Are You A Curator?

by Steven Rosenbaum

The title Curator gets used a lot these days, but are you a curator? We’ll explore what it takes to be a Curator, asking question Are you a maker? Are you a leader? Do you thrive and explore across media boundaries?

The ideal curator is multi-disciplinary, willing to forage for ideas and wisdom in tweets, Tumblr posts, LinkedIn pages, Flickr images, Slideshare accounts, Facebook posts, G+ Groups and the legion of emerging voices and sources. The tools are ever changing. The nature of the ideas and the shape of their containers is morphing daily. Vine and Instagram videos have empowered a whole new class of creators. Pinterest boards are now part of the curatorial mix. YouTube, Vimeo and Metacafe are the tip of the video iceberg.

What is the future of the editorial function? What are the Legal and Moral questions around Curation? How does curation impact SEO and your sites unique content mix? Can curation coax your community into increased engagement? And how does contextual relevance play a role? And finally - what about Monetization? Can bring in meaningful revenue?

There’s a temptation to think that, in a crowded marketplace of content, you can have more impact by creating break-out content. However, I’d make the argument that whether you’re teaching, entertaining or enhancing your topic, curating content is to your advantage. Why? Being a useful filter makes you a destination rather than a source of content. Helping your audience by being a resource of valuable content makes you more than a voice in the wilderness. By aggregating and curating a wide variety of sources, you become the keeper of the coherent flame, a unique and valuable resource.

105 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2015

About the author

Steven Rosenbaum is an entrepreneur, author, and curator. He is the founder and CEO of the web's largest Video Curation Platform, Magnify.net. His book Curation Nation, explores the changing worlds of publishing, consumer content, and brand-centric curation. It will be published by McGraw Hill in the spring of 2011.
Rosenbaum is known as the father of user-generated video, having created MTV's groundbreaking UGC series MTV UNfiltered, a pre-web television project that handed cameras to young storytellers. Since that time he has built a career finding, organizing, and curating first-person storytelling.

Rosenbaum's work as an Emmy Award winning documentary filmmaker includes his film chronicling 9/11 "7 Days In September." That film gathered more than 500 hours of video around 9/11 - creating a curated journey through the eyes of 28 filmmakers and citizen storytellers. The result was the curation of the world's largest collection of 9/11 videos: The CameraPlanet Archive which Rosenbaum and producing partner Pamela Yoder donated to the National 9/11 Memorial and Museum. His film work includes long form documentary projects for National Geographic, HBO, CNN, MSNBC, Discovery, A&E, and The History Channel.

As a blogger, Rosenbaum contributes to posts on Technology, Internet Video, and emerging digital lifestyle trends to FastCompany, The Huffington Post, Silicon Alley Insider, Mashable, TechCrunch, and MediaBizBloggers.

Today, Rosenbaum calls Curation the "New Magic" of the connected world - fixing the signal to noise problem, and making the world contextual and coherent again.
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