From Steven Rosenbaum via Nieman Reports:

…Today, the idea of journalist as curator is front and center, as the tools to make and tell stories are now in the hands of anyone with a cell phone, laptop or desktop computer.

The old barriers to entry—the cost of a printing press or a broadcast tower—have evaporated. Of course, this change doesn’t come without a price….

People are clearly overwhelmed by the growing volume and weight of digital content and messaging that they feel compelled to process….

The solution is not to be found in faster computers or smarter algorithms. The best place to look for a remedy is in the power of the human mind and tapping its capacity to find, sort and contextualize information and ideas. As this happens and it already is starting we will think of this time as being the dawn of the human filtered Web — the curated Web….

Skillful sharing of information through channels of community filtering and personal recommendations will fulfill people’s sense of digital identity as content curators. And this leads to a different kind of content consumer, one who will do less surfing of the Web and instead turn to curated content delivered by trusted sources.

Journalism isn’t going to be any less important. In fact, as information gets messier and noisier, those who possess the skills to recognize important stories, find themes, provide context, and explain the significance of pieces of information will be critically important. Instead of reminiscing about the good old days—as we long for the relative quiet and lack of disruption we had then—let’s take what we know how to do as journalists and find the best way to use these skills to tell stories and provide essential information.

• Excerpts from: Nieman Reports
• Image by Edward from Flickr Creative Commons

From Maria Popova via the Nieman Journalism Lab:

New tools in general, and Twitter in particular, greatly challenge the binary dichotomy of attention as something that is either given or taken away, distracted. Instead, these tools allow us to direct attention to destinations where it can be sustained with more concentration and immersion.

They offer a wayfinding system that is, on the whole, the polar opposite of traditional media’s: While “old media” fought against the scarcity of information, new media are fighting the overabundance of information….

[Twitter allows] people to discover the most relevant, interesting, and impactful information, in any medium, and then relate it to other information in a networked ecosystem of meaning that helps us better understand the world and each other….

If information discovery plays such a central role in how we make sense of the world in this new media landscape, then it is a form of creative labor in and of itself. And yet our current normative models for crediting this kind of labor are completely inadequate, if they exist at all…. Finding a way to acknowledge content curation and information discovery (or, better, the new term we invent for these fluffy placeholders) as a form of creative labor, and to codify this acknowledgement, is the next frontier in how we think about “intellectual property” in the information age….

Ultimately, I see Twitter neither as a medium of broadcast, the way text is, nor as one of conversation, the way speech is, but rather as a medium of conversational direction and a discovery platform for the text and conversations that matter.

• Excerpts from Maria Popova via the Nieman Journalism Lab
• Image by Marc Wathieu via Flickr Creative Commons

From the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities:

America needs “informed communities,” places where the information ecology meets people’s personal and civic information needs.

This means people have the news and information they need to take advantage of life’s opportunities for themselves and their families. They need information to participate fully in our system of self-government, to stand up and be heard.

Driving this vision are the critical democratic values of openness, inclusion, participation, empowerment, and the common pursuit of truth and the public interest…

To achieve this, the Commission urges that the nation and its local communities pursue three ambitious objectives:

• Maximize the availability of relevant and credible information to all Americans and their communities;

• Strengthen the capacity of individuals to engage with information; and

• Promote individual engagement with information and the public life of the community.

• Excerpts from: Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age
  

“Aggregation” can mean smart people sharing their reading lists, plugging one another into the bounty of the information universe. It kind of describes what I do as an editor. But too often it amounts to taking words written by other people, packaging them on your own Web site and harvesting revenue that might otherwise be directed to the originators of the material. In Somalia this would be called piracy. In the mediasphere, it is a respected business model…

Last month, when AOL bought The Huffington Post for $315 million, it was portrayed as a sign that AOL is moving into the business of creating stuff — what we used to call writing or reporting or journalism but we now call “content.” Buying an aggregator and calling it a content play is a little like a company’s announcing plans to improve its cash position by hiring a counterfeiter….

There is no question that in times of momentous news, readers rush to find reliable firsthand witness and seasoned judgment. (In the first hour after Mubarak fell, The Times’s Web site had an astounding one million page views, and friends at other major news organizations tell me they enjoyed a similar surge.) I can’t decide whether serious journalism is the kind of thing that lures an audience to a site like The Huffington Post, or if that’s like hiring a top chef to fancy up the menu at Hooters. But if serious journalism is about to enjoy a renaissance, I can only rejoice. Gee, maybe we can even get people to pay for it.

• Excerpts from NYTimes.com
  (And I make no income aggregating this story)

“Many of us who have been following social media since the early 90s are very sensitive to today’s exponential growth in usage of the sharing web.

“Inspired by other cool real time counters, Social Media Industry Head, Laurel Papworth, my own Rise & Rise of Social Media presentations and various ‘cool’ videos (you know the ones) I decided to put together this little Flash app (which is in constant development) showing how active & dynamic the Social Web, Mobile Industry and Game Business is.”

• From Gary Hayes at Personalize Media

“At a minimum, Twitter is an extension of each one of us. It feeds our senses and amplifies our voice. We’re connecting to one another through shared experiences creating a hybrid social network and information exchange tied by emotion and interest.

“While Twitter provides the technology foundation, it is we who make Twitter so unique and consequential by simply being human and sharing what we see, feel, and think – in Twitter time. It’s both a gift and a harbinger of enlightenment. As new media philosopher, and good friend, Stowe Boyd once said, “It’s our dancing that makes the house rock, not the planks and pipes. It is us that makes Twitter alive, not the code….

“Twitter continues to change how we discover, communicate, and share. Each time we do, we reveal a bit more about who we are and what moves us. As we embrace the new year, Twitter’s numbers will expand, but I believe the nature of the service and also how we use it will change significantly.”

Excerpts from Brian Solis.

“Here’s how it works: Users build their own personal study networks by following other students and joining groups. When they have a question, the site pushes it out to their extended network and matches them with people available to work with them.

“If the site is the Match.com of study help, as Mr. Hill brands it, the key question is whether students will be able to find a ‘date.’”

Excerpts from  Wired Campus

“So much of the American economy is based on GDP that comes from waste, environmental pillage, urban sprawl, bad planning, people going farther and farther with no land use planning whatsoever, and leading more miserable lives. …

“What country has the highest exports in the world today? It’s the country with the highest wage rates and union restrictions. Germany has become more of a power, not less of a power as the world has become more global. Our problem isn’t competing with China, it’s competing with Germany in China. We’re so focused on China all the time, and low-wage assembly stuff, that we’re missing what’s going on. It’s Germany that’s going in and selling stuff in China that we ought to be selling that would hold down the trade gap between the U.S. and China. …

“Why is this high-wage country beating us? Why are the European socialists beating us? It’s too subversive an idea so we don’t allow in the discourse.”

• Excerpts from:  Salon.com

“From the beginning, Richardson rang true to me: the read/write web is not just a gimmick for boosting student engagement – it’s an affordance for a student-centric, project-based, collaborative, inquisitive, reflective pedagogy.

“Connective writing,” as Richardson calls it, is not just about composition using hyperlinks, it’s about ways to think systematically and communicate effectively about the connections between ideas – an essential skill in a networked world.

• Excerpt from It’s an amazing time to be a learner – Will Richardson | DMLcentral.

“The era of ‘left brain’ dominance, and the Information Age that it engendered, are giving way to a new world in which “right brain” qualities-inventiveness, empathy, meaning-predominate.”

• Dan Pink | A Whole New Mind… and more