clear Politics and familiar names like Business Week’s Business Exchange and the Washington Post’s Political Browser are well-known examples of this model.

OneSpot’s mission is to enable this new paradigm, by making it easy for publishers to curate the Web for their audience. Doing this well isn’t easy — given the huge volume of great content to choose from — but we’ve helped major sites such as The Wall Street Journal Online and SFGate.com enter this new world efficiently and scalably, without losing the editorial control or the quality associated with their brands.

Along the way, we’ve learned a number of things about this style of media. Here are some of them — I’ll elaborate on them in upcoming posts.

1. The primary goal of any site is to serve its audience. Traditionally, publishing involved editors figuring out what content their audience was interested in and hiring someone to create it. On the Web, readers always seek the best content, regardless of where they have to go to find it. In this free market, it’s in every site’s best interest to provide a place for their audience to find a single spot for them to find the best targeted content in one place, regardless of where it comes from. When a site serves its audience well, it can become an authoritative source for its audience, fostering loyalty and increasing influence in its web community.

Curation	Creation
Reduces information overload	Increases information overload
Selection	Text
Summarization	Audio
Context	Video
Commentary	Multimedia
Perspective	Copy editing
Editorial voice	Reporting

2. “Curation” is the aggregation, filtering, and prioritization of content for a targeted audience, with context and editorial voice. From the Latin curator meaning “to care.” “Curation” traditionally has referred to “organizing and maintaining a collection of artworks or artifacts“, but is a good description of this new way to add media value. This means not just collecting large amounts of content in one place — what many refer to as “aggregation” — but organizing: selecting and ordering the best content that fits in with a given site. Just as an art gallery has an experienced, skilled curator to ensure its patrons experience the best of arts’ offerings, so too can a site select stories and posts to ensure a great experience for its readers while still providing a distinct, unique perspective. Care for the material displayed, whether on walls, pedestals or URLs, encourages a strong following.



3. It’s extremely hard to create the best content on the Web. It’s a simple matter of supply and demand. IDG predicts a jaw-dropping 1.8 zettabytes of digital information by 2011 (a zettabyte is 1 trillion gigabytes). Consumers now can choose from all of the content on the Web — if they can find it. The amount of competition for attention is immense, and increasing as the barriers to creating content are lowered by new technologies. Creating great content was hard enough when consumers had a limited number of choices — now it’s much harder and it will only get more difficult.

4. Great content is subjective and will be evaluated by your audience. For most topics there are thousands of sites readers can visit. What makes one site different from another is the site owner, the editor. Context, commentary, perspective, and personality provide the meaning that connects content to your audience — what has traditionally been called editorial voice. This voice is as important as the content itself. It makes the difference between a regularly read, frequently bookmarked site and an occasional Google search find.

5. There’s not much use in creating the 4th best piece of content on something. Or even — in some cases — the second best. The market of the Web is very efficient: unique content has value, most does not. Consumers have little reason to choose something that’s not the best from their perspective. But too often, publishers focus on posting frequency rather than posting quality. Since no publisher has infinite time or resources, it’s often better to create an original post once a day that will come in 1st, than to come in 4th multiple times. Readers will find 1st place pieces — through search, or through links from other sites — lower quality will get ignored. You can’t always create the best content at high frequency, so take advantage of the huge volume of the Web to drive volume — focus on finding the best with technology, then curating it and supplementing your great original content.

I’ll elaborate on these ideas and more in a later post. I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Bonus reading: terrific additional perspectives on curation:

• Some additional definition of curation from Mindy McAdams
• The Growth of the Curation Economy from 2009 — 5 Trends That Will Change Media, by Steve Rosenbaum at Magnify.net
• How To Use Curation To Make Your Blog Better: Lessons From Postsecret, from Rohit Bhargav
• The Age of the Editor, a speech by Virginia Postrel at The State and Fate of Publishing conference from 1994