The Philippine Online Chronicles

The Web is huge and scary. Just ask anyone who isn’t familiar with the Internet.  Just observe someone so new that they wouldn’t know what to do when they see the bare, white, minimalist Google.

It would take at least 31,000 years just to read over one trillion unique web addresses that make up the World Wide Web and it is still growing.  That’s not a static number at all.  Everyday new information is added to this universe as users new and old add their content.

How then do we make sense of the madness?

How then can ordinary users succeed in getting the information they want?

Quite a number of people recognize this problem.  It is, in engineering parlance, a signal versus noise problem.  Geeks in particular are searching, pardon the pun, for ways to solve this mess.  Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the Web, has long proposed a Semantic Web to help make sense of the madness. Translated in human terms, it’s the ratio between useful information versus irrelevant or off-topic information.

What’s happening right now is that increasingly social media is playing a huge role in making sense of the web, whether through micro-blogging on sites such as Facebook and Twitter, or in audio/video podcasts.

In this crazy World Wide Web there are a few examples, Master Curators who are leading the trend to making sense of it all.  Here are different styles to curating.

Daring Fireball

Well-respected online, John Gruber of Daring Fireball is one of the best curators of our time.  What he does is present information--- links and quotes in a way that is easily understood.

The awesomeness of DF is not just the quotes but Gruber’s way of giving his opinion. Sometimes it is just one-liners like this:

Other times it is a lengthy essay, like his iPhone 4 impressions and observations, which is by and large, rare.

What’s great about Gruber is that what he says is highly relevant each day.  It simply takes just a few minutes going through his feed to keep abreast with what’s happening online and the technology world at large.

The design of Daring Fireball is also amazing.  Not only is it neat, but Gruber has never allowed comments on his site.  Sure you can drop him an email or two, but what he’s said is that Daring Fireball is his space.  He wants to own every pixel on it.  In fact quite recently, he said “I’ll tell you what’s fair.”  Daring Fireball isn’t noisy.

We’ve segued, haven’t we?

The Long View

In the Philippines, no one curates better than Manolo Quezon.  If DF is about technology and Internet in general, then Manolo does it for the Philippines. Whether it is local politics or local social media, he is able to translate for us.

An example of this is his post from way back in 2008, on Planes, Trains and Automobiles.

Notice then his opening paragraph:

I think my first train-related entry was back in 2005, in Debating solutions to squatting, I pointed to this entry by Torn and frayed in Manila on how our country possesses “one of the most ramshackle railways in the world.” That’s putting it politely. Torn was reacting to a report by Howie Severino (and The Unlawyer also commented on it, including detailing the extremely low fares charged by the railroad).

Manolo tells us in a paragraph the salient issues of the day in the local blogsphere.

This Week in Tech

The best curator on the web comes from the This Week in Tech network and its flagship podcast, TWiT (which is short for This Week in Tech).  TWiT doesn’t create news.  They just curate it.  They tell us each week what’s important and why it’s important. Each week there is a roundtable discussion of Tech luminaries to talk about the important events of the week.

An episode of TWiT, “No Hitler for you,” which aired on April 2010, actually talked about curation.  Here’s a snippet of their conversation:

Natali Del Conte And we saw from that Read-Write Web debacle a couple of months ago that most people go to – not most – but a lot of people still go to Google, type in Facebook and find Facebook that way instead of just putting ‘facebook’ in the URL. So that shows that a lot of people are very far removed from the actual process. And that’s [ph] Dana Boyd’s (59:29) whole point, is that defaults matter, and the fact that this is on by default is what’s…

Leo Laporte Exactly.

Natali Del Conte …most offensive about it. And if you could control it a little bit more, have more autonomy, then I wouldn’t be so scared of it.

Becky Worley So your complaint is that Facebook is the opiate of the masses?

Leo Laporte Yes.

Natali Del Conte I’m not sure if I made that – did I make that point?

Leo Laporte I like that, it’s very Marxist of you.

Becky Worley That’s a great quote.

Leo Laporte Yeah.

Becky Worley But I mean – but as a consumer reporter and someone who has to think about what’s the easiest for people who just don’t want the level of interaction with the web that we take, because we’re geeks – I can see the benefit.

Shira Lazar But I – the internet for many normal users, the masses, is overwhelming. So if your friends can curate that for you and then also Facebook will recommend things knowing that – the other news you’re looking at, they’ll recommend other stories for you. So for the masses, the regular users, that could be something that makes things easier.

Leo Laporte It is, and it’s the – okay, so…

Natali Del Conte But we’re assuming that a lot of people have digital discretion, which they don’t. I don’t think that that’s…

Leo Laporte Or even are aware enough to exercise it.

Natali Del Conte Right.

Here’s the video:

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Taking off from TWiT’s discussion, if we can’t assume people have digital discretion, or have the ability to filter out more than 31,000 years of web data, how then do we make sense of it all?

In the same episode, Natali makes an important point.  She said,

“Well now – and I tend to think – I’m going to get a little bit esoteric here. But I tend to think that – I was talking about earlier how there really is no one website that recommends everything that we want. Because we are right now culturally developing a learned behavior which David Levy – who is a professor out of The University of Washington – calls information environmentalism. We’re learning how to filter out what’s pertinent to us versus what’s not pertinent to us. I don’t think there’s a technology that’s going to do that for us, but I think that Facebook thinks that it is going to be that technology. And that’s where I find that a little bit dangerous.”

Exactly.  That’s the problem isn’t it?  If for geeks the web is overwhelming, how much more for users who aren’t used to receiving multiple vectors of information tunneling all at the same time?

There is too much noise.  How do we figure out what’s pertinent to us?  Leo Laporte in “No Hitler for you” said it best:

“if you wanted to know everything there was to know about Cricket you wouldn’t go one by one to all the Cricket pages, you’d try to find a Cricket – a curated Cricket collection of pages. That’s what Wikipedia is, is really is a curated link, so what happened very quickly is we realized we can’t follow at all, so we need to follow somebody who is curating it. And that’s just a – it’s a information management problem, I think we had to do that. And by the way, where is the money on the net, the aggregator and the curator. So that’s why at South by Southwest people are interested in that, it’s the same – it’s kind of Mark Zuckerberg is small scale, Mark wants to curate everything known on the net so that you go through Facebook and he can reap all the gold. And really that’s – if anybody is doing curation, that’s what they are hoping, that you will go to Buzz Out Loud or CNET or CBS because that’s where we will make sense of this flood.”

Why we curate

In the beginning, to make sense of it all, came Google with its search engine.  We’ve increasingly learned that search engines have their limit in this sprawling Internet.  Relevant information salient to the searcher gets easily lost.

Today there is an avalanche of information.  There is just too much for anyone person to know it all.  We've the Web, then there is Twitter, and Facebook, and podcasting, who can keep up?

What’s common here, between Gruber, Quezon, TWiT is that curating is about gathering information that others have gathered and saying, here is what it means.  Curating is about translating one language and they make it understandable for the masses.

Put in another way, Curators are both the Rosetta stone and the filter. Curating is making sense of the madness for people.  This is what curators tell their followers.  These are all the pertinent information spread across all these experts and boom! This is what it means.

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"No Hitler for you," via TWiT's YouTube page.

Screenshots by author.