Curation Nation: How to Win in a World Where Consumers are Creators

by Steven Rosenbaum

Business Leaders Are Buzzing About Curation Nation

"An indispensible guide to the brave new media world."
--Arianna Huffington, editor in chief, the Huffington Post

"Gives me hope for the future of the Information Age. Rosenbaum argues for the growing importance of people--creative, smart, hip--who can spot trends, find patterns, and make meaning out of the flood of data that threatens to overwhelm us."
--Daniel H. Pink, New York Times bestselling author of Drive

"A testament to the strategic mind of a genius and a road map for developing engaging consumer experiences by curating content around your brand."
--Bonin Bough, Global Director, Digital and Social Media, PepsiCo

"Perfectly on-trend--an insightful guide to the future. So entertaining you won't put it down."
--Chris Meyer, author of Blur

"Read this book. Embrace curation, and you'll be ready to 'crush it' with focus and passion in the noisy new world of massive data overload."
--Gary Vaynerchuk, New York Times bestselling author of Crush It

"Provides a wealth of real-world examples of how businesses can use the Web to give their customers a valuable curated experience."
--Tony Hsieh, CEO, Zappos.com, and New York Times bestselling author of Delivering Happiness

"Our best hope for sorting the good from the mediocre in our increasingly overwhelming media landscape."
--Clay Shirky, author of Cognitive Surplus and Here Comes Everybody

About the Book:

Let's face it, we're drowning in data. Our inboxes are flooded with spam, we have too many "friends" on Facebook, and our Twitter accounts have become downright unmanageable. Creating content is easy; finding what matters is hard.

Fortunately, there is a new magic that makes the Web work. It's called curation, and it enables people to sort through the digital excess and find what's relevant.

In Curation Nation, Steven Rosenbaum reveals why brands, publishers, and content entrepreneurs must embrace aggregation and curation to grow an existing business or launch a new one. In fact, he asserts that curation is the only way to be competitive in the future.

Overwhelmed by too much content, people are hungry for an experience that both takes advantage of the Web's breadth and depth and provides a measure of human sorting and filtering that search engines simply can't achieve. In these shifting sands lies an extraordinary business opportunity: you can become a trusted source of value in an otherwise meaningless chaos of digital noise.

In Curation Nation, Rosenbaum "curates the curators" by gathering together priceless insight and advice from the top thinkers in media, advertising, publishing, commerce, and Web technologies. This groundbreaking book levels the playing field, giving your business equal access to the content abundance presently driving consumer adoption of the Web.

As the sheer volume of digital information in the world increases, the demand for quality and context becomes more urgent. Curation will soon be a part of your business and your digital world. Understand it now, join in early, and reap the many benefits Curation Nation has to offer.

Learn more at CurationNation.org.

Genres: Nonfiction, Business, Social Media, Internet, Curation, Technology, Professional Development

304 pages, Hardcover

First published January 28, 2011

About the author

Steven Rosenbaum, Co-founder and Executive Director of the Sustainable Media Center, with a Masters Degree in Truth from the prestigious Gallatin School at NYU, THE FUTURE OF TRUTH, explores the concept of Truth, finds out why it matters now more than ever, and explains how seemingly objective technologies known as Artificial Intelligence are poised to take hold of the concept of Truth and replace human complexity with potentially catastrophic robotic certainty. Published by Matt Holt Books, an imprint of BenBella Books, distributed in partnership with Simon & Schuster, represented by Todd Schuster at Aevitas.

Reviews

[Emily · Rating 1 out of 5]

The worst trend book I've read since my encounter with Thomas Friedman, this is an endless magazine article on curation and technology that is definitely only for people who don't know anything about either of those things. The author is gushingly enthusiastic about trend-setting websites with names from the bottom of the barrel that I've never even heard of (Mediaite? Newser??) and likes to laud the innovations of huge companies like PepsiCo. He also uses the word "listenomics." He can't seem to settle on what "curation" even means, citing as one example a man who set up a website where people could contribute posts and videos about Susan Boyle. Where's the selection or presentation in that? Basically, anything Web 2.0-esque that interests him is fair game.

Right out of the gate, the author annoyed me with a criminally simplistic one-page description of how librarians used to organize things using the Dewey Decimal System and then Google came along and fixed everything. (Not a thought on how libraries and the web are different in terms of their contents, format, users, creators, authority, etc.--because, I'm sure, he hasn't thought about any of those things.) Yes, I sound grumpy when people make mistakes like this, but somebody has to stand up for the concept of knowing what you're talking about, and this is an area I'm familiar with.

Here's a sample of his prose:

And now thanks to the magic elixir of bandwidth and hardware, we've all got a television broadcast studio in our pocket, a printing press on our desktop, and a radio station in our iPod. Mass media just went kaboom.

At one point he talks about buggy whips. Of course.

I made it 75 pages in and feel comfortable concluding that this is the kind of book that your clueless boss who knows nothing about technology reads immediately before getting all enthusiastic and assigning you some benighted project that is too nebulously conceived to be implementable, let alone successful.

[Giselle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I won this book through goodreads first-reads!

Curation is becoming a critical aspect of our online world. I know from years of being involved in online marketing and studying search engines that the search engines simply cannot keep up. It looks like they are, because if you ask for something, you get 10 results, a few of them good. But they're probably not the best results out there. We take what we get.

Curators will help fix this. Not only will we, as consumers of content, rely on the curators to show us the truly good information (with color), but the search engines will also rely on them as at least one of the many signals that indicate what belongs at the top of search results.

Online curation is something that I've been involved in for a long time now both in the publisher sense that Robert Scoble puts it: "Pick a niche and own it." as well as someone who is developing the tools that curators will use to own their own niches.

As someone who likes to curate, and loves the concept, I read as much as I can from the people who do nothing but think about this stuff all day every day. Steve Rosembaum is one of those guys. The people that Steve taps into for this book are those guys.

The criticism that this book could have been shorter and more organized is valid. Just the same, it is a valuable brain dump from one of the guys who is well in front of this important topic. It is full of insight and was well worth the read. I pulled dozens of quotes to share with my team to help solidify our own vision.

[Kressel Housman · Rating 2 out of 5]

When an author is all gung-ho over a single idea and promotes it as the answer to everything, my spidey sense tingles and says, “Take this guy with a grain of salt.” That happened on the very first page of this book, and I almost gave up after one chapter, but I pressed on, hoping to learn marketing secrets for the firm I work for. I didn’t.

The thesis of the book is that in this data-flooded Internet age, even more valuable than the Google algorithm are human curators who can tell the difference between signal and noise. Goodreads is a perfect example of a curation site. While we’re all rating and reviewing everything we read, we’ve collectively built what I’ve described as a human card catalogue. But just because I agree with the book’s thesis doesn’t mean that I think it merited 250 pages of repetition. With a book I like, I can whip through 250 pages in a couple of days. This book took me three weeks. The business origin stories kept me going: the beginnings of Huffington Post, Twitter’s big splash at South by Southwest, even how cable television got started in a mountainous Pennsylvania mining town. I love origin stories. But as for the book itself, I’d say skip it and read something by Clay Shirky.

[Ruth Seeley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gave this four stars because I think it's a must-read (sadly, for many of those who won't read it until it's too late). This despite numerous typos that drove me nuts and made me question my sanity - seriously - McGraw Hill publishes text books but can't afford to hire a copy editor or activate spell and grammar check? Bring on the self-publishing, I say! At least there will be some authors as chagrined by typos as I am.

As a history of what actually constitutes 'curation' it's quite startling - I'd never thought of either Reader's Digest or cable TV as exercises in curation, but of course they are.

Steve was a guest in one of our #bookmarket chats on Twitter, which made me curious about the whole subject. I'd noticed that people were starting to 'like' my reviews on Goodreads (and that there are some people on Goodreads whom I've never met and will probably never meet whose reviews I look forward to and trust implicitly). Have also noticed books I've read, rated and reviewed showing up on Goodreads friends' lists and realized this was a form of curation that's a little less fleeting than Twitter. The challenge, as we all know, is filtering the tsunami of information by somehow getting ourselves to high ground so we're not swept away, something, as Rosen points out in the first chapter, we've all done instinctively when buying things - books, clothes, magician equipment, by going to trusted sources. The question is whether those trusted sources will continue to exist and whether we'll be able to find them or not. One of the odd things about the publishing industry is that the last century doesn't seem to have helped supply the necessary filters to aid publishers in producing less of what people don't want and more of what they do want - or is it that the curators have consistently been ignored? (In this case curators include book buyers at the wholesale and retail levels, as well as book sellers and individual customers.)

In an odd sort of way, this book is very much a follow-on to The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR. As to the value judgments, I think the Jeff Jarvis good/Andrew Keen bad stance the book takes is slightly specious. Both have valid points to make and are worth listening to/reading.

And of course, there are other subjects/areas I wish the book had covered: science blogging in particular and science curators as well as my standard plea for less US ethno-centricity. However, since the book's called Curation Nation and that nation is presumably the US, I'll grudgingly have to give it a pass on that front. Hello though. There's a whole wide world out there that is not the US of A. Here we are. Hear us mumble. ;)

[Tara Brabazon · Rating 1 out of 5]

It is significant to note that the high profile supporters of this book describe it as a guide to the 'Brave New World.'

Without irony. Without understanding its origins. Or its context.

This is a book that minimizes and marginalizes the theft or 'borrowing' of the work of other people. Everyone becomes a creator. Everyone has something to say. Everyone curates the content of others.

Information literacy is unmentioned in this book. Knowledge is unmentioned. So is expertise.

Rosenbaum stated,“I didn’t want to weigh things down in the text with footnotes and endnotes.”

And that - dear friends - is what has caused our current diabolical culture. Let's value a vibe, an opinion or subjectivity because ... well ... we wouldn't want to weigh down the text.

Sigh.

I bought the book because of a statement used on the cover: "why the future of content is context."

That is a tremendously important phrase that is completely unmentioned in the book.

The theorizations of deterritorialization, de- and re-placing, alongside geosocial configurations of born digital objects are valuable and meaningful. They are ignored in Curation Nation.

How could such basic stuff exist, for page after page after page?

Perhaps because 'we' are a curation nation, and we read the simple rather than the difficult. Which this book verifies.

[David H Deans · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are several types of applications for content curation processes - my review is written from the perspective of a seasoned marketing practitioner.

I believe that Steven Rosenbaum has compiled a comprehensive assessment of the topic in his book, Curation Nation. He calls curation the "new magic" of the connected world - fixing the signal-to-noise problem and making the world contextual and coherent again.

Note, in March 2011 at the South by Southwest conference, I saw Mr. Rosenbaum present a summary of the findings of his research and extensive interviews that resulted in this thought-provoking book. He has demonstrated an in-depth understanding of why the future of content is applied context.

The conclusion of his observations, analysis and compelling examples are very simply put - "we are all curators." He also says, for some it will be accidental. For others, it will become part of who we are. And, for a few of us, curation will become our livelihood.

I had not previously considered the long history of content curation within the publication field. The example of the "Reader's Digest" magazine -- the well-known compendium of abridged articles -- is mentioned early in the book. In hindsight, it provided me a helpful conceptual foundation for the numerous other application scenarios mentioned throughout this book.

Given my professional background, my view of "why human curation matters" was somewhat limited by my own experience. Mr. Rosenbaum's detailed explanations and varied case studies really helped to broaden my awareness of all the other potential possibilities.

Chapter 5 is about Content Entrepreneurs, and it describes some of the more disruptive characteristics of curation applications today. It also sets the stage for a discussion of what constitutes "fair use" of other people's content - which is a contentious issue, for sure.

It seems that achieving the most effective curation result is part Art, part Science and perhaps lucky Serendipity. This quote from chapter 7 is profound; "creating unique, memorable content isn't a formula - it's a happy accident. In the same way, as publishers struggle to figure out curation, there will be a few leaders and lots of followers searching for the future economic model for content."

Andrew Blau's summary of the transformation aspects of content curation sums up the implications to the legacy publisher status quo, and particularly why big media companies don't like this emerging trend. He said "What is clearly happening is that there are many, many more people speaking in public -- or some version of public -- without having to ask for permission, some of whom seem to be able to accumulate large audiences, some audiences the scale of traditional broadcast television or feature films."

In summary, this book is a current snapshot of this topic, based upon both historical and recent events. Once you've read it, you may want to conduct your own ongoing research. That was my take-away - I'm intrigued by this subject, and I want to learn more. I also want to enhance my skills in the area of content strategy development, within a marketing context.

[Book Calendar · Rating 3 out of 5]

Curation Nation Why The Future of Content Is Context How To Win In A World Where Consumers Are Creators by Steven Rosenbaum

Steven Rosenabum is describing a major shift in how media is being delivered. Consumers of media are increasingly becoming prosumers and creators of their own content. People create a variety of sites based on their interests from cooking to baseball. Steven Rosenbaum runs Magnify.net which aggregates video content on the web so many of his ideas come from his direct business experience.

A prosumer is a consumer who proactively chooses what and how they will consume. A good example of a prosumer might be someone who buys green products, or only buys from the Better Business Bureau. Increasingly prosumers are becoming creators of their own content based on what they are interested in.

The tools of content creation are becoming cheaper and easier to get access to. Social tools like Twitter, Youtube, blogs, podcasts, and other social media tools are easy to get access to. It is not just the software and web which is becoming cheaper, people now can easily afford smart phones, laptops, and inexpensive video recorders. People can use these tools to spread their ideas and opinions.

The difference between this book and other books is that Steven Rosenbaum takes it one step further. He describes how to curate content, picking out and organizing materials for blogs and websites. He even describes content strategy citing Kristina Halvorson's book Content Strategy.

Then Steven Rosenabaum talks about how curation scales with aggregation mixed with selective content on websites like The Huffington Post, Blog Her, and Linked In. This creates a larger picture of curation both on the small individual level and on the larger scale of big commercial websites.

None of the material is particularly new. However, how it is presented is new. This is a solid overview of how to organize social media tools. It pulls many disparate threads together to create a picture of a strategy to manage and organize social content. The book can be a bit diffuse at times. This book would be useful for people interested in new media.

[Robin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a very interesting read on modern times that, like most things technology, will be out-dated in a short time. That doesn't mean it won't be a good history lesson, or proof of "I told you so" for someone - it means read it soon if you really want to get your effort's worth.

Author Steven Rosenbaum does a great job of bringing a wealth of information to his reader, i.e. curating information about internet curating. His tendency toward favoring curation is more obvious than just the title, but he deserves credit for the lengths he went to to get opinions of people who disagree - partly, and whole-heartedly.

Some of the conclusions he draws in the end are more fanciful than he gave basis for throughout the book - not impossible, just not all that well-founded - but overall Rosenbaum made a good book, worthy of four stars...

Except that, while preaching the worth of having a human filter on all things information, one must wonder how, after a year or more of research and work, the author skipped his own advice when it came to printed media. He did his job well at curating the information presented in the book, but needed at least one more human filter to read it before it went to print - errors do not abound, but words are missing, the grammar does not always hold together, and sometimes the author repeats himself from paragraph to paragraph (not while trying to make a point), once even almost word for word.

[Rhodes Davis · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love the pursuit of knowledge and yet recognize the challenge of making sense of the avalanche of data that overcomes us each day burying us in the relevant and irrelevant. Some technological tools help us sort and aggregate data but ultimately the greatest value comes through wise curation of data.

Like reviewers who help us appreciate, discover, or avoid books, restaurants, and movies, adept curators help us make wise choices with limited time and resources to focus on information with high-value return. Curators who are focused on their own financial gain or shilling for a particular point-of-view will face a narrow audience or complete rejection. Good curators provide what we need, introduce us to obscure information, reveal developing issues or technology before it is mainstream, and make sense of the flood of information.

This is an excellent book on rise of data curation on the Internet and addresses content sharing issues and debates. The book also explores the challenges of how curation can or should look and where it is going. This is especially important for those developing an Internet channel.

"The future of search is verbs" - Bill Gates (Curation Nation, p. 220). People search because they want to act! Curation provides information to help them act.

[Rachel · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book - a lot of what I do both for work and all of what I do on my blogs is curation. I wanted some new insights or an intelligent study of the changing nature of human data consumption or something, but instead I got some (not very well curated) interviews with head honchos of has-been internet companies and a chapter on how to start a blog.

Littered with "kinda"s and "cuz"s, Curation Nation reads like someone trying way too hard to be hip. Interesting thoughts from interview subjects are lost within their own wordy quotes, and the same few subjects are interviewed so frequently throughout the book that they lose their authority and the later chapters begin to feel like uninspired repeats of earlier ones.

Okay, good things: This great quote from Paul Carr, "Curation without expertise is just scrapbooking." Something I'll be trying to remember! And a thought-provoking comment from the conclusion: "Passive participants in social media will be off the grid, their digital vote won't count. And they won't be helping to influence the tides and turns of our increasingly digital world."

Unfortunately, that's about all I got out of it.

[Kari · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most thought-provoking books I've read in awhile. I need some of my friends to read it so we can discuss! :)
Rosenbaum discusses the "deomcratization of the curator" - a curator doesn't only work in museums any more. Consumers are becoming "pro-sumers", a consumer turned part-time professtional. Curation adds a human touch to aggregation, and with the overwhelming amount of information streaming past us every day, it's the human element that helps to make sense of it. Now that content is more and more free, curation is becoming king. We need to focus on the WHY of content as much as the WHAT.
As a librarian, I was curious to see if we'd be included in the dialog, and we weren't, much, only as an example of a place of currated content, and the Dewey Decimal System as an antiquated method of trying to currate that content - the explosion of information we try to corral in libraries has reached beyond the scope of Dewey's ability to contain it neatly. Hm....what's next?!

[Deborah · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was interesting, well written and Easy to understand. It includes an index and a list of sources.

He does make good points for curation, but it seemed to ramble rather than give the advice implied in the subtitle. At least there is an index and chapters, but I think it would have been better to arrange the information into sections. One section for an overview to explain curation, one to advise how everyone can benefit from curated data (including a list of websites), and one with advise on how to use curation for businesses.

He did include stories of his experiences in TV, but didn't try to sell his own website too much.

I won this through the goodreads first reads program on April 4th. It arrived on April 15th and it is a full finished hardback copy.

[Christine · Rating 3 out of 5]

I actually got a lot more out of Curation Nation than I expected. I was really interested in the concepts of curation, and did a lot of additional research due to information that I found in this book.
There were some interesting discussion on the pros and cons of curation, and a lot of examples of how it could be and is used. The Endnotes section was useful as well for looking up further details on some the examples that were presented.

The book could have been more condensed, and perhaps more organized. There were some parts that rambled on or repeated information.


I received this book for free through Goodreads First Reads.

[Stephanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I borrowed this e-book from Brooklyn Public Library and read it straight through. I wish I knew for certain that I wanted to devote myself to web curation full-time. However, Rosenbaum's extensive explanation for what curation is and its necessity put me at ease for all the posting and sharing I do. Because I have embraced both social media and curation, I see myself as an information professional who can increase my value exponentially. The book is well-written and extremely helpful for information professionals at all levels of expertise. Highly-recommended for anyone, really, who reads and wants to share information with others.

[Dujo · Rating 3 out of 5]

First of all, it's crazy how outdated this book has become in the 3 years since its release. Half of the website links don't work and a lot of the companies mentioned have changed names or no longer exist. Not the author's fault, of course, but it's crazy how fast things change on the web.

The book itself was alright. For a book with about the internet with the subtitle of "How to Win...", I found it a bit disappointing. It turned out to be much more anecdotal than practical. Nothing really new or groundbreaking, but I do agree with the author that curation will continue to become more important and more valuable over time.

[Amy Beth · Rating 3 out of 5]

The overall idea of the book is interesting: we are so overcome with data now we all need curators (bloggers/websites) we trust to tell us what is good. Some of the history was interesting too. It wasn't great writing though and I didn't agree with his a priori ideas on the omnipresence of media. The most interesting chapter was on how to be a curator for whatever topic you are interested in. It had great tips on how to find keywords and content on the web to populate your site. Well written or not, it is clear curation is going to be important in the future of the web.

[Loki · Rating 3 out of 5]

This isn't a bad book, but it is an introductory one. If you're already familiar with the players and arguments in content creation and strategy, this book is probably a two-star read - you won't learn anything new (other than maybe some anecdotes about various startups). If you're not already familiar with the topic, it's a decent overview that will get you started, and provide you with some places to start if you want to dig deeper - but if you're in a hurry, just skip this and go straight to writers like Clay Shirky, Chris Anderson or Seth Godin.

[Dave · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm concluding this book is a career-builder for the author, not the reader.

The tone will turn you off from the very beginning, and it doesn't get much better from there. I was hoping for some kind of how-to content, but the book limits itself to a celebration of curation itself: "look at all these people who are doing it! You should too!"

Add this to the growing stack of business books that are all sizzle, no steak. Don't push a trend if you're not going to show me how to jump on board.

[Linda]

Great book; I borrowed from the Belmar Library in Lakewood, Colorado. Loved it so much, found so many compelling ideas that, upon returning my library copy, I promptly ordered my own copy from amazon.com so I can highlight it and put colored stickies on significant pages. Thanks, Steve Rosenbaum for my intro to this subject!! Every librarian should read this book. Without fail! And then let me/us know what you think!

[Nuttamon Prayoonhong · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very inspiring. The book projects a clear impression on the present society where everything is linked and shared. While introducing the new "curation" concept,at the same time, the book encourages us to start filter the flood of content that's been coming to our lives. Although the solutions of how to behave in this downpour-data environment wasn't clear enough, it at least gives you ideas of how you can apply this strategy to your business, even your everyday life.

[Gianna Lorandi · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was eye opener to me. Being working on a website for a few months now, I've decided to start over because I've clearly missed a few key points about the format and the content.
Curation is such an important concept I didn't even know existed.
Rosenbaum writing is so easy to follow and all the case studies are fantastic and interesting examples, I've found myself researching them all.

[Zach Olsen · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was too long. Aggregation, curation and recommendations are more and more necessary and desired as the tidal wave of content is coming down on us, thats the gist of it, I don't think over 300 pages is needed to explain that.

[Kristennicole · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a curator and journalist who's studied the business of curation, I find Rosenbaum an authority on the phenomenon that will ultimately contextualize the "brain dump" of content we've left across the connected web.

[shinfu]

I have just won this book from First Reads. I look forward to reading it. Thanks.

[Landy]

Thank you Goodreads First Reads for this free book. Looking forward to reading it when I get it. Review to follow.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting snapshot of an emerging edge.

[Teri Temme · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love the new word to add to my vocabulary and resume! We are all in information overload, this book details how to deal with it and make sense of it all. Great read.

[Sarah Sammis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hayward Bookshop

[Danie Cutter]

This book was received as part of First Reads, will post a review when read... watch this space.

[Nicholas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty basic....