WordPress, the biggest blog software platform on the Web, has added a “reblogging” curation feature much like the smaller innovative service Tumblr has offered for years. It’s another chapter in the race to decrease friction in sharing your favorite Web content with friends.
If the previous era of innovation on the Web was fundamentally characterized by the democratization of publishing and content creation, the next era may be based on finding solutions for building value on top of all that newly published data. Much of that value capture will be performed by machines, but tools for humans could be a game changer as well.
As we wrote yesterday, Google VP Marissa Mayer says the average person uploaded 15 times more data in 2009 than they did just three years ago. Much of the innovation built on top of that explosion of data will be driven by machines, but not all of it.
The gap between the value that’s made possible by all this data, and the power of the tools available to consumers to capture it, is so great that it simply must be filled. Each progressively simpler, faster and more powerful tool for everyday people to build and share collections of content is part of the race to capture that market.
The addition of easy curation, if primarily in-network for now, to the giant WordPress community is a big advance for the popularization of curation.
Can Curation Catch On?
Will curation truly become a substantial market, capable of sustaining itself? Previous developments in the democratization of publishing have had mixed results. Blogging, photo sharing and video distribution have taken off. Mapping and podcasting, arguably, haven’t caught on as widely or sustainably.
Maybe the old 1/10/90 rule will pay off when it comes to curation. One percent of people create content, 10% share it and 90% primarily consume it. If you believe those numbers, maybe the curation market has 10 times as much opportunity as the previous market for publishing tools.
What do you think? Do you agree with this assessment of the opportunities in content curation? If you disagree, please say something and stop me before I say all of this again next time a curation feature is launched somewhere big.
