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Christopher Parks
COM-310
Instructor Ursula Wefers
2 February 2015
The Age of Curation
Content curation is the summation of multiple sources of information that makes it easily
digestible for the viewer. This idea of content curation is very useful because it cuts down the
amount of time needlessly searching the internet for topics of interest by allowing the user to
select their own points of interest. Those who are accustomed to spending countless hours on the
internet every day can attest to the fact that they spend much of that time searching for what they
want or need to see. A user can filter stories by interest, publish date, and publication.
Applications like Storify and Flipboard allow users to curate their own content by interest, but
Storify takes it a step further by allowing members to pull together Tweets, Facebook posts, and
articles to create their own story and publish it to their site. There are other sites like LikeHack,
Pearltrees, and GetPrismatic that offer the same idea of content curation but in slightly different
forms. For example, GetPrismatic and Storify allow you to collect information from Tweets to
articles in the New York Times, but GetPrismatic is geared towards serving the user with stories
more catered to their interests as opposed to what is popular amongst all users.
What is important to most users is to have information they desire catered specifically to
their tastes. Many internet users do not wish to waste time searching for the latest in NFL
football news via Bing or Google, for example. Using one of these curation sites can pool all of
the most popular articles from across the web related to the NFL and serve it on a silver platter to
the user. Marketers used this curation tool before it became mainstream to the public. The reason

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was because it benefitted businesses to curate content that would be of specific interest to their
customers, like a company blog. Since many internet users have attached themselves to this
useful tool, it has proven to be very successful. In fact, there has been an uptick in personal
content curation services since 2007, from 3 to 20 (Bullas, 2013). Being able to filter content is
advantageous to all internet users because it reduces the amount of “surfing” while giving users
access to information they want immediately.
In conclusion, content curation is a powerful tool that is growing in popularity due to its
convenience. Having the ability to filter content by personal interest reduces the amount of time
wasted by searching for information via search engines. There are several popular sites including
Storify and LikeHack that allow users to curate their own information and judging by the
numbers, there will be more sites to come in the future. People are interested in consuming as
much information in as short amount of time as possible, and content curation sites give users
that ability.
Works Cited
Bullas,J.(2013, May 5). 4 Time Saving ContentCuration Tools.Retrievedfromwww.jeffbullas.com:
http://www.jeffbullas.com/2013/05/23/4-time-saving-content-curation-tools/