Post by David Pierce. Find me on Twitter.
The advent of the Web has brought on ways to create content that are better and more available than ever before. That’s a great thing, and has led to an enormous amount of great content being produced. It’s also, unfortunately, led to the production of so much terrible content that it’s harder than ever to find the good stuff.
Books, movie-theater movies, and record-label albums are vetted for quality, and you can more safely bet that those things are worth your time (though those processes are obviously a long way from perfect). Blogs, YouTube and the like have no such pre-evaluation – again, pros and cons, but it can make the great stuff harder to find.
Thankfully, all that noise has led to the rise of some excellent curators. Whether they’re people, apps or services, there are a number of sources that do their best to point out the best of the Web, while weeding out all the junk crap nonsense videos that hurt my eyes and ears other stuff. These resources bring to light the best, and keep us from getting overwhelmed and distracted by the rest.
As with my last post, I’m partly writing this because of my curiosity about this subject – there are many more curators out there than I can possibly know about or highlight, but I want to know about them! So please, after reading this post, leave a comment with your favorite people or apps that help you weed the signal from the noise.
Jason Kottke – arguably the grandfather of Web curation, Kottke’s got no discernible rhyme or reason to what he posts, but he tends to highlight a broad, diverse group of excellent and unique content from all over the Web.
Daring Fireball– If you don’t like or care about Apple, don’t read John Gruber’s Daring Fireball. If you’ve got even a passing interest, though, Gruber’s one of the most interesting and intelligent people discussing the subject. He posts a lot, and a lot of his posts are links elsewhere – he’s a great source for excellent techie content, as well as original thinking (plus, he’s a Yankees fan. So he’s awesome).
Boing Boing – Also a site without an obvious guideline for content. I go back-and-forth on how useful I find what Boing Boing posts, but they’re a long-standing and respected source for indie, niche-type content and people. If nothing else, Boing Boing is an excellent “resource of resources,” constantly linking to other interesting people and websites.
Bobulate – Liz Danzico’s blog is heavily design-focused, but I’ve found that designers tend to see the world differently and often become great sources of new perspectives on things. Liz discusses and links to everything from music theory to Web design, and she finds great new thoughts on each.
Neatorama – More of the same, lots of fun and interesting content, this time with a heavy dose of “woah, that’s cool!” thrown into the mix. There’s a lot of art displayed, a lot of videos, and a lot of funny and bizarre things for your enjoyment. Neatorama’s not the source for great writing, but it’s a great place to spend a few minutes looking at fun and cool things.
3quarksdaily – 3quarksdaily is updated three times per day, and is nearly always the first site I go to looking for something to read. They generally link to longer-form writing, and have exposed me to new and fascinating things more than a few times.
Damn Interesting – They don’t post very often, but the folks at Damn Interesting do a fabulous job of uncovering some bizarre, funny and generally damn interesting things, and then writing about them really, really well. It’s mostly original content, so it only half counts as curation, but they’re culling from the fascinating world around, so I’m counting it. Because I can.
The Morning News Headlines – It’s all links, but a couple of times a day the Morning News posts some of the best of what they’re finding and reading around the Web. It’s the most breaking news-heavy of the bunch, but is a frequent source of great content and headlines.
Devour – Devour is brand-new, and fits somewhere between the “app” and “people” categories of curators. It’s from the folks at Uncrate, one of my favorite blogs, and is a hand-picked collection of the Web’s best videos. I only discovered it today, and I already love the things they choose – it’s a great mix of funny, cool, popular and niche.
Mag.ma – Magma takes all the video sites on the Web (or at least the most popular ones), figures out which videos are the most popular, and displays them for the world to see. Instead of wading through YouTube or Vimeo to find out what other people are watching, stop it. Just go to Magma.
Instapaper – Instapaper takes the articles that people are saving into their Instapaper accounts the most, and displays them for easy reading and saving. A great resource, especially since pretty much everyone uses Instapaper these days. I would’ve done that cool “link every word to an article about Instapaper to prove it gets a lot of coverage” thing, but there’s too many. Just know there’s good stuff on Instapaper.
Today’s Big Thing – If I ever need a laugh, Today’s Big Thing is the first place I go. The folks at TBT pick one video, per day, in a bunch of categories (Sports, Music, Pets, and more) – they’re usually funny, often involve adorable pets or people getting hit in the crotch, and are almost guaranteed to make you laugh. I include TBT on the list because it’s great, and also because it was the place I found what will forever be my favorite video ever in history.
Listorious – Listorious is a huge repository of Twitter Lists, and is arguably the most complete, solution-for-anyone curation option out there. Basically, Twitter Lists work like this: someone puts together a list of people who have interesting things to say about a certain subject – technology, music, Renaissance museums – and with one click, you can follow the whole list. Listorious is a directory of those lists, and a great way to find cool people and subjects on Twitter.
(Update: In poking around during and after writing this post, I found this thread on MetaFilter with a huge number of great sources for curation, filtering, and generally awesome content. I highly recommend reading through the thread, and checking out a bunch of the sites. I was certainly glad I did.)
As much as I read original news sources these days, I find myself relying on curators at least as often. These people show me what’s interesting, and I largely trust them to find the right thing and show it to me. I get to avoid the noise, and they bring out what’s worth knowing.
What curation tools or people do you use?
