As technology and social networks grow faster by the second, it gets more and more difficult to keep up with every update. "Content curation," or the input of internet content at faster rates than it can be consumed, is a legitimate concern right now for many online users. YouTube statistics reveal that 24 hours of video is being uploaded per minute; Twitter is now reporting 50 million Tweets per day; Facebook statuses are updated 60 million times per day. With social updates occurring constantly, it's no wonder that we can't keep up with our friends, let alone world news or current events.
Being named "the Web's biggest challenge in recent years," content curation reveals the changing ways in which consumers search out and react to information. It also brings up some important concerns. Are there drawbacks to this overflow? And are we equipping ourselves in the right ways to handle this massive quantity of information? How do we determine what's relevant?
As social media junkies, we can see the benefits to continuous and perpetual streams of information. We eat it up as each new story comes; however, the average user does not have the time or patience to spend paging through each link or story to find exactly what they are looking for. In a world where time is of the essence, everybody must realize that the inundation of haphazard online content is going to keep growing and it's up to each of us to moderate web intake. But how? In a perfect world, we would want to combine efficiency, personalization and relevance as it relates to the news and information we find online. But that's much easier said than done.
Enter Digg.com.
Over time, social voting website, Digg.com, has become a staple for technology lovers to find the latest and greatest, most relevant stories to hit the web. Recently, the site revealed its plans to begin filtering Facebook and Twitter links through a personalized home page based on the activities of friends. Coming in the near future, Digg will let you sign in using any of your existing social network accounts and allow viewers to "Digg" stories without even logging in at all. With the plan to not only share links and updates from social networks (and the usual Digg stories), but rank them as well, there is no telling how this re-positioning can enhance the relevance of Digg to web users.
By combining pertinent news, high-interest statuses, updates and photos of social network friends all in one place, Digg may have uncovered the cure to content curation. The not-so-easy fix of efficiency, personalization and relevance may come together, but we all know how unpredictable the internet can be. Related platforms like Google Wave and Flavors.me have also attempted to guide users toward a single location for all their social networking and content needs, but in many ways have ended with lukewarm results and little widespread knowledge.
Until we know how successful the Digg undertaking may be, we will continue to take the heaps of internet content as it comes and try to stay sane in the process.
Image Source: http://langwitches.org
