I write for experts and consultants who want to gain visibility, credibility and authority online and be recognized as trusted guides.
The path I have been following for 25+ years, is curation. That means helping readers find what they should pay attention to by: a) becoming a discovery agent for them,
b) highlighting and contextualizing other people’s great work, c) creating collections, libraries, and resources that support the goals of my readers repeatedly over time.
In this issue:
1) Trust-Building Curation Insights
2) Interesting Reads for Curators
3) Research Tools for Sense-Makers
4) Curation Monetized Real-World Examples
5) Curated Newsletters Worth Paying Attention To
1) Trust-Building Curation Insights
Sense-making for explorers looking beyond the surface of things. Expanded and hand re-mixed thoughts from my recent Notes on Substack.
[Context] [Framing]
What this graph shows is something most people are still not aware of. It’s a paradigmatic shift and it may take some time to fully appreciate its implications.
Here’s my interpretation:
Creating new useful, informative content used to be rare and valuable. Now AI does it in seconds, for anyone, at near-zero cost.
What has value now, is the ability to see through what is out there and decide what actually matters, why it does, and how it connects to the rest.
You could call this context curation.
The natural consequences of it are:
a) Passing information to others - like when you write an opinion piece, or share a link to an interesting video - is no longer sufficient to build clout, credibility and authority online. It produces only more noise.
b) Information by itself - a link, a pointer, a recommendation to check out something - is merely fuel in a tank: ignitable yes, but useless if not inside a combustion engine. Without strong context, information is basically worthless. Unusable by human beings.
c) The game has changed. The new minimum qualifying bar to be relevant and useful to others today is set at organizing and structuring, sense-making, orientation and purpose-driven experience sharing.
d) Curating knowledge infrastructures is the appropriate, emerging way through which one can transform disconnected information bits into structured, contextualized and semantically meaningful assets that allow other humans to learn and appreciate something.
e) Stop spending your energy trying to know more or be more productive. You cannot win that race anymore. Start instead paying attention to how you decide things. When you read something and think “this matters” or “this does not,” write down why. When you pick a tool over another, or trust one source over ten others, explain your reasoning out loud or in writing. This process of making your judgment visible is exactly what is becoming rare and valuable.
f) Authority is increasingly determined by how knowledge connects across sources and authors. When you or another expert links relevant work from others in his field, he’s directly contributing to define the semantic map of that topic. When you start to include, point to, contextualize and curate other people resources and ideas, you become part of those who define spaces and their meaning rather than simply being the one talking about them.
You become a semantic source.
2) Interesting Reads for Curators
Stuff worth paying attention to for experts / thought leaders wanting to better understand where things are headed.
a) Taste
Knowing how to create, execute, make things real, is being commoditised.
Something else is emerging, and it is not just a bunch of new trendy words. It’s a true paradigmatic change to the way experts and professionals should approach their editorial strategy online.
“Value in the creative economy has shifted. For years, technical execution was the scarce resource. If you could design, code, compose, or write better than others, you had leverage. That equation is changing.”
Source: “The Curation Economy” by Fabrice F
The age of the “how” may be dead. Entering the “what” age. Deciding “what” you want to do / create / imagine in a world where everything is becoming possible.
“…the future of work” is about having a true passion and going deep into it.
A path with a heart is the best route into this future.
“No career is safe now, which means your healthy obsessions, those things that kindle your flame and stir your soul, are the only things that will carry you through.”
Like it or not, passion is about to be just as important as profit.
Source: “Rick Rubin Is the Future of Work” by Tom White
Your taste, in your field of expertise, becomes a lighthouse highlighting what is worth paying attention to.
“Honestly, curation is such an underrated superpower.”
Source: “How To Actually Stand Out In 2026 (12 Things Most Creators Won’t Do)” by Julian Precht
b) The Future [2025-2030]
“If AI agents keep evolving the way they are, very soon it will be them mostly doing the searching, browsing and vetting. What happens to services and apps when are not anymore humans checking them out, but little armies of agents, signing up and testing them out in advance for you?
Three key things to highlight and consider:
1) Build the best product for a specific niche.
AI agents will do real evaluations. The single best strategy here is to go after long-tail niche markets, just so that you reduce the competition and aim at being the best or one of the best among a few.
2)Build an audience that buys YOU.
Personal brand is the strongest moat that’s left. The founder with 100K followers who share their journey will outsell the faceless SaaS with a bigger feature set. Every time.
3) Everything else, the traditional SEO playbooks, the content calendars, the conversion rate optimization, the paid acquisition funnels... all of it was built for a world where humans do the searching.
That world is ending soon.”
Source: “The Death of Marketing and What Replaces It” - by John Rush
c) Attention
“Alongside the general clutter directed at us from all angles, there is also this constant flow of over-information, too much newness arriving in too little time to process it properly, let alone form a real thought about it.
The next piece of information appears and your brain gets pulled away again.
Sometimes it is information you want, your texts, your Instagram feed, your Substack feed, and sometimes it is information you never asked for in the form of ads, reels, recommendations, content disguised as education that somehow ends up consuming your whole attention anyway.”
“To Create, Curate What You Let In” by Nina Vincent
3) New Useful Tools for Information Curators
Useful instruments for experts I have recently discovered and tried out.
WUWT - Wha’s Up With That
Browser extension for AI reading analysis by Marshall Kirkpatrick, works on articles, PDFs, research papers, newsletters and YouTube videos. With one click, it pulls out key points, shows what is actually new, critiques weak spots, suggests follow-up reading, and helps you save useful insights as you go. Best for people who read heavily for research, writing or strategy work. Free, 3 pages/day.
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SpaceSearch
Browser-based AI search tool for searching many platforms at once, including Google, YouTube, TikTok and Reddit, from a single query. It pulls the results into one view and adds short summaries, so you can quickly see where a topic is being discussed and which sources are worth opening first. Especially useful when tracking examples, reactions or trends across different channels. Free version available.
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Roundups
Browser-based AI builder for making product comparisons and buying guides from product URLs or marketplace listings. You add products or URLs, and it generates a buying guide you can edit, publish, export to your blog or newsletter, and connect to affiliate links. Best for people who regularly recommend tools or gear and want to turn those recommendations into clear, useful comparison posts. It makes it easy to turn curated recommendations into actually useful, well-researched and well-presented knowledge infrastructures capable of income-generation. Free version available.
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CrossTab
Chrome extension for web data extraction that turns almost any website into a structured dataset you can export as CSV, copy, or send to an AI tool. You describe the data you want in plain language, and it can pull it from multiple pages too. Especially useful when comparing tools, building directories, collecting examples or researching competitors. Free plan, 10 credits.
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Wallabag
Open-source read-it-later app for saving web pages in a clean, distraction-free format. Good for people who collect serious source material and want a stable place to archive, organize and reread any content they have saved, across devices. Open source, self-hostable. 100% free.
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GeoBrowser.io
Browser-based collaborative knowledge-mapping platform. This looks to me as a very ambitious project where people can build topic “spaces” and connect sources, claims, people, events and tools can be semantically be linked together into a navigable knowledge graph. Supposedly - too early for me to say it - this is going to be a great way to show how system components fit together, where ideas connect, and what evidence supports what. I’d recommend it to KM practitioners and to those who have previous experience in organizing large databases of information, ontologies and taxonomies. Early access only.
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Gistr
Browser-based AI notebook for saving and working on ideas from articles, PDFs, YouTube videos and podcasts. It lets you highlight key parts, ask questions to the content sources you submit, link notes to exact pages or timestamps, and organize everything into shareable collections. Potentially useful for preparing lessons, articles, reports or resource guides that strongly leverage sources and references. Free version available.
4) Curation Monetized Real-World Examples
Interesting projects that organize existing info to create unique value and revenue.
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yFilm Guide
Data-driven movie discovery guide ranking the “Top 250 Films of All Time” through a weighted aggregate of IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes Critics, Metacritic, and Letterboxd scores. A self-built interactive ranking film database with integrated filtering, sorting and customizable weights.
Who it’s for:
Serious movie watchers, list-makers, and anyone who wants a faster way to choose what to watch without relying on one platform’s bias. Especially useful for people comparing “critical consensus” vs. “audience love.”
How it curates/organizes:
It doesn’t curate editorially; it curates mathematically. Films are organized by composite score, then made explorable through filters like era and “vibe,” sortable source columns, and custom weighting controls.
Monetization / business models:
Affiliate commissions by linking films to platforms where they can be watched via JustWatch links (active)
Potential sponsorship opportunities (potential)
Sellable reusable ranking methodology (potential)
Directories.so
Meta-directory collecting niche directories across design, AI, products, travel, finance and more, effectively a “directory of directories.” The site describes itself as “the ultimate directory of the best directories on the internet”.
Who it’s for:
Founders, makers, designers, researchers and SEO-minded operators who want shortcuts to discovery channels, inspiration libraries, launch platforms and specialized resource hubs without manually hunting them down one by one.
How it curates/organizes:
It creates value by aggregating already-existing directories, then sorting them into practical categories such as AI, Design, Marketing, Products & Tools, Travel and Finance. Each entry gets a one-line description plus a visible DR authority score, helping users judge both relevance and likely SEO authority at a glance.
Monetization / business models:
Indirect lead generation / brand marketing for DCNY the marketing agency behind this project (active)
Cross-promotion of related products in the footer (“More”) (active)
Potential paid inclusion / featured placement via submission flow (potential)
SEO traffic capture around high-intent “best directories” searches (active)
5) Curated Newsletters Worth Paying Attention To
Unique high-value newsletters that help you discover, make-sense and appreciate life artefacts that would otherwise go unnoticed.
Sequence by COSMOS
Culture and aesthetics newsletter that curates eclectic and fascinating topics from the growing curated catalog that is the COSMOS platform itself. Meta-curation at work. COSMOS strength is not information density but taste, coherence and the ability to turn scattered visual signals into recognizable moods, patterns or directions. It also mixes trend spotting, cultural references, objects and people well. It exists in two editions, one that you automatically receive once you become a COSMOS member (this is the one to look at) and the one you can access on Substack (less impactful, still interesting).
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Wallpaper
The fully curated email newsletter edition of Wallpaper*, the London-born design magazine founded in 1996, it is now a daily digital digest for people who live close to architecture, interiors, fashion, art, travel, tech and luxury culture. Its strength is breadth without feeling random: it scans many adjacent worlds and keeps a recognisable editorial standard, taste level and visual discipline throughout. What it does especially well is selective cross-disciplinary curation. It does not just collect nice things. It connects style, objects, places and people into a coherent view of contemporary design culture. I recommend it because it is polished, global, consistent and unusually good at framing aspiration without losing editorial control.
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Words That Matter
Weekly guest-curated reading newsletter by Ben Springwater, launched in 2023, built for serious readers, writers, thinkers and knowledge workers who care less about volume and more about what is actually worth their attention. Each issue invites one curator to share the books, essays and articles that shaped their thinking. Its special strength is its format: Editorially it curates through people with distinct intellectual taste. Visually it showcases content in a way that makes it immediately memorable. I recommend it because it makes its curated selection feel personal and credible.
To find more interesting curated newsletters I recommend:
Cover image: The underwriter at La Puerta Azul bar, Holbox, island (MX). March 2021.
Why: It’s through my lens and interpretation that the resources I share take a specific meaning. By themselves they could mean a million different things. Not when they pass through my filter. Like for a cat, curiosity is what propels me. The desire to search and to know more.
What I Can Do For You
If you are an expert, a consultant or professional coach, striving to become a recognized trusted guide in your field of work - without resorting to marketing tactics or persuasion techniques - I can be of help.
Check out the Curation-Based Authority System, a mini-video workshop (55 min) that takes you through the most basic curation formats to build authority and credibility online, while showing you the requisites, the examples, the key steps to follow and the easy-to-make mistakes you need to avoid.
Follow a path with a heart.
From Koh Samui (TH)
Robin Good
also love the cat mural !!
Interesting read!! Thanks for the mention⭐️