Why Curate Content?

Simply put, you can become the go to source for information on a particular subject. By now you've probably noticed the trend towards "curated content". Not just in things like news feeds but jobs, art and even email (thanks Gmail).

It seems to be a response to the incredible amount of information we are being presented with on a daily basis. While we have access to more and more info, the signal to noise ratio tends to get higher because of it. Link blogs are playing an increasingly important role in filtering information for people.



What does it mean to curate?

First lets look at what it means to curate. We're probably all very familiar with the concept of a museum curator so lets use that as an example. The curator is responsible for the care, acquisition and interpretation of the museums collection. They have a deep and abiding care for the collection and control how and what the museum patron sees when they visit.

From our perspective, a link blog is an excellent example of curation and something easily done with Postach.io and EvernoteWeb Clipper

Here are a few things that are commonly curated.
  • We curate life lessons. - Business Advice, Life Quotes.
  • We curate food. - Recipes, Restaurant Reviews.
  • We curate art. - Pictures, Paintings.

What makes a good curator?

Good taste, empathy and knowledge. While there are many services and technologies that attempt to curate for us, none that I've seen possess the traits I've just mentioned. The day I see robots at an art gallery with chins cupped and heads cocked staring at a painting saying "I love the artists depiction of gum on shoe sole to represent the ongoing struggle humankind has to understand its place in the universe", I'll be wrong.

Until then understanding your audience is key and filtering the right information is a manual process. If you are able to do this you'll become an invaluable source of information for a group of readers which has it's own obvious set of benefits for the blogger.

Link blogging for Business

Link blogs become personal news services for the people who subscribed to them, places people come for inspiration and repositories for all the good ideas and cool things we don't want to forget. From a practical standpoint link blogs are useful for consultants who want to share information about their field but don't have the time to author all of their own posts. They provide great SEO and from a marketing standpoint are quite useful.

Link blogging for Education

Teachers come across so many cool concepts and ideas when developing a lesson that it just makes sense to link blog. Whether it's for a future pool of ideas to draw from or to gather information on a particular subject. With Postach.io's ability to have multiple blog authors an educator can "crowd source" information on a particular subject from their students.

Those are a few of the examples on how to use a link blog. If you have any examples please let us know and post them to our Twitter account! :)