Studies show that the average information worker spends 2 hours a week looking for information which costs companies and individuals millions of dollars in productivity.  Organizing access to information will solve this problem.  KBrowser allows you to manage your context and work more efficiently.

How do you compete with big brand publishers.  Brands like NYTimes, Huffington Post or Daily Kos, with staff or network of writers able to generate new content on a continuous basis creating engagement and online ad revenue.  The answer is content curation.  Curation allows any small publisher to create valuable and fresh content continually. Most probably you are already receiving tens of news letters, Facebook posts and twitter massages related to topics of interest.  If you start organizing and tagging this information, soon you will have pretty valuable knowledge base that can generate new ad revenue for your site, help you with ideas for new posts, and create tens of new links for your social media messaging.  See our KBucket page for an example. [ad name=”LTB ATF”]

I don’t know about you but I often don’t get things right the first time.  When I start a project – a blog, or a curation project on KBucket – I start with a topic , by creating a few categories to store my curated links . What happens next is inevitable – as I curate, my ideas on how to tag and organize change.  Often the reason is because I can not find what I curated and that tells me that the tags and the grouping are not optimal and they need to change or enhanced. For example just today a user asked about paper.li type apps that organize information in magazine format – I have curated this information on my Search & Social Media page – So I searched for paper.li on KBucket,  since my search terms did not find me the desired information, clearly because the tagging was not optimal, so I enhanced it. A good curated page takes time to build and optimize.  If you are just filtering and aggregating without going back to improve your research, then you are not really curating!  Curation by definition is organization and maintenance. Additionally the value and usability of your curated page improves when the organization and tagging is informed by a community.  Different people have different ways  of relating to the same information.  Therefore crowd sourcing is a critical function of building optimal curated pages. Our two year case study of a group of 70 people shows that an optimal curated page (the groups and tags on a topic) takes about 2 months to optimize. [ad name=”Post LTB”]

You can use your curated research as an engine for your messaging strategy.  If you read 10 to 20 sources of news a day – using our tools this should take you no more than 30 minutes – and select 10-15 related articles to your topic – saving and organizing should take you no more than 30 minutes – and you do this for lets say 40 days you will have curated, tagged and organized between 400-600 articles that you can use as part of your content strategy. For an example take a look at this page and notice that each tag can be used as a unique address to broadcast a message.  Here are some of the benefits of your curated research. Your research will help you come up with new messaging ideas While Conversing on Social Media you have ready made answers for any dialog Instead of linking people to an article on some other site you are directing them to your research page promoting your research You can crowdsource- Engage your community and expend you reach Content curation will be an integral part of the savvy marketing executives strategy.  Here are some other ideas on curation strategy to support my arguments Contact us for more information on how to use curation to become a messaging machine. [ad name=”Post LTB”]

Curation is traditionally defined as “The act of organizing and maintaining a collection of artworks or artifacts”. Curators are knowledgeable about their domain and hence the ability to pick the best work for a collection based on their research and knowledge of the subject matter. Curation has two defined characteristics – organization and maintenance – Organization implies that you can always access the collection and know where things are – Maintenance implies that you can always add or subtract items in time. Many products or activities that are simply filtering – even human filtering are advertised as curation products.  For example many call twitter list’s as curation – But is that really curation? How?  The list is just a list and the tweets are random.  Lists are certainly filters, but can they be identified as curation? Another activity that is being branded as curation is what traditionally has been known as syndication.  This article by “Steve Rosenbaum” is branding Huffington Post as a curation site – A content site where editors pick other people’s content for different segments of their publication.  Is this really curation or loose syndication? A search on Huffington post on “social media” gives me this.  It’s certainly a nice list, but where is the organization?  where is the organized context? Let’s compare the same search on KBucket.  The search for “social media” gives you this  with other related articles organized and accessible in context. I think there is a lot of value in filtering and managing streams – Aggregation with human editorial touch is also very useful and there are great successful models of that like techmeme.com – But these are not new activities, they have been around. What is new with curation are tools and platforms that let users be managers of context and also search for information in context  Organization, purpose and maintenance define the value of the curated set.  Search defines the value of the curated platform.

Describing curation Rohit Bhargava says – “a content curator is someone who continually finds, groups, organizes and shares the best and most relevant content on a specific issue online”. The most important component of this job is the word – continually.  In the real-time world of the Internet, this is critical.” I like Rohit’s description and his emphasis on the word continually.  We have practical experience and a real world case study that emphasizes the notion of continual refinement when it comes to curation. Background The vision for our authoring tool Optimal Desktop was conceived by my partner and chief designer Stefan Ritzi when he was working as an IT consultant.  Through his consulting practice he recognized a common desire by various groups within organization for personalized information access solutions.  The desire was specifically for curated information access solutions. In a white paper based on a 2 year case study (we wrote this paper in 2005 before “Curation” was coined) in a real world environment we describe the problem in this way: “Optimal Access is a software company dedicated to solving the problem of saving and sharing search results. With wider usage of the Internet, individual users and institutions of all size, search, capture and save information from a growing number of sources. Yet, the traditional solution for bookmarking, managing, accessing and sharing a large volume of links fails to satisfy this universal need. Optimal Access products empower project managers and researchers to aggregate and organize information from multiple sources by subject or project making it easy to store and share links in context hence improving the findability of information.” Case Study Over two years, we studied the use of Optimal Desktop (Our Desktop Authoring and Curation solution) for 4 operational groups (70 people) within an information-based organization – FirstAssist in London UK.  The subjects worked in 4 functional call centers providing Medical, Travel, Claims and Legal assistance to their clients.  Using our products they managed access to an average of 916 links to Intranet pages, web applications, Internet news sources, files and folders. Here is how Geoff Tothill Chief Medical Officer and our chief evangelist describes the problem with traditional solutions and the need for curation (tools that can continuously reformat information access): ” The problem with the traditional concept of a web portal is that structure and direction is ‘designed into’ the portal and the addition of new material, or the personalization of this information for use in a restricted part of an operation can be very time consuming. Using Optimal Desktop as a universal client we have solved many of the traditional problems associated with the structuring of information which is derived from multiple sources. We have built individual cabinets (Panels – The top tabs in a KBucket page) for each of our teams, with information grouped together logically in drawers (Groups – The bottom tabs in a KBucket page). This has allowed a large amount of information to be deployed in a coherent and understandable way.” Process of curation What is critical and the point I want to share in this post is how to create superior value in curation.  Curation becomes real valuable when its refined by a group and reflects the needs of the people that are actually using the curated product.  Here is how FirstAssit curators explain their process: “Our Curated pages are built by our Project leads and with the input of the entire team. We have found that it takes roughly 2 months to optimize the taxonomy of our Curated pages so our employees can easily find the information they need to do their jobs. The flexibility provided by Optimal Desktop to easily organize and re-organize the taxonomy of our curated pages makes it possible for us to optimize our information access needs.” Value of curation Value of curation can be summed up in time saving and education and that’s exactly what First Assist case study shows: “We have reduced the time to train new employees in our International Call Center division from 8 months to 3 months. Our new employees quickly learn to find the information they need to perform their jobs. Since call center operates in 3 shifts the standardized access to information provided by Optimal Desktop has improved the efficiency of call center employees staying up-to-date with the latest manuals and reports. Using Optimal Desktop, group managers are now able to quickly add content and make it searchable for their staff. Eliminating the need to depend on specialized staff (Programmers and IT staff) has improved our publishing time from 2 days to one hour. Optimal Desktop has empowered those in service provision to actually design client specific portals with specific navigational interfaces targeted at their staff, reducing training and dramatically increasing speed of deployment. This certainly gives us a competitive advantage.“ My 2 cents In general I think we can say that curation tools are there to help people find the information they need faster.  As we can see from the value conclusions above, both people who helped create the curated products and new people who came to use them benefited from the curated results.  Another important value of curation is editorial control by everyday users, a function that until now was reserved for web developers and magazine editors. In summation I believe that tools that incorporate refinement as part of their philosophy can inevitably offer better curated products. [ad name=”LTB ATF”]