📡 What Experts Should Pay Attention To: Curation Signals - #01
Insights, reads, tools and monetization examples for trust-building experts.
I write this newsletter for new, emerging experts, consultants and advisors who want to be discovered and recognized as reliable trusted advisors.
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
When I asked AI about what relevant next topic to cover and which content format to use - based on the extensive reader data I had provided - Claude suggested I stay with in-depth, long analytical essays, similar to most of my recent articles, as readers positively reacted to them with very high open-rates.
But I decided to challenge that advice, trust my guts and go for my natural, much riskier and slower road: experimentation.
In this issue I go against all the constructive advice AI gave me. I choose to learn by making mistakes than to stay safe by blindly trusting what the expert and data say.
Here’s an alternative, shorter TRUST-able format that is not a deep-dive but rather a quality digest for what I have recently discovered, read, tested and ran into.
The goal is to explore, learn, validate AI recommendations against my intuition as well as checking whether this alternative editorial format could be a good complement – not a replacement – to the editorial approach I have been using so far.
1) Curation Insights
Sense-making for explorers looking beyond the surface of things.
Since I was a teenager, I much enjoyed collecting and organizing. Whether they be old stamps, soccer players stickers, insect taxonomies or music records (my first professional paid job, at 13, was being a DJ at private parties). As I look back and ask myself what made those kinds of activities so interesting and rewarding, I start to discover interesting things that might have captured my curious heart and gradually shaped my character and interests.
Discovery as Fishing - Curation requires a lot of searching but you never know what you’re going to find next and how long it is going to take for that to happen. What I did discover though, is that if you keep searching, you always run into something interesting. I like to think of it as fishing. Patience and persistence are the key traits needed to discover. Because unless you enjoy and persist doing it, you won’t find anything special.
.Pattern Noticing, New Ideas, Better Filtering - As I dug for extended periods of time I naturally started to notice traits and similarities across things that would otherwise have appeared totally unrelated. Recognizing those patterns helped improve my ability to find relevant stuff, to create novel connections (you can generate more ideas because you now have more root-concepts to remix) and to critically evaluate things I was not familiar with (by picking filters and references from a larger and more diversified pool).
.Appreciating the Where - How I sequence selected resources or ideas has powerful consequences on what I am able to communicate. Exploring order and position of objects inside a collection, has opened up for me additional ways to interpret something, as its meaning changes relative to what it precedes or follows, or – in non-linear spaces – to its position relative to others. Such awareness has helped me learn to fully appreciate the importance of what you place at the beginning and at the end of anything.
.Having a Viewpoint - Being able to express a personal viewpoint it’s very powerful. It shapes, it molds, it acts as a strong filter or lens. It bends interpretation through personal perspective. The point is how you develop one. And beware: an opinion is not a viewpoint. An opinion is what you think about something. A viewpoint is where you stand after you’ve looked long enough at something. It comes from having:
exposed oneself to many different perspectives
spent time noticing patterns
wrestled to find a personal way to interpret reality
Understanding this made me realize that curators are not just collectors, but true influencers of other people’s perceptions.
2) Interesting Reads for Curators
Stuff worth reading for experts and would-be thought leaders wanting to understand better where things are headed.
Democratization does not flatten hierarchies; it steepens them. “GenAI is the logical extreme: the act of creation is trivialized, and the art of selection becomes paramount. The critical task, therefore, is not generating more (that’s going to keep happening), but designing the systems - the new algorithmic gatekeepers - that can rescue the meaningful from the deluge. The future of culture will be shaped not by the sophistication of our generators, but by the values embedded in our filters. The strategic question is not what can we create, but how will we choose what matters; and who, or what, will do the choosing?”
“From Barking Hellhounds to AI Slop: What Electronic Music Foretells About Generative AI” by Narain Jashanmal
.The apprenticeship comeback → “…once AI accelerates execution, the bottleneck moves to judgment. [But] how do you teach judgment? Courses can’t teach it. Sitting at the feet of a master as he or she exercises superior judgment over long periods of time is the only way.”
”18 Predictions for 2026” by Jakob Nielsen
.Stop thinking of AI as a tool that speeds up your existing work. “Start thinking of it as a domain requiring its own mastery, one that multiplies with what you already know. Your domain expertise isn’t obsolete. It’s one of the multipliers. But on its own, it’s not enough anymore.”
“0 to 1, 1 to 10, 10 to 100: Three Ways of Working with AI” by Anthea Roberts
.There will always be creators. But the ones who stand out in this era are also curators. “People who filter their worldview so cleanly that you want to see through their eyes. People who make you feel sharper just by paying attention to what they pay attention to.”
When AI hands you an answer on a silver platter, you lose something fundamental. “You lose the muscle memory of finding information yourself. You lose the instinct to question sources. You lose the hard-won skill of evaluating credibility.”
”Why I Spent the First Week of 2026 Training Librarians on AI (And Why You Should Care)” by Michael J. Goldrich.
The more [ideas, opinions, prompts] the less their value.
”Your Hot Takes Are Worthless Now” by Nick Quick
.A good example of how to do meta-curation (curating your own curators).
”Who to read this 2026: A Curated Guide to the Experts and Systems for Success in 2026” by Frey
3) New Tools for Sense-Makers and Curators
Useful instruments for experts I have recently discovered and tried out.
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Turns your Substack data into queryable intelligence about what your audience actually responds to, not what you think they want.
StackContacts by Finn Tropy | StackContacts
.Collect, organize and personalize your favorite prompts.
Prompt Collector by Karen Spinner
.Track new emerging trends and fast-moving areas. Find what’s new and unexplored across research papers. Uncover gaps and opportunities on the topics that interest you. See the forest, not the trees.
FutureScan by Karen Spinner
.Find key passages and critical insights inside any long Youtube video
Longcut.ai by Zara Zhang, Yiqi Yan, Samuel Zhang
.Declutter, remove ads, improve legibility of any online article by choosing font, size, character and line spacing.
ReaderMode - browser ext. by Ryzal Yusoff
.Export all of your Kindle books highlights into your favorite second brain.
Glasp Kindle Highlight Export by Kei Watanabe and Kazuki Nakayashiki
.Personal content collector and private search engine. Second brain.
Stacklist by Kyle Hudson and Martina Zrnec
.Visual second brain for thoughts, ideas and projects. Online and local. New cross-platform version. Free version available - video intro.
TheBrain v.15 - via Chuck Frey
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Paradata: My personal criteria to select the above tools:
Tested and tried
Found it really useful for my research and curation work
Made or recommended by a human being with a recognizable name
Targeted at individuals, creators, indie entrepreneurs, experts. Not at enterprises.
Free, low-cost or with generous free plan or trial.
4) Curation Monetized Real-World Examples
Existing profitable projects built around collecting and (re-)organizing existing info.
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The four projects listed below are all about books and how you can create new value around them by mixing their data with the perspectives of high-profile thought-leaders, entrepreneurs and authors.
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The Greatest Books by Shane Sherman
Comprehensive collection of the best books ever. More than 40k books included. Through a unique custom algorithm, it filters through 700+ ‘best of’ book lists to generate a unique guide to the world’s most appreciated books. Project paradata.
Monetizes by integrating contextual Google ads, in the fully free version.
Offers monthly paid membership allowing full catalog download and customizable recommendations.
Has open-sourced filtering algo.
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Most Recommended Books by Anurag Ramdasan and Richard Reis
Human-curated book discovery platform. Born 2020. Lists 300,000+ manually vetted books. Paradata.
Monetized though Amazon affiliate commissions.
Accepts user submissions and feedback
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ReadThisTwice by Vahe Hovhannisyan
Tracks over 3000 thought-leaders and their book recommendations across social media and interviews. Curated by a human.
Monetizes through Amazon affiliate commission and Google ads
Allows creation of personal book collections and reading lists
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GoodBooks by Terrance McArthur and Jordan Hughes
9,500+ book recommendations from the most successful and interesting people in the world. Launched 2020.
Monetizes through Google ads, Apple Books affiliate commissions and direct ads.
5) Curated Formats: Duck Constellation
Trust-building curated content formats I’d recommend if you are an expert.
Description: Personal perspective / insight / opinion, complemented by other authors’ quality viewpoints.
I have named this content curated format “duck constellation” because two images lit up in my mind when I try to abstract it: 1) a flock of ducklings following their mom as she swims, 2) a group of stars forming a recognizable pattern. The flock are the curated contributions following the main theme, the constellation is the unifying meaning emerging from multiple perspectives.
Examples:
This is a curated format that may look challenging, but with the help of AI, second brains and shared knowledge libraries (like Sublime, Glasp, Arena and Cosmos), it is rapidly getting into everyone’s reach.
Why I recommend it: Duck constellations are a powerful format for ideas needing to be grounded and inspected from multiple perspectives. They seek complementary – both supporting and diverging – viewpoints to expand the reader horizon, provide broader context and to increase the resolution and depth of the idea being presented.
Cover image: Duck Constellation by ChatGPT 5.2
AI: this article has been entirely written by a human.
I have been curating what to pay attention to for experts and communication professionals for 25+ years.
I do this because I enjoy looking beyond the surface of things and to share what I discover in my journey.
I love to create lasting information resources that can be useful to others.
Please consider supporting this work (like, recommend, subscribe).
Follow a path with a heart.
From Koh Samui (TH)
Robin Good
Thank you so much for sharing glasp's Kindle highlights importer!
I really liked this. Especially the part where you basically said, “I hear the data… and I’m still going to trust my instincts.”
The way you talk about collecting and noticing patterns feels familiar. That slow process of paying attention, sitting with things, figuring out what actually matters. That’s where good judgment comes from, not just reacting fast or publishing more.
The distinction you make between having an opinion and having a viewpoint really stuck with me. You can feel the time spent behind it.
This didn’t read like “content” to me. It felt more like someone thinking out loud and inviting others to look over their shoulder. Which is probably why it works.