N

You have arrived at the web home of Noah Brier. This is mostly an archive of over a decade of blogging and other writing. You can read more about me or get in touch. If you want more recent writing of mine, most of that is at my BrXnd marketing x AI newsletter and Why Is This Interesting?, a daily email for the intellectually omnivorous.

October, 2006

Why Curation is Better than Filtering

Don't mean to hang on the word tip for another entry, but this is something I've been thinking a lot about lately.

For a while we've been talking about what all these bloggers and companies are doing online as 'filtering': They are helping bring news I want to me without all the other stuff. In fact, that's how I thought of myself, especially the sidenotes (for those that don't visit the site, they're on the homepage), which are just links to other places that I think are interesting. I've talked about it a fair amount in the past, even suggesting in an iMedia article that marketers need to become filters for consumers.

While I don't deny the value in filtering, I've decided that from here on out I've got a new word.

Curation.

The word suggests I'm actively looking after what I put out there for you guys, rather than just passively filtering by something like title or category.

What's really interesting to me about this idea is that I think it's what separates humans from computers: In the future computers will filter and humans will curate. While the computer will help and be fairly accurate, it won't know the audience well enough to recommend a far out story that doesn't fit in the algorithm.

So, welcome to NoahBrier.com: Carefully Curated Since 2004

October 27, 2006
©
Noah Brier | Thanks for reading. | Don't fake the funk on a nasty dunk.