“Content curation, simply put, is collecting, contextualizing and sharing information, often on a specific topic.”

Content curation is the art of finding, organizing, adding value and publicly sharing digital information artifacts on a specific topic for a particular audience interest.

Content curation makes it possible to understand, explore, make sense of a topic, issue, subject, person or event by organizing the best information resources about it (articles, studies, images, video, etc) and providing keen insight and expert guidance into their exploration.

The main goal of content curation is to help others discover, learn and make-sense of something they are not familiar with.

“Curation is using your expertise in a field to gather great content around a specific theme and present that content in a way that will educate others.”

Here a list of specific reasons that make content curation so compelling

it is hard for a newbie to distinguish a reliable, trustable source from a marketer or spammer,

titling and meta information is often misleading, ambiguous or just not clear enough

relying always on the same sources tends to limit your view and awareness of other new ideas and opinions in your field of interest

[Content curation is] the process of assembling, summarizing and categorizing and interpreting information from multiple sources in a context that is relevant to a particular audience.

In the near future, when there will be hundreds of alternative specialty news sources curating tens of thousands of interest areas, it will be you, the reader, who will select your preferred topics and your trusted curator(s) to keep yourself informed.

Thus you will see readers gradually move away from superficial and generic information sources (as most traditional newspapers are) to individual curators or news hubs that curate specific topics and interests. The more specific, the better.

“Content curation is the art of collaging sometimes seemingly disparate content from a variety of sources to make previously hidden truths manifest with a NonZero goal of helping others see, understand, interact with and contribute to emerging ideas, memes and truths.”

“Content curation is the collection of content created by others, then filtered through one’s own point of refer­ence.”

Storytelling is an essential part of content curation, as it is often the perfect vehicle through which one can guide others into the exploration and sense-making of something that is altogether unfamiliar to them.

Instead of simply providing a classification of information, storytelling provides a communication technology to navigate and explore that information in a natural way.

“Curation is a form of storytelling that places content within context.”

Curation is an active skill, not a passive one: it’s about identifying gaps in skills and knowledge and plugging them, but also about building communities and networks.