Curation- The act of curating, of organizing and maintaining a collection of artworks.
Films aren’t just for Hollywood anymore. After walking around the Warner Bros. Studio lot today, I realized just how much history there is in Film & Cinema after only one hundred years. However, the rules are being re-written; today being a filmmaker is a simple as making a quick trip to Best Buy. Find some of your friends, record some goofy moments, grab a laptop and upload to YouTube: done. In the age of ubiquitous cameras, videos are not hard to make. Obviously the quality of these videos vary; for every independent film posted on YouTube there are five stupid teenagers doing stupid things. But the sheer volume of content creation is what’s impressive, and that makes the concept of content curation even more important.
Check out this video done by Matt Quest:
For more info on Gear & Shooting, check out this article.
It’s an incredible video, something that up until the past few years no independent filmmaker would have been able to produce. Footage like that used to come exclusively from teams of National Geographic photographers. These days, all it takes is one guy, a GoPro, and a quadcopter. But how do you access these videos? How do you even find out about them? That’s where content curation comes into play. Everybody watches videos on YouTube; how many times do you actually watch Youtube’s recommended videos? Youtube’s stumbling steps into content curation may be flawed, but they’re a step in the right direction.
Consider instead Netflix’s approach, detailed in this article. At Netflix, content curation is literally a science; they use thousands of unique tags and identifiers to label movies comprehensively. When users first sign up for Netflix, they are asked to pick some genres of entertainment that appeal to them. Netflix uses that data and pulls the most relevant films from its database, based on those tags. Additionally, users can rate films and television from zero stars to five stars based on how much they liked the content. You may have heard of Netflix’s million dollar contest to improve its rating algorithms.
Netflix is a master of curating content because it combines big data from two sources: detailed descriptions about every film and television show it has available; and user preferences, both what you personally have told them you like, but also what other people who have similar interests as you like. By having all that data, Netflix has made itself the current king of curation. And in a world where 100 hours of content are uploaded to YouTube every day, curation is king.
For more information on Netflix & Big Data, check out this article. For a more cautionary look, check out this article from Salon.
