Best of Hacker News - A curated list of the highest ranked articles in March'13
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It bemuses me as to why internet has seen fit to abuse this word to such as point as to make it trite and totally vacuous. At this point, using it is more likely to grate users and discredit the product.
What publishers currently seem to be missing is that in a world where the barriers to publication are reducing to zero, good curating is going to be the commodity that I, as a consumer, will value most highly. By good, I mean 'feels correct to me.'
The problem is volume. First person to discover a means to curate at high volumes is king.
tldr - you are spot on - be good at high volume curating and there is your fortune.
Surely you are talking about Google? After all, what is search but massive-scale curation?
But to be fair, in book publishing the problem is deeper than web search - you need to be a better curator because the consumer investment is bigger.
Hitting a search link is close to free for the consumer, but accepting a book recommendation is relatively expensive, both in time spent sampling and pounds sterling. So good curating has greater value.
I'm going to be less happy if the third book on the recommendation list is the one that hits the spot if I've had to purchase and start to read recommendations one and two.
Motivation was to be able to catch up on items I may have missed.