Curated is the buzzword
Andre Willers
11 Nov 2013
Synopsis :
Torrents of Internet information is valved down to
manageable proportions by fairly trusted editors .
Discussion :
0.This site is not curated except by myself .
1.Interesting is the evolution of crowdsourcing as editors
more trusted than individuals .
See Appendix A
Any Website that gives a count of hits and “likes” is a Crowdsourced
Curated site .
Humans trust the large counts more . (Or rather , is less
likely to be penalized)
An interesting confusion of quantity and quality .
Or to put it another way ,
Quantity masquarades as Quality .
The perils of mass-democracy.
Note that crowd-sourcing was pioneered as “Scientific Peer
Review” since 1600 CE
Plus-la-change .
Hence celebrities . Famous for being famous .
These are all mini-hysterical foci . The mechanism is the
same .
2.Brands
These are intimately involved with the process .
3.Brands are already curated , but now inter-brand curation
is being driven by advertisers .
4.How trustworthy is crowdsourcing really ?
On small things , very .
On large things , not at all .
The exception is votes .
5. If they want your money and the word “curated” appears ,
politely decline .
My big toenail is also curated.
Andre
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Appendix A
'Curated news' means already-written news usually from a
wide range of sources that has been filtered, aggregated and collated in a
meaningful way. This is case with a site like HuffingtonPost. 'Socially curated
news' can mean sites like digg.com or reddit.com that rely on the power of
crowdsourcing to filter, aggregate and collate, in order of relevance and
popularity, the relevant news items of the day.
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Appendix B
Editors and
Brands .
Andre
Willers
15 June 2007
See previous
http://andreswhy.blogspot.com “Prodigies” I to V , “Dehydration”
, Itarin2” , “The Religious Experience and
Proximal rewards “etc , etc .
Discussion
Editors create Brands .
A Brand is a single label that
encapsulates a very specific set of characteristics .
One very important characteristic is
the level of trust in the editor . This is encoded in the brand , but since it
is a meta-characteristic (ie describing the brand) , it usually decays much
slower . The brand itself is dependant on the product , but the perception of
the reliability of the Brand is spread over the end-users , which change very
slowly.
Hence , a brand can be established
quickly , but take a long time to die .
This is also why magazine editors
are not the stars . They might create the Brand , but their role is always
underemphasized . Old age instead of euthanasia .
Attention is drawn to brands like
mitochondria , hippocampus , cortex , immune system , old age , religions ,
Readers digest , Encyclopaedia Brittanica , Ford , Microsoft , etc .
An Editor takes an overwhelming
flood of information and channels it .
The destination of the information
can be of three forms:
- Null (ie wastebasket)
- End-user (ie fits a Brand category)
- Feedback (input needs some further work .) Circular
feedback creates “clumps” of processing : ie Brands . For instance , some
of the most effective advertising does not target the end-user , but this
feedback process .
Examples of Brands :
- Genes (DNA editors generate genes : ie clumps of DNA)
- Chromosomes (phenotypes and cancers can be seen as
chromosome editors)
- Personalities ( John smith is the brand of a complex
set of data and body)
- Families (eg Hapsburg)
- Societal memes (eg religions , science)
- Companies (eg Ford)
As expected , the basic underlying
neurological structure of humans plus the strictures of information-handling
form a fractal landscape . Since apoptosis is essential and humans are mortal ,
it is also an iterative-cascade landscape .
The structure of a human neuron
(with it’s many dendritic connections ) favours this on a hardware level .
A person or a face can be seen as a
Brand .
It has been experimentally proved
(via fMRI) that even a single neuron can recognise fairly complex Brands like
faces ( honey bees can recognise human faces on a single neuron level) .
The corrollaries are obvious .
If fMRI shows that your brand (eg
Coke , Napoleon , “Bridge over troubled waters” , etc ), fires up only one
neuron , you have arrived .
The advantages are that an
individual can navigate through quite complex information spaces using brands
and the concommittant trust in the editor that he will be omitting and/or
emphasizing only relevant data .
This process has been seriously
abused by politicians in the 20th century . “Trust me . I’m the
Fuhrer.”
But the flood of information has intensified
since then . Complexification increases factorially with the number of input
sources (ie population) .
People define themselves by societal
and commercial brands .
“Prada meets Fiat” , “Pepsi
Maserati” , “Gucci VW” makes sense to you , you poor thing . (Trust me , in a
hundred year’s time you might as well be talking about the bee’s knees.)
Paradigm shift :
The trust in an editor becomes very
important because there are so many authors . The risk of losing something
original decreases , unless the author is many sigmas removed(ie very
exceptional) .
A case study : Readers Digest .
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The original editors were the
founders (Wallace) . In the 1930’s people were faced with enormous changes:
going from farmers to city-dwellers , flight , cars , cheap clothes , washing
machines . As usual , there was the get-rich-artists , the doom-and-gloom
merchants , crime , threats from foreign countries they never heard of before
,a major recession , politicians , etc . Each pumping out its own version of
the truth .
The readers Digest brand is an
Editors brand . In our terms , a moderated forum with a positive bias . All
then available in cheap pocket-sized volume . Read what you like , disregard
the rest .
But the facts were trustworthy and
the bias known .
The Brand is very strong . People
trust Readers Digest .
Department store is an analogue . A
single management .
Fast forward to the present .
Cheap glossy specialist magazines
(that you see on every stand) have sucked the readership away .
A Mall is the analogue .
In this process , the essence of the
Brand got lost .
Can the Brand be salvaged?
Yes .
The competition for attention is enormous
. “Readers Digest” still commands a cortical pause in visual scanning .
Unbundle the magazine into separate
magazines with the brand of “Readers Digest”
Enhance the Editor (obviously an
expert and fan in this particular aspect) .
(Refer to how Campbell did it with
Astounding) .
In a really high intensity
information flow , the editor becomes creative as well .
This is how your brain does it .
Andre
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