Tag: curate

Metacuratorship and the CD Revival

I just read A Future History of the CD Revival. Ten years from now, there are clubs based around burning music CDs. The physical discs aren’t just pleasingly shiny.

Unlike today’s collaborative, crowdsourced, and automatically generated playlists, a CD’s tracklisting is fixed, and the CD-burning scene is an opportunity for music lovers to show their deep individual loves of music, its sequencing and presentation.

The article is at Pitchfork. I found it via a selection of the top music articles of 2010, which I in turn found via Largehearted Boy.

I appreciate LHB’s music and lit blog, especially his curatorship of the certain musical strands of the web. He often points in turn to selections, so we have multiple levels of curatorship here…

WordPress Plugins: Abundance and Curation

One of the main plots in the story of the web is the replacement of scarcity by abundance. For example, you want to find restaurant reviews? Go ahead, knock yourself out, but try to finish with the reviews before the restaurants close for the night. As that example shows, abundance is itself a problem.

Abundance isn’t just a problem for consumers of web content. It’s also a problem for content creators. For example, what plugins should you use for your WordPress site?

The official plugin directory currently lists over 10,000. You can search by keyword, but that doesn’t solve the abundance problem. Searching for the keyword analytics yields 270 plugins.

So we need selection, or ordering, or, to use a currently fashionable term, curation. The plugin directory does this by sorting; you get to choose the criterion (Relevance, Highest Rated, Newest, Recently Updated, or Most Popular).

Weblog Tools Collection recently asked “WordPress Genuises” for the top 5 plugins they use in every site they set up, and published the results. I’ve been guided by those results in setting up the PTA website I’m working on.

I’m interesting in approaching plugin curation from another direction. There are several value-added WordPress hosts, such as page.ly and WP Engine. They use plugins. I’m interesting in their selection of plugins, since it provides a sort of implicit curation of plugins. I’ll contact them, and see what I can come up with.

Meanwhile, any comments on plugins and how to select among the abundance are welcome.