Now that content is so important to the conversation between businesses and customers, should businesses be hiring somebody to pick out the best content on their websites?
After all, curation is the latest great thing. It seems to solve the problem that in some contexts, search is just too machiney. For example, Felix Salmon has just joined the ranks of curators with the launch of counterparties.com, “a curated snapshot of the best finance news and commentary”.
Of course, counterparties has existed for a good long time as a regular feature on Felix’s blog, but this launch on a separate domain represents a formalisation of the principle.
Herding sheep
From the point of view of news and content strategy, Counterparties is interesting because it’s neither fully human-powered nor chosen by algorithm. Instead, it combines both – the wisdom of crowds anchored by good old-fashioned human judgement about what’s interesting. Think of it as a shepherd (Felix) rounding up the content sheep using an intelligent sheepdog (the algorithm).
Counterparties combines our own judgment — what we find interesting, overlooked and important — with the recommendation engine created by our friends at Percolate.
The site joins other important curation sites such as The Browser and Brainpickings. They’re an answer to the problem of serendipity, which search generally fails to provide.
Laura Larsell sums up the problem:
“search” works best when you have a pretty good sense of what you are looking for. But most people, most of the time, do not have concrete ideas of what they really want.
Why U No Browse?
Is that true for your average commercial website? It’s debatable. There’s a strong case for organising content around the tasks people want to achieve when they arrive on your website: I want to buy a coffee machine; how do I apply for this course; what vegetarian options does the restaurant offer… and so on.
Browsing isn’t much use in that sort of task-orientated process. If anything, it’s a distraction. But Laura points out that companies like Amazon and Netflix already encourage serendipitous discovery by means of widgets that tell you what other people bought and what they list as great books and films.
With that in mind, it’s not hard to imagine ways an imaginary Chief Curation Officer might encourage browsing. A travel company might pick an interesting destination to highlight (indeed, this already happens on sites such as tripadvisor.com). An intranet manager might select best practice case studies or interesting quotes culled by the sales department from conversations with the customer. A bike shop might feature a video showing how to tackle the local downhill race course. And a university site might feature great ideas that appear in its undergraduate physics (or philosophy, or medicine) course.