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This week on The Bella Buzz podcast, we talk with the CEO of Mech Media and Founder of Shareist.com, Scott Jangro. Scott has an outstanding reputation in the Affiliate Marketing industry. In 2010 he was honored with the Affiliate Summit Affiliate Marketing Legend Pinnacle Award.

His current efforts are focused on developing a robust curation platform that provides stellar aggregation functionality with visually appealing content presentation, combined with social features, that advances the evolution of information discovery on the web.

The act of digital content curation is born out of the typical meaning of the word applied to art galleries and museums.  A curator will examine and evaluate numerous items for inclusion into a very specific exhibit presentation. Those that are deemed worthy are included, and those that are not are discarded. As applied to the current state of the web, a curator can provide a valuable service in the face of the growing challenge web users face, the exponential growth of the amount of content published on a daily basis.  A curator will aggregate and maintain a collection of links to relevant, original content on a specific topic.

As the amount of published web content becomes a staggering sum, web users are finding it more and more difficult to locate the content they are seeking through algorithmic search. It also becomes difficult to distinguish the original source content from the scraped, auto-generated, repackaged article designed to simply generate pageviews.  It is an important aspect of the curator’s responsibility to start at the seek and discovery phase, but continue to drill down to the original source of the material.

A well curated presentation of a topic will contain links to original sources of content that have been exposed via a thoughtful and continuous search for relevant information.  It will also contain bits of editorial content that the curator has included in order to put the links into context with the rest of the presentation.  Why was this included? What is the most relevant portion of the content? .. These types of insights from the curator will help the visitor determine the best content for further exploration. In this digital information era, the topic curator will be as valuable as a skilled reference librarian while providing a preservation service to future explorers by compiling a comprehensive resource on a topic.

A less obvious component of curation comes from the additional social elements that are incorporated into the platform.  By allowing user comments and sentiment ratings, the curator can re-examine the inclusion of the content in the topic and use the perpetual feedback loop to improve the quality of the presentation.  A curator can select to include or ignore suggestions from the users, but the overall refinement of the topic improves its relevancy over time. This is an advantage to digital curation that is not quite available in offline scenarios. A participatory community develops.  [Read more...]