When I see internet marketers pushing “content curation”my BS meter automatically goes off. Beep .. beep .. beep!
Today is no exception.
When I first heard of the term “content curation” it was from internet marketers. I immediately thought of content scrapers, plagiarizers, list makers and the like trying to game Google to get a better position in the SERPS, increase traffic, build authority and to ultimately make money.
Nothing that I’ve read since has changed my mind.
Let’s be honest .. that’s the name of the game isn’t it? Getting more traffic from the search engines, blogging friends or the a-listers that we suck up to.
After all, why else would the marketers be pushing “content curation” so hard. For fun? (That’s a rhetorical question).
Here is an excerpt that I recently wrote “Is There a Difference Between News Aggregation and Content Curation”:
The term “Content Curation” is being promoted by internet marketers to justify content theft. Their feeble remarks are used in a very narrow context and don’t take into consideration the rampant list makers, plagiarizers and copyright infringers who are abusing OPC (other people’s content) to rank well in the SERPS.
If someone changes my words a little to obfuscate their crime (which happens often), or even if they link directly to my article and rank better in Google than me (which is why they do it) — why on earth could you possibly think I would be happy with that?
Of course if someone wants to quote me and intelligently discuss what I’ve written (and link to me) .. that is a completely different matter. But just making lists and/or copying and pasting is complete and utter BS.
It is wide open to abuse and “content curation” unfortunately opens that door. You would never get away with that in the printed literary world so why should blogging be any different.
It is my intellectual property that is being ripped off and it is for this reason I can never condone so-called “content curation”. It is a lazy person’s way to write content and rank well with the search engines.
My advise is internet marketers should use their brains to come up with something original to write or go find another hobby. BUT please leave my/our content alone!
I can’t stop the content curators but they certainly won’t gain my respect, and I will be in their face .. count on it.
Content curation is just a fancy term the marketers came up with to obfuscate the fact that it’s another way to game the search engines, build authority and to make money.
Just to be clear, I’m not talking about news aggregation here. Newspaper clipping services of course do it all the time and there’s no harm or foul there.
What I am talking about is stealing, ripping off the intellectual property of another writer for profit. A simple analogy might be the difference between quoting news copy as opposed to editorial content.
As an ex-journalist I can tell you there’s a HUGE difference between news aggregation and “content curation“.
We are bloggers, which also means we are writers. We need to have some boundaries when it comes to making money. Don’t we?
Am I right?
Funny how we used to revile “content scrapers”. Now they’ve polished it up into a business and given it a new name to make it legit.
But there’s a huge difference between “content curation” the marketers talk about than just adding to the conversation (without an ulterior motive) don’t you think (another rhetorical question).
Here is what Wikipedia has to say about curating content:
The act of curating, of organizing and maintaining a collection of artworks or artifacts; The act of curing or healing; The manual updating of information in a database
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/curation
Digital curation is the selection, preservation, maintenance, and collection and archiving of digital assets.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_curation
Seems to me that’s what Googlebot already does. Surely we don’t need any more help from the internet marketers (yes … another rhetorical question).
I can think of better, more ethical ways to get traffic than leveraging off of someone else’s sweat equity.
Like say, for example … writing great, original content? Now there’s a thought.
Just sayin…
P.s.: Within the first 24 hours since publishing this post I have been targeted by dozens of splogs scraping content from here. Thanks for proving my point assholes.
