‘An indispensible guide to the brave new media world’ -Arianna Huffington, Editor-in-Chief The Huffington Post

‘Curation Nation gives me hope for the future of the Information Age’ -Daniel H Pink, author Drive

‘Curation, not creation, is king and Rosenbaum shows you why. This is a great piece of research and analysis’ -Guy Kawasaki, co-founder of Alltop & author Enchantment

‘True pioneer Steve Rosenbaum has assembled big ideas, bigger egos and more than enough information to catch you up, in a hurry’ -Seth Godin, author Linchpin

Between the dawn of civilisation through to 2003- there was just 5 exabytes of information created. That much information is now created every 2 days and the pace is increasing. People aren’t ready for the technology revolution that’s going to happen to them.
Steven Rosenbaum reveals in Curation Nation (McGraw-Hill, March 2011, £19.99) why being a human aggregator is the key to growing an existing business or starting a new one. In fact, he asserts that curation is the only way to remain competitive in the future. Whether you’re a brand, a publisher, or a content entrepreneur, the key to creating a manageable, inviting online experience is to extract value from an otherwise useless chaos of digital noise and position yourself as a trusted source for information and goods.

This is great news for businesses, as it takes away the traditional pressure of having to consistently create something new. Instead, Rosenbaum says that we should focus our resources on handpicking content or products that are already out there — whether it’s someone else’s how-to-install-your-new-showerhead video or a particularly great movie review or an article about organic baby foods — that we think would be relevant and exciting to customers, and repackaging it for their consumption.

The Huffington Post does this by letting its readers dictate which articles it features from around the web; Whole Foods does it by only carrying only sustainable products; Pepsi is doing it with its new Pepsi Refresh campaign, asking people and organisations to submit ideas for how it should spend its money to make a positive social impact and then asking people to vote to determine which projects should receive the funding.

Successful curators have a voice and a content mix. They gather, organise and filter good stuff, allowing visitors to make content for them, as well as creating some unique content of their own. The basic thinking behind it is transparency, listening to customers, and giving people a place to participate in order to become THE centre of curated content on your topic.

In Curation Nation, Rosenbaum “curates the curators” by gathering together priceless insight and advice from an extraordinary collection of thinkers from media, advertising, publishing, commerce and web technologies. Curation Nation is both a journey and a guide to a phenomenon that levels the playing field, giving businesses equal access to the content abundance that is driving consumer adoption of the web.

Steve Rosenbaum has been working with curated content since he created the groundbreaking hit MTV News UNfiltered, an early example of viewer-generated content, in the pre-web days. He is the founder of www.magnify.net where people can integrate user-generated video, video that they produce, or video that they discover into a website with social networking features. Along the way he has made many films, documentaries and web projects including “7 Days in September”. Steve is a technology blogger for The Huffington Post.