Curation is king
In 1996, Bill Gates wrote an essay titled “Content is King” that was published on the Microsoft website.
Gates wrote, “Over time, the breadth of information on the Internet will be enormous.”
Today, there might be even more content online than Gates imagined.
Even before AI, content was growing fast. More people with better tools made more written, audio, and video content.
As AI is now increasingly being used for content creation, the total amount of content online will grow, probably at a faster rate than before.
This makes search functionality more difficult but more important.
Search
Most of the apps you use have a search bar. Google. Netflix.
Before, Google may have had 100 articles to choose from for a given search term. Now it has to choose from 1,000 articles. Those numbers aren’t real. Just examples.
Imagine you’re looking for a show on Netflix. You type in “comedy” or “action,” and you get many results. How do you know which one you want? The algorithms try to help us, but they aren't perfect.
It’s partly the fault of the user. “Comedy” and “action” are vague search terms. “Romance comedy” and “superhero action” are more specific.
But do the search algorithms give better results as search terms get more specific? I don’t know.
And how are the algorithms assessing quality?
You can match the search term to words in a blog post or words in a script, but that doesn’t help with finding quality.
Getting recommendations from a human
If you want to find quality content, it’s often better to get a recommendation from someone you trust.
For information, you want someone who knows the space and can differentiate between legit knowledge and B.S.
For entertainment, you want someone who has similar tastes as you, or at least knows your tastes well enough to give you personalized recommendations.
Two layers: search algorithms and human curators
There are two layers.
Search algorithms are the first layer. Human brains don’t have the speed and processing power needed to scan the vast ocean of online content.
Human curators are the second layer. Curators will use search algorithms and then further refine the results for a target audience or an intended outcome.
Many will only use the first layer.
But you will likely get better results for what you are trying to find if you add the second layer.
Two use cases: information and entertainment
“When it comes to an interactive network such as the Internet, the definition of ‘content’ becomes very wide. For example, computer software is a form of content … But the broad opportunities for most companies involve supplying information or entertainment.”
In the information space, I see coaching and courses growing.
Coaches and course creators are the human curator layer.
In the entertainment space, it’s more subjective. What are your tastes? How do you describe your tastes? Is the search algorithm fluent in how you describe your tastes? Or do you need a human curator as an in-between layer?
There is probably money to be made by entertainment curators, compared to information curators.
Coaching and courses
Let’s say you want to learn something.
You need to find the right information.
A lot of the information is free online. You just need to do a search on Google.
But then you’re sifting through all the results. And you can’t really tell the good from the bad.
Coaches and course creators don’t necessarily know anything that you can’t find online for free.
But they will save you the time that you would otherwise spend trying to find the information yourself.
You have to know what you want
You can’t write a search query that will give you what you want if you don’t know what you want.
Do you know what you want?
Can you describe what you want?
I’ve written more about this here:
Conclusion
“Those who succeed will propel the Internet forward as a marketplace of ideas, experiences, and products—a marketplace of content.”
We now have something similar to the marketplace of content that Gates envisioned.
But the continued success of this marketplace may depend more on curation than content creation.