Although typically talked about in the context of museums and artefacts, increasingly curation is becoming adopted in a digital society as the concept of having others select a collection of content for you. It’s an incredibly powerful concept and as we move forward with search it becomes one of extreme importance as we seek to get the right combination of both relevancy _and_ trust in our results.
Curation of content is nothing new, and I’d forgotten how pervasive it was in how we consume content (and has always been) until I started randomly thinking about how one of this year’s big new trends will be cloud based audio (cue Google, Amazon and Apple announcements) and if I get all my music from the cloud, probably curated through some mechanical process like Lastfm or Pandora then is radio dead? Well, of course it’s not. Radio works because (mostly) they have proper people “curating” collections of tracks for specific audiences. Humans (especially good ones) know that there’s a difference between the Clash and the Sex Pistols and that “Punk rock” is an attitude not a music style, right kids? (But I digress).
This random thought then joined up with something I’d heard earlier in the week from those lovely folks at the Guardian’s TechWeekly podcast – (sure, I’m sucking up to them, but ignore that, they still represent the _only_ place in this country you can go to for proper analysis on the societal impact of technology). Last week they interviewed the folks at Artfinder (brilliant concept by the way) and whilst they talked about their innovative service, they stopped off to talk about the importance of curation and our old friend serendipity. Then Chris Thorpe (founder of Artfinder) said “John Peel was probably the ultimate serendipity engine” – talk about the penny dropping (and at the wrong speed too). For those of you viewing at home in black and white, John Peel was one of the most influential DJ’s in the UK, his tastes were, let’s just say eclectic, he knew no musical boundaries, and his playlists provided the soundtrack to the youth of millions of kids in the UK. What made Peel brilliant was he knew his audience, knew his music and had the confidence to introduce new material (new to the audience, or new to the world, it didn’t matter.) Ironically for this anecdote, it was Andy Kershaw or Mark Lamarr that played this role for me and given that unlike John, they haven’t yet shuffled off this mortal coil, their continued absence from the airwaves remains a national disgrace – can you fix it Jem? – (BTW – You need to follow Jem if you want the best curated experience of all that BBC radio has to offer).
So back to the point, why is all this radio nostalgia important? Well think back to what I just said – curation works best when it is done with:
- good knowledge of the audience,
- good knowledge of the subject and
- the courage to introduce something new.
These are the very essence of discovery in the digital world and yet another signal about why, even with the best machine learning systems and algorithms, you still need the human/social signal to get it right. It’s easy to generate a list of “likes” of seemingly connected content, and it’s easy to play to the “herd”. What’s hard is to make it properly personal in a way that will resonate with the individual and take that concept of personalisation to the next level.
This, my friends, is our challenge, if we are to truly get beyond relevancy, introduce trust and become the ultimate mechanism allowing the curation of the web for individuals, we have to figure out how to make search the enabler (note not owner) in how this happens.
Besides without this or Peel’s incredible talent, how am I ever going to find the next Rastabilly Skank?
Tags: curation, discovery, notes from the floor, rastabilly skank, serendepity
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