This term seems to have taken the place of “portal”, although it is more than the concept of portal,  and a little different.  Curation is better understood as what people expected from a portal,  if they were putting  much work into shaping what their portal did for users.

The most important idea  for me in curation is that we depend on our friends and  teachers and  mentors and influencers to tell us what they think.  Being  the social animals that we are, it helps to shape who WE are.  Not only the “WE” in reference to us as individuals (in the  plural sense of many “I”s),  but also in the collective sense in that we are not lonely individuals but communities  consisting of individuals,  shaped by communities,  with and by “other individuals”  who are in turn shaped  by us,  their followers.  Sort of.

But CURATION is a community of links;  or the communal nature  of links.  This was the strength of portals, and is now,  the  strength of “Social” sites (IF,  that is,  they are actually “social”)

RSS was a nearly “curation” tool. It oozed SOCIAL.  Which is what made it like a living breathing newspaper for me.  It is  still the underlying  technology  for  most of the  curation happening now.  Dave Winer has been blogging and now tweeting about this for years.  And Dave is , for me,  a major source  of curation for  me in my selection of folks who  think about the Web  in an inherently social way. 

The church itself has always been a curator.  This is the case with many philosphical/politcal/ideological communities.  People seek out communities to share their world experience, and to  seek understanding of what that experience tells them.  The church pastor , prior to  modern mass media,  was often THE major  source of  information about the  world.  Along with that,  a theological perspective  was imparted,  by virtue of the way those pastors imparted that information about the  world.  In non-urban settings,  the pastor  was often not only the only educated person in a particular village,  but the only one  with a channel for getting information from the outside (much of this prior to electronic mass communication ).

Now we can find curators for very specific niches.

Curators bring THEMSELVES into the link creation process,  and publish their collection of links to what they consider to be important or interesting items.   They often write blog posts with more detail  of why they linked this or that particular thing,  and often tweet that  link (usually,  Twitter is the channel for that link,  although, there are,  as Dave Winer  would tell us,  dangers in sending all that value  to a corporate silo (as Twitter certainly is,  and has become more so in the past year).

As with all these pieces of the multi-slashed noun modified by “Theopolitical”,  there is so much more to say about curation.  But that will become much more apparent going forward since I have,  at  least for now,  decided that this  is a good articulation of who I am on the Net.

Next up:  Producer