We wrote about self-directed learning a couple of months ago. We like the idea, and we also like the buzzword!

Wikipedia is the easiest example of the promise and the problem in one place: You can potentially learn a lot, and you can get hopelessly lost as well. Thinking along the lines of “How to efficiently make sense of things on the Internet,” we stumbled upon the concept (and implementations) of content curation. In one sentence: Content curation refers to a human manually filtering information so that others can get straight to the point. There are several pages for the “full version,” including this one. It’s amazing that the idea emerged only in 2010, because info has been overloading us for quite some years now. Allowing one thought to lead to another, like they do on the Internet: --> Isn’t this about making an autocracy out of a democracy? --> What about attribution of content to the original author? --> What about the curator doing bad things to what the original author intended? --> It’s great that writers and companies want to squarely address info overload, but what about the next level of the problem... curated info needing to be curated? So what are other people saying about this?

“When in doubt, Google,” and one of the results was this page:

Bewilderment! The title of the page is “Health Family Tips,” but the links on the page are all to “content curation” or something similar. Actually, no. The links on the right are all about Health. So maybe this is an aggregator with “family health” as the theme? No again. Plus, it says “links from Bing.com,” so what is this page doing? (The page also says “no posts matched your search”, and there are some hard-to-understand text snippets.)

It all looked very funny. Eventually I realised: My original Google search was showing me the same links as here, so this page had added to the results without giving me anything... Actually, no. It did give me the answer to my question, which was “What can a content curator do?” The most basic thing he/she can do is to save us from copy/paste. That is at the root of “Making sense of the Internet,” isn’t it?