In the first part of this post, I began the discussion of a new style of media: sites that have some original content, but primarily picked and linked to the best content from around the web for their audience.

1. The primary goal of any site is to serve its audience.
2. Curation is the aggregation, filtering, and prioritization of content for a targeted audience, with context and editorial voice.
3. It’s extremely hard to make the best content on the Web.
4. Great content is subjective and will be evaluated by your audience.
5. There’s not much use in creating the 4th best piece of content on something.

Now that you have had time to think over the first 5 rules, the remainder of the “top 10″:

6. If you can’t create the best content for your audience, link to someone who does. It’s all about what serves your audience best. Restated, this is Jarvis’ New Rule: Cover what you do best. Link to the rest. Scott Karp calls this link journalism. If you focus on what your audience would be most interested in — regardless of whether or not you created it — and succeed, nobody can possibly compete with you.
7. Curation is usually more efficient than creation. Creating great original content is typically time-consuming, expensive, and requires expert knowledge of your audience. Finding content for your audience and adding editorial voice is often just as useful (if not more), and takes a fraction of the time.
8. It’s not cost-effective to build a definitive site without curation. It’s just too expensive to create the volume of content yourself that you need to keep your audience coming back frequently and spending lots of time on your site. Unless you have the resources to hire an entire staff of writers, it is difficult, if not impossible to build the library of content needed to become authoritative source on your topic, driving traffic and keeping readers on your site. You need frequency and time on site to make money in the new, lower-revenue world of the Web.
9. Curation is not gatekeeping. Gatekeeping assumes that your audience needs you to decide what’s best for them; that they have no choice but to rely on you for information. Curation assumes that your audience trusts you to find what will interest them; that you’re a reliable and time-saving representative of their interests.
10. Curation on the Web requires technology. A huge amount of manual labor will go a long way — successful curated sites like Engadget and Gizmodo, created by OneSpot advisor Peter Rojas, were started by dedicated expert editors manually combing through thousands of articles each day to find the best of the Web for their audience — but any approach powered by a lone editor or any small team of humans is bound to miss something when faced with the sheer scale of the Web. As Clay Shirky says: It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure (thanks to Clay for pointing me to the IDC stats in the last post). OneSpot is one of the first platforms specifically built to address this problem, but there are many existing individual tools that are useful as well.
11. The eleventh rule has yet to be written. Please add your suggestions in the comments below.

Curation on the web is still relatively new and evolving, as is OneSpot — I encourage you to participate in the discussion.