To make a long story short, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to disaggregate signal from noise.

“We’re living in a pivotal time in the history of mass communication — what we believe is the golden age of new media.”

The real scarcity isn’t content anymore. It’s attention.

When it’s impossible to absorb everything from the flood of information, the best we can do is pick and choose what matters to us most — or, better yet, find the people who can do the curating for us.

Curators are the new creators, and as consumers, we’re going to be willing to pay someone with good taste to help us sort through the ever-growing mass of information at our fingertips.

Zuckerberg’s Law, or the tendency to share more and more on social media over time

Dunbar’s number, or the average number of stable social relationships one can maintain at a given time (it’s around 150)

Zipf’s Law, which describes how in any system of resources there are a small number of items of high value, and a “long tail” of many more of low value

In the end, we always end up somewhere in the middle… but it’s a lot of swinging back and forth on this creation/curation pendulum until we get there.

there’s room for a new market of creators as curators

As we saw with The Browser example, it’s possible to monetize free content if it’s curated well — consumers are willing to pay someone who has good taste

The best brands (and individual influencers, at that) are the best at an always-evolving curation as a service.

Content curation hooks people in with the promise of learning new skills while saving time, and it keeps them coming back by building a sense of community around a particular subject or vertical.

Curation, in a sense, is its own form of intertextuality, or the shaping of a text’s meaning by another text.