The pace of information creation has been accelerating every year for decades. The pace of technological change is accelerating the rate of information production. This creates a very important question: How can human beings possibly keep up with the information explosion? Perhaps, with the help of a few friends.
One way we keep up is the social networks, and sharing links to interesting articles or videos with friends. Our friends help us separate the wheat from the chaff on the internet, by telling us about articles or videos or products they found interesting.
Another way is what's being called "curation." This is where people create lists of useful articles, videos, etc and share them with others. Curation is a more formalized form of the ad-hoc sharing happening on social networks. Curating content on the Internet has existed in several forms over the years, and is only now being called "curation," a word borrowed from museum curators.
The role of museum curators is not to throw a pile of random objects into a building, but to collect and organize existing objects into a story. Curation on the Internet has a similar purpose, to collect and organize collections of stuff gathered from the Internet, in order to tell a story.
At The Ethical Curator we want to encourage the creation of curation websites that add value to the Internet. The means to doing so is by identifying prinicples of good quality, ethical, useful, curation practices, that adds value to the data being collected.
Information is just data until someone creates meaning from the data. Curators filter and sift and connect nuggets of data together into a story, creating meaning from those nuggets. A flood of raw data is just not the same.
