Curation Columns Gain Traction

This month's new buzz word is "curation," as in a column that curates what's on the internet about a subject of interest. Hmm, sounds a lot like Topix hypernews from back in the ancient days of 2000. That oldest of old school -- links pages and news aggregation.

Well, everything old is new again. If you want a primer, this column isn't bad from Business Insider, but it is over a year old.

The new roles for SIDs in this become serving as the curator for their sports. They already should be doing the old tyme version of that: saving and archiving stories, stats, images, data. Now they need to become the sorters of on-line information about their teams and sports. Oregon is doing some of this with their sport contact blogs.

However, the linking to others is a little bolder. Oklahoma has one of the more intricate and dense curation blogs for its football team. One stop shopping for a lot of info. Ole Miss has a nice blog by its SID personnel that does similar work, but more overview and broad based. And back at OU, their senior associate AD, Kerry Mossman, has a long-standing column that's not terribly unlike my own Bill's Blog, but more topic driven than event driven. (Mine have gone in two forms, the traditional features, the traditional game and now much more of the CoverItLive interactive.)

The future lies in between -- little more detail, more links for those sports that generate them.

The value and the danger is in the judgment calls that lead to what makes the curation page. This may be the separation point between real-time reporter -- the digital correspondent that repeats what they see to whoever is listening -- and the journalist -- independent or branded, who uses a background of the subject to sort the wheat from the chaff.

It really is an information fire hose out there -- curation becomes the nozzle that makes the stream drinkable.