A big brouhaha on capitalizing on other’s hard work by aggregating (often sans credit) or adding very little value has led to the announcement of a new Council on Ethical Blogging and Aggregation at SXSW. Another group announced a Curator’s Code, with (proposed) standard symbols to indicate a direct attribution (“I found this here”) or an indirect inspiration (“I derived my idea from…”). An overview of the controversy at the NYT provides a good summary.
Curation is a key component of the web — linking ideas, stories, bizarre videos — and something publishers wrestle with. (See Content Curation, from Content Wrangler for a good overview.) While the controversy is primarily related to the prevalence of unattributed reposting, it is instructive for all kinds of curation.
Not about the controversy, but also about curation from SXSW, Man vs. Algorithm: Online Curation of Videos, a podcast, looks at human vs. AI curation – what does each do well? (The audio references video the audience can see, so you’ll have to use your imagination.) (And you may think it is all done by AI, but check out Pandora’s approach: Pandora’s effort to curate music, from NYT in 2009.)