There's been a lot of noise around the concept of “Web curation” these days. Even the affably vapid Robert Scoble has written on the topic – so you know it's got real buzzword status.

The concept is simple (which suggests, but does not prove, that it may be profound). The amount of information online is unfathomably vast and dreadfully disorganized. Web-search technology is miraculously effective if you already know what you're looking for, but if you need to stay up-to-date on a handful of topics, search engines suffer from clunkiness and redundancy. What you need is a team of human beings who monitor a topic for you, select the best and most relevant data on a regular basis (preferably around the clock), and present it in a meaningful format. You need curation.

Web curators aren't writers, because they are more concerned with locating, selecting, and presenting information than writing original works. Curators do, however, write text that frames, explains, contrasts, and contextualizes the summaries and content links they provide.

Web curators aren't editors, because they don't revise information to make it clearer, more direct, or more meaningful. They do, however, make notes in the cyber-margins, commenting, correcting, explaining, and offering contrary views.

Web curators aren't the same as museum curators. In the museum setting, curators are responsible for assembling meaningful collections that can be preserved through time. The online curator isn't concerned about eternity. His offerings are intended for right now – in fact, the sooner the curator can get his collection online, and the more frequently he can update it, the better.

Web curation isn't the same thing as content aggregation. As customarily practiced, aggregation is based on a more-is-better basis. There's little or no deliberation over the inclusion of text, images, and links – if the keyword search finds a hit, the headline appears in the list.

A blogger named Brittany Morin discussed curation in an insightful Huffington Post article in November. Morin wrote:

With all of the information and all of the people together in one place, there are even more opportunities for creating, sharing, and discovering ideas. But you can't necessarily go search for them -- sometimes you just don't know what to look for. The ideas should come to you, and they should come through a channel whose expertise and taste you trust. In the analog world, when one wants fashion advice, they turn to Anna Wintour, creator of Vogue. When one wants to cook, they grab a cookbook with recipes written and edited by a chef they trust and admire. It was at last year's D8 conference that the late Steve Jobs even said: "I think we need editorial more than ever right now."

Some of the best Web aggregation sites are blogs. Curation through blogging can be a satisfying and important job, though it is also a lot of work. Yesterday's post, for example, in which I connected some dots and concluded that the U.S. is gearing up to wage an offensive cyber-war, required me to read, analyze, and annotate hundreds of documents online. I waded through redundant information in news reports, exaggerations in blogs, and deadly dull primary sources, including pending Congressional legislation. (That stuff is written in a specialized, highly formal and obscure dialect barely intelligible to readers of everyday English.) I spent about 30 hours researching that post.

Obviously, it is not economically feasible to expend that much effort on a blog that is updated several times a week. But now that I've done my homework on the issue, I can create follow-up posts by adding news and analysis incrementally. That's the theory, at least – we'll see how it works in practice.

Curation will not replace online publications and it won't replace Web search. But it will continue to serve an important role in helping us keep up-to-date on topics that matter to us. We'll continue to count on specialists to find, evaluate, contextualize, and present relevant information. In essence, checking in with a curator equates to subscribing to the curator's point-of-view.

I hope the relevance and quality of information I provide in these ramblings motivate you to check in now and then. Don't hesitate to drop me suggestions in the comments.

Web recommendation: My favorite software development Web curator is Rob Diana, whose Regular Geek blog posts almost always align with my own interests in the programming biz. Diana's curation efforts are on hiatus at the moment because he was relying on behavior of Google Reader which Google has eliminated. He promises, however, to resume posting selected links every day once he resolves the technical difficulties. In the meantime, there are the insightful, intelligent articles he writes, including this one, which introduced me to the concept of Web curation: Google Reader is not about reading news, it is about curation. J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. A curiosity: The Serbian Orthodox Church, and therefore the Republic of Serbia, celebrates Christmas according to the Julian Calendar – on January 7.