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Beyond Gamification. Designing up Maslow’s Pyramid.

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Paul Keith:
I think the problem with the Dilbert cartoon is that it ignores why social curation is notable.

It's kind of like social media where I never quite picked up the hubbub of what drives major social sharers but I know what Digg and Reddit is and I know enough about the troubles and hoops people went through just to be part of the in crowd.

In some ways social curation is far superior and it's ambiguity is it's greatest strength seeing as instead of trying to fit a role (curator/social media journalist) it is instead a keyword to find words where the curator - the middle man - is cut off. This doesn't mean just writers or journalists but includes such things as people rambling out upvotes and downvotes. Social curation apps actually try to fix the filter failure following the fall-out of popularity from tweets and rss.

Take for example subjot. It doesn't advertise itself as a social curation tool but you can use it as a social curation tool far better than Twitter. In that respect, the route towards designing for a fad word like social curation inherently improves the dynamic of the web without asking the designers to understand it. Simply to address the need for it. The result is that subjot may not be the ideal curation tool but at least compared to services that leverage Twitter, subjot extends itself so far to it's own design that it doesn't need to be Twitter+. Instead it can be Twitter alt -minus less filter failure from the end user with less need for the end user to unfollow someone/everyone. Thus in this case, social curation apps are the opposite of the Dilbert comic though hype wise it doesn't appear to be.

As far as management goes, well... to me it just reads like apples and oranges. I apologize for simply not being able to follow. Managements suck. Bureaucracies suck. Hell con-men suck. They all have something on hand to offer already though. It just seems like the opposite in this case. Fad words are post-phenomenon mass-hipster marketing (not sure if these words make sense since I'm just making them up but the point is these are observers) where as corporate politics such as your example aims to create a pre-phenomenon justification as to why whatever it is that's being done is some sort of cutting edge absolute that should be done until one can get away with it for so long. In many ways it falters when you have such examples like Apple who have a history of hardware that went against the status quo and worked and though it is debatable what these items really contributed besides increasing consumer mindset towards previously luxurious items, the influencing factor did lead to further innovation of such products that might not have happened if the competition had not went beyond the call. (not just technologically or usability or nobility - those things don't move other companies but through a symbolic market demand that serve as a threat to other hardware/software providers/designers to pick up their slack.)

IainB:
I am confuzzled by most of what you wrote above - even after having read it through carefully, three times.
You seem to be discussing the merits of something that you confirm is still an undefined term - a buzzword - and which thus does not exist.
Sorry, I don't wish to seem rude, but, as someone whose teachers included grammarians and logicians, I think your comments probably only serve to confirm that "curation" is still in the Bullsh*t Bingo buzzword collection.

Anyway, I think it could likely be more fun (though no more useful) to debate the colour of the wings of those nonexistant fairies made so famous by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Paul Keith:
I don't see what's confusing.

The topic was gamification/Maslow.

You then raised points why buzz words are bullshit.

I then raised points why buzz words have some influence.

We went into social curation which has a stronger and more concrete history of design because there are web apps released that claim that tag/had been branded that tag by the digital media and each of those websites are different but have a unifying pattern of what they are trying to introduce.

You use a Dilbert cartoon as your argument point.

I then use your Dilbert cartoon as your argument point.

Teachers/students/philosophers/forum users/logicians/grammarians, I sincerely hope none of those groups try to raise evidence by referring to a Dilbert cartoon much less use it as a set up to say the counter reply to a Dilbert cartoon only serves to confirm curation as still being a Bullshit Bingo buzz word.  :P

The difference with "social curation" (two words, not just the word curation) and the colour of the wings of those non-existant fairies is that even for myth believers, the colour of the fairies does not help expound any of their beliefs as even in those times the women who revealled the fairies were considered liars even in such an innocent age and it is only Doyle's status that lend it credibility and later on as desire to look for evidences backing the unknown went on, it became an urban legend that was brought up not because the biologies or even the appearances of such fairies would back up the rationale of the fairy believers but because it would back up this idea that there was truly something paranormal about this world that science can't explain but fantasy can. In short, even in concept, the fairies even if they were real would be useless. They would simply be like the myth that managers are not bullshitters that's why they get payed more.

In contrast, social curation is like the CEO. There's still a lot of bullshit in that position. The justification of high salaries. The instigator of bureaucracies. The manager of managers. The guy who saves the company by simply inspiring the workers and knowing how to out-wit the lesser politicians of the company. Yet at the same time, done right - social curation/CEOs do provide something intangible. They have nearly the same role as managers but because of their greater responsibilities, if they pull it off, they introduce something new. If they're shit, the company sinks. In this case, the same goes for buzz words. Digg's dead but Reddit still lives. Social curation is in a similar scenario. It lived. It died. It got a temporary ressurection in things like Mashable follow where the Web finally understood something as simple as the usability behind the follow button. It went low. It then pops up from time to time with newer social networks like G+ but under the wrong assumption that it needs to be "private data backed" in order to "recommend" circles/fans/friends/etc. (An old model that failed except for Facebook and even then Facebook did it right because of it's userbase not because of it's design) But whichever the case, regardless whether the word social curation even survives or not, there are tangible examples of apps in a social curated mold. There are tangible examples of designs following social curation showing it can have an impact.

Take the recent workflowy thread. I've become cynical of outliners because they don't adopt something as basic as Tree List's hotkeys or things like Onenote becomes popular but few (even among notetaker/outliner circles) mention/adopt some of the design of YeahWrite until OneNote but Workflowy wows people because it can filter branches thanks to it's search. That's a core element of social curation, bullshit or not. That's why even in the workflowy thread no one can find quite an alternative example because even though the design should be somewhat obvious (we do have software like Evernote banging the idea of personal search notes for years now) it wasn't until Workflowy appeared that we finally have a pseudo-free and simple implementation of that concept in a total package.

At the same time, the bullshit factor of buzz words here is that Workflowy doesn't state it is a social curation tool. The designers might not even be thinking of social curation when they design the app. Yet here's the flip side though. Is Workflowy better off because of it? I say no. A big part of social curation is the social. Actually social here doesn't mean sharing except that it can be shown to the public/friends that get permission. What in reality it is hinting at is that export and import can be cool.

...but in order to be cool, it has to be personalized to more casual needs and layed out in better ways. Bullshit buzz words or not - there's nothing confusing about that especially for technical people. Export/import and presentations was always an important and controversial issue in all walks of life but software developers have often tacked it on if not been slow to adopt to this. Web developers focus too much on mobile. Desktop developers focus too much on caged databases. Had Workflowy been more of a social curation tool maybe it would have focus on a desktop compliment already. Maybe.

If this is still confusing, here's the bottomline. Curator as a word especially in a digital world? Yeah, there's a lot of bullshit in that. The average blogger can be a curator simply by blogging. You won't know whether he's a good or bad curator at that. You might not even sniff it because blogging is based on popularity and niche circles much like social networks. Social curation though - you can see a bit of the person's identity through that as it's their personal collection. Not in an entirely privacy invading way but like a well researched blogger making a blog post. The difference between the potential of social curation design and blogging is that blogging asks for the reader to have an interest in skimming through archives with little way of organizing a story except maybe via chronological and tag based random clickings. Social curation could potentially adopt the concept of stumbling upon data that Stumbleupon originally popularized before that service was hijacked into a social media category and combine it with the innovations of annotations (PDFs/Diigo), personal website scraping (Scrapbook+/Surfulator) and combine it with the bundles of an e-book.

Example imagine if dotepub was one day not based on an old version of readability but like website scrapers can edit and curate and mash up contents into an e-pub. It may not be a revolution unless e-book readers become cheap (for third world countries) and take off but the combination of those results could one day fuel the "true" death of mainstream newspapers and open up the culture for journalistic challenges where the best daily e-pub subscriptions are judged rather than the popularity of a newspapers' brand. On top of this, it may not be for everyone, but imagine the filter failure stress relief from no longer having to juggle between reading something later or reading something now but taking the perspective into that between a decision of those two plus the option of reading a collected set of articles like wikipedia but without the need to click through every next link or hope the other link is not a red herring. All these without having tabs stored in browsers or suffering in collection problems or being slaves to con-men who claim they scraped the free information around the web and then "curated" it into a paid PDF/video. Not to mention the lack of need to distribute this with an internet connection.

Again, I'd like to emphasize that the above is merely hinting at the potential of social curation and not saying this will be the reality.

IainB:
...as stuff like social media sharing buttons spread around the concept is what then boosted the motivation to develop such concepts as social curation and cross-sharing further than what designers and coders would have intended. (My emphasis.)
-Paul Keith (October 18, 2011, 01:38 PM)
--- End quote ---
I thought this Dilbert cartoon made a good comment on this...speaks for itself really.
-IainB (October 30, 2011, 10:48 AM)
--- End quote ---

I don't see what's confusing.
...
...Again, I'd like to emphasize that the above is merely hinting at the potential of social curation and not saying this will be the reality.
-Paul Keith (November 05, 2011, 10:28 AM)
--- End quote ---

Well, perhaps I added the confusion then? Because I are still confuzzled.
Unless you are making a joke of this? It could be amusing for Tweedledum and Tweedledee, I suppose.

At any rate, I am sorry if you feel the need to be defensive about using the term, but all I intended was to point out - without sticking it in your face - that if you are unable to define a term (in this case the "curation" concept) before you proceed to use it in a rational argument, then it cannot be a rational argument from the point when you first use it - because there is no definition of terms.
This isn't my opinion, it's just one of the rules of logic that I learned in high school when we were being taught how to develop our critical thinking skills and methods of thinking.

The only definition I have so far managed to find for "curation" is this sense:
curation
late 14c., from O.Fr. curacion, from L. curationem, noun of action from curare "to cure" (see cure).
Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2010 Douglas Harper

--- End quote ---

The way you talk about it, that meaning (above) doesn't look like it has anything to do with the price of fish. However, your language indicates that you seem to know what it is that you mean when you are talking about "... curation ....".
However, there seems to be nothing to put one's finger on and say, for example, "Ah! That's what he means when he talks about the terms 'curation' or 'social curation'! "

If we carried on discussing this without some idea of what you mean by the term "curation" in this context, then it will probably become an absurdity like the discussion in "Waiting for Godot".

So, please help me - this is making my brain hurt!:

* "Curation" - what exactly do you intend it to mean when you use it?
* "Social curation" - what exactly do you intend it to mean when you use it?
Thanks in anticipation.    :)

Paul Keith:
Oh I apologize if the way I came off was being defensive. I was simply providing tangible examples. I think it's safe to say that there are people whom I respect enough to not feel emotionally bothered with when replying.

However it is weird to equate critical thinking into the conversation of fad words though. Especially digital fad words.

If anything, it would be pseudo-skeptic to deny the existence of a term on face...nay Dilbert value.

The critical thinking way would be to do as what you have done with Maslow's idea and slice through the fluff from the truth. I can only surmise that it is not your fault but mine for being a poor communicator that you feel I have failed to bring this things to surface when I felt that was what I was already doing. In my previous post alone I (attempted to) answer this question: what exactly do you intend it to mean when you use it?

At the same time, the bullshit factor of buzz words here is that Workflowy doesn't state it is a social curation tool. The designers might not even be thinking of social curation when they design the app. Yet here's the flip side though. Is Workflowy better off because of it? I say no. A big part of social curation is the social. Actually social here doesn't mean sharing except that it can be shown to the public/friends that get permission. What in reality it is hinting at is that export and import can be cool.

...but in order to be cool, it has to be personalized to more casual needs and layed out in better ways. Bullshit buzz words or not - there's nothing confusing about that especially for technical people. Export/import and presentations was always an important and controversial issue in all walks of life but software developers have often tacked it on if not been slow to adopt to this. Web developers focus too much on mobile. Desktop developers focus too much on caged databases. Had Workflowy been more of a social curation tool maybe it would have focus on a desktop compliment already. Maybe.

If this is still confusing, here's the bottomline. Curator as a word especially in a digital world? Yeah, there's a lot of bullshit in that. The average blogger can be a curator simply by blogging. You won't know whether he's a good or bad curator at that. You might not even sniff it because blogging is based on popularity and niche circles much like social networks. Social curation though - you can see a bit of the person's identity through that as it's their personal collection. Not in an entirely privacy invading way but like a well researched blogger making a blog post. The difference between the potential of social curation design and blogging is that blogging asks for the reader to have an interest in skimming through archives with little way of organizing a story except maybe via chronological and tag based random clickings. Social curation could potentially adopt the concept of stumbling upon data that Stumbleupon originally popularized before that service was hijacked into a social media category and combine it with the innovations of annotations (PDFs/Diigo), personal website scraping (Scrapbook+/Surfulator) and combine it with the bundles of an e-book.
--- End quote ---

For word origins I often refer to this site: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=curate

late 14c., "spiritual guide," from M.L. curatus "one responsible for the care (of souls)," from L. curatus, pp. of curare "to take care of" (see cure). Church of England sense of "paid deputy priest of a parish" first recorded 1550s.

...and for dictionaries:

http://www.onelook.com/?w=curate&ls=a

noun
▸
an Anglican priest who helps a more senior priest more...
verb
▸
to be the curator of an exhibit in a museum more...

On top of this, if you search social media in the dictionary:

http://www.onelook.com/?w=social+media&ls=a

You'll have to go to such anyone can edit sites such as Urban Dictionary or Wikipedia just to get a "dictionary" entry.

Such is the commonality of many digital words. I don't see what's weird in that. Yet I'm sure despite the lack of this, you would know that what the dictionary defines as Twitter is not the same as the social media service known as Twitter.

On top of this, you could simply google for a definition and links such as this would turn up in the 1st few pages:

http://www.quora.com/How-is-social-curation-different-from-collaborative-filtering

The main difference to me is that curation is more than filtering (whichever form you give it): curation is about giving context.

A filter will select content. A collaborative filter, content based on what others and you did.

A curator will not only do that but add context: comment, analysis, format, pictures, ... Why they felt it was relevant, why they agree or disagree with that content.

Look at how the same piece of news is titled differently by say CNN and Fox and Al Jazeera: it's the same news but the context can be way different because each time, a human being - not an algorithm - gave his own twist to it.
-Guillaume Decugis, I run Scoop.it
--- End quote ---

To cut through the fluff, social curation is beyond context. It is perspective. Context can be everywhere. People can have context from upvoting and downvoting and liking an entry. Yet that's social media.

Social curation as it is commonly understood and implemented by many services is a fad word to unify the way people collect and personify such collections to bypass the filter problem from collecting such items.

The theoretical aspect of it is to take the mindset away from the collector so that they could simply collect and put more fluid and natural wording metadata to their collections instead of the dead as molasses aspect of tagging. It is a mindset to take into account the manner that people not only collect in different ways but they consume their collection in different ways as well as take into account the what if of what happens if they present this data to another human being. In short, it is an experiment towards something that can change the way we bookmark, annotate, share, relate, blog etc.

Of course origin-wise, the problem remains that it is a buzz word. However as most buzz words go, there was a prelude to this and the prelude is that as new services come and go, such services are often wrongly categorized and while those categorization helps, they also fail to be buzz words but one needs buzz words to influence those web developers to create and design a service that applies to the buzz word.

An example is Twitter's follow button. While it is a crucial feature on par with the "mark as read" buttons of rss readers and the footnote feature in word processors, no one was copying it. No one even understood how or why it needs to be copied for usability. At least that's how it was if you read the digital media and ask most of the early bird users. There was a demand for it but no one simply find it cool/necessary or needed.

As it stands with most concepts, someone had to hype it. So someone did. My first introduction to a social curated compared service was Storify and while I do not know the origin of the buzz word, it cemented to me why social curation was both necessary and important. At least for me.

One reason being is that even before I encountered social curation, I was social curating and the concept so enamored a poor communicator like me that when I first encountered a service that somewhat hinted to social curation (though it didn't advertise it as one) I wrote in my profile:

"I use Diigo because it's a great service, certainly the one I most depend on. I wouldn't know how to read as much websites without it's features. The Diigolet button looks like the developers were considering Opera users. It was one of the few web services where support was present to the point that it will be hard not to be introduced to Maggie even though I didn't really look for the staff. It is still in my opinion one of the key features in building up a competent web service.

So all in all, you have community, developer support, innovation and the underdog quality feel of a well made "before it's time" web application. Man, the only thing that would convince me not to use it is if the developers looked like they forgot all the stuff that got them the users, the features and the general stability of the service.

I mean, I've heard some like Mashable think Diigo has failed so there's always that doomsday looming in my head that one day they'll just drop the service but man oh man, hopefully they don't.

I don't have the cash to donate to them but this is like THE new hope for a more productive web if not the few soldiers on the quest of going against the grain of web 2.0 being more about infotainment than "fun research" community that really really just works and isn't just for the experts and the rich or the mainstream users so finally I use it because even though I don't have the cash, I want to use it as a way of showcasing my support for such an app that deserves to be right there at the top and hopefully it can only improve from here on out."

*Note that this was way way before such controversies as this article.

Now has most social curation services reach Diigo's level? No, I don't think so. Which is why it's so difficult to simply define social curation like one would define social media when Digg first became popular.

Diigo was what I considered the first Web 3.0 service when it was first released. For me, the only other innovative service on par with the tag of Web 3.0 was Dropbox because both of those services have qualities that you just couldn't point to anywhere as a total package.

When Diigo first came out, it had the most external social bookmarking service importing feature (which it dwindled down by ver. 3) and it's premium features, were not premium features and it also captured embedded youtube videos. It was a perspective that at that time I've never seen offered in any other free service nor I've ever thought a bookmarking service couild do. After all (even though it didn't) it gave you the capability to eat up nearly the entire portion of the social bookmarking side of the internet...and then some.

That is what modern social curation tools are aiming for.

As a definition, it is as large as the semantic web which is why it's so hard to define in a short manner without sounding like buzz words and it being a buzz word, also doesn't help it's case.

But as an tangible design, it's a lot more specific and that's what gives it life.

Storify first inserted the idea of a search engine where you can collect data via drag and drop and present it as a personalized edited collection.

PearlTrees does to social bookmarking what Goalscape does to outliners which is give you results that you wanted but you weren't searching for. Most of it is just due to it's mindmapping-like interface but to call it simply mindmapping would be false.

Scoop.it aims to push the focus more on content than authors. It is blogging without the pressure or the destiny of a blog to be judged on it's author rather than it's content.

Subjot edits the follow button so that instead of following the users, you follow subjects which lessens the noise.

Uncram takes the Zemanta model of creating diaries by recommending explanations for entries you posted. It also experiments with a like button that also serves different emotions such as thanks or agreement.

Ifttt.com takes the problem with exporting data from different services and uniting them.

Workflowy creates a fluid filter search engine that redefined how outlines are filtered and managed.

Each of these designs redefine what used to be simple subscription models utilized by RSS readers.

Each of these are able to do this because instead of trying to value your personal data and identity (at least less so than say something like Facebook), social curation defines itself as services having the perspective that (me) is less important than my data and that as good as many "Web 2.0" services has been, at the end of the day... not everyone desires to see how many upvotes an entry has, not everyone wants items recommended to them, not everyone wants to read the latest linkbait blog article. There are people who simply want to be informed. Read up on things they want or need to read up on. Have simple ways to collect and reread what they collected. Have simple ways to extract what they read and show it to another person without going through hoops and have ways they can interact with such presentations/stored notes to make it easier or more enlightening to review them.

Unfortunately this potential also means that where social curation's definition starts to stray towards incredibly tangible, incredibly present, incredibly existent definitions...the potential of the service strays off towards theoretical concepts again. No different than what semantic web features entail once people talk about social media vs. MSM or social bookmarking vs. browser bookmarks that sync. Social curation's potential (and in turn it's definition) lies in that place where one day people who can't hack it/who can't use bookmarks have a service designed like a bookmark for others but one for them. That one day people who can't collect without getting disorganized, have a way to get themselves organized without needing or wanting to get organized. That people who can't cut through the mass exposure of rss or feed-like features such as push entries like Facebook or Twitter, have a way to still consume such services with less noise. It is as it says on the tin: a way for a personal user to have a personal library but unlike a library like say MediaMonkey or Calibre, a library that's more like a museum. A museum where one does not need to be a master metadata librarian in order to mass collect and mass consume their collections without becoming confused or even worse buried under our own inferiority to better human beings.

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