By Dann Hurlbert
Social media has resulted a continued barrage of social spamming–re-posting millions of perceived “noteworthy” images/videos/links/stories and sharing of billions of m
undane daily thoughts and routines—arguably a waste of time for those involved on either side of the post. Out of courtesy, a good curator carefully selects what content will actually benefit those who encounter it—rather than re-posting arbitrarily. J-P De Clerck of i-scoop.eu defines content curation better than anyone: “Content curation is about aggregating/discovering/gathering relevant content and then sharing or presenting it to audiences in a targeted and optimized way.” One thing (among many things) his article Content Curation: Overview, Benefits, Goals, and Tools discusses is that a curator’s goals should be “to become a trusted filter and source of valuable and relevant information.” I couldn’t agree more.
One way to visualize smart curation is using Harold Jarch PKM framework of Seek>Sense>Share, which he wrote about in a recent Social Media Today post. Jarch outlined that “sharing is not as important as knowing [what and] when to share.” He expands by saying that “sharing can confirm or accelerate our knowledge,” but “little should be shared if there has been no value added.”
I propose that each individual develops criteria that guides his/her decisions about what things are worthy of being re-posted. Pawan Deshpande wrote an article entitled Content Curation & Fair Use: 5 Rules to being an Ethical Content Curator for contentcurration.com that gave five generic rules for content curation. To model the change I’d like to see in the world, I decided to sum up Deshpande’s, Jarch’s, and De Clerck’s articles even more tightly.
Introducing The 3 C’s of Content Curation:
1) Be Concise: Use only the content you need to make your point.
2) Be Considerate: give credit to the creator of that content.
3) Be the Connection: provide links to the original work.
Using these 3 C’s, we can avoid becoming social spammers by actively and courteously curating and sharing [valuable–and only valuable–] information.
–Dann Hurlbert, Media & Design Specialist
Photo Courtesy of ClckrFreeVectorImages
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