It's All About Curation

I am on vacation for the next few weeks in Israel and I have to tell you its very interesting to see my wife, my daughter and I wander around together and take pictures, grab literature, etc.

I am expecting to put some stuff in a scrap book later, though I am using Google+ as my travel journal while here. My wife Bonnie and my daughter Nicole have been using Facebook to document our trip, though Nicole is only including posts to her close circle of friends. 

Bonnie of course is even more gregarious than me. More importantly she takes great pictures. Unfortunately, I don’t visit Facebook often so I am at a bit of a loss as how to see either of their pictures.

Reading DealBook, it sounds like Pinterest might be the curation place for me, although my limited access says I need a new group.

Pinterest allows for common sharing amongst loose lurking areas of interest. The pictures you would pin up on your corkboard are the model for the grouping. I would love to compare pictures of some of the sites we have seen and add them to my travel log.

I will also say that our guide has been terrific and in some ways circular. Most of what we are seeing has connections to things we have already seen or sites that are going to be part of our future stops. I am thinking that a travel site that allows you to follow themes would great. For example, we could connect the dots between Theodore Herzog in Vienna, the London and of course Israel.

Twitter has a bit of this ability as I have seen by some of the re-tweeting that occurs.

More interesting on the curation is Google’s recent support of the mundane, I mean the mundaneum. We can consider this Victorian era microtagging. 

All of this sense of being overwhelmed with information comes as I want to gather more information. As I sit in my hotel lobby and listen to all the pilgrims coming to celebrate the artifacts of their faith, I am not looking to dispute their faith merely to catalog it.

Ironically, Jerusalem is the perfect place to see the pitfalls. As the archeologists dig, through the layers of generations, I am reminded that like the city people change as does their use of words. Take a look at the ngram viewer. 

Curation may be on the rise but that does not mean we are doing it well yet.