Online Curation: Dos and Don'ts

Jennifer Hoang

Category: Strategy

04.26.2012

One zettabyte: that’s a one, followed by 21 zeros. 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. A trillion gigabytes.

This is the amount of data we – all over the internet, all over the world – consumed in 2010. In 2011, that number jumped to 1.8 zettabytes. Talk about information overload: users are bombarded with all types of information and cannot tell the difference between the ones they want to view, and the ones they are forced to view.

Are humans the web’s secret power? We think so. Humans are able to cater, filter, and share information to their network. If we had a computer to tell us what we like, would we ever fully rely on it? Does a robot really know what you want to eat for dinner every night? Not exactly. To put it another way, curation is the key moving forward online.

Curation – what is it? It’s valuable data that’s not yours, but you want to share it with the world. Users want hand-delivered information that is filtered out from all the nonsense floating throughout the rest of the web.

Curation is the next big thing. One quick look at Pinterest will give you an idea of how popular curation and sharing has become, and it’s only getting bigger.

We encourage everyone to curate, but please do it properly and legally.

Here’s a best practices list, from a recent article published by Fast Company:

  • If you don’t add context, or opinion, or voice and simply lift content, it’s stealing.
  • If you don’t provide attribution, and a link back to the source, it’s stealing.
  • If you take a large portion of the original content, it’s stealing.
  • If someone asks you not to curate their material, and you don’t respect that request, it’s stealing.
  • Respect published rights. If images don’t allow creative commons use, reach out to the image creator–don’t just grab it and ask questions later.

At NJI Media, we love to curate articles we find interesting – check out our tweets throughout the day. And don’t worry – we’re curating the legal way. You can do the same by following the simple guidelines above.

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