I write this newsletter for new, emerging experts, consultants and advisors who are looking to increase their visibility, authority and trust in the eyes of their prospective customers. In simpler words: people who want to make a business out of their personal know-how even if they’re not great writers and may not have relevant traditional credentials.
The strategy I have been using for 25+ years, is curation. That means helping my 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, catalogs that support the goals of my readers repeatedly over time.
In this issue I highlight key insights, trends and suggestions on what to do to move from being a mere link-sharer, to become a trusted influencing filter: a meta-curator.
Personal Story
When I first started publishing online, back in 2000, I had no idea what I was doing.
I was simply driven by the raw excitement of this new tech toy called the Internet. I was fascinated by the emerging apps that suddenly allowed anyone to publish directly to the web. But unlike what everyone else was doing at the time, I chose a different path. I didn’t want to open “just another blog.”
I said to myself: “I don’t want to be another voice among many. I want to build a hub where I curate the very best for communication professionals.”
And so, I started. I used a balanced mix of curating other people’s ideas, resources, and tools, while also—with their permission—republishing key essays from high-credibility authors and institutions.
By 2008, MasterNewMedia had become a curated online magazine in four languages with millions of readers. It gave me, and three other people around the world, the opportunity to make a living doing something we genuinely loved.
But with success came money—and the desire for more. That’s when things started to break.
I forgot the original reason. Corrupted by wanting “results” without putting in the originality that had given life to the magazine in the first place, I made many disastrous mistakes. I stopped being the guide and started chasing the numbers.
As a result, MasterNewMedia ceased to publish regularly around 2014, after being economically independent for over 10 years.
What remains of that unforgettable adventure is a deep conviction: the concept of building visibility, authority, and credibility through curation rather than just authoring makes more sense today than ever before.
For those experts who do not want to sell themselves as the ones with the ultimate system or solution, curation may prove to be a more reliable road to provide value while becoming a trustable source.
*N.B.: I have recently saved over 150 articles from the original MasterNewMedia site, updated their links and formatting and republished them here.
1) Concept / Focus of this Issue
There are two curation levels. It is important to understand their differences.
Level 1 is made up of “primary curators”, that is, individuals who pick and share interesting things they find online.
Level 2 are meta-curators, people who select and contextualize for their readers, the best information that their selected primary curators have shared.
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Level 1 are sources. Level 2 are trusted guides.
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This process of curating the streams, collections, and lists of other curators is what John Udell, as early as 2009, referred to as meta-curation.
In a 2009 thought experiment regarding Net radio, Udell proposed a layer of "meta-curation" where experts would curate the existing curated streams of others to help audiences identify the most valuable content.
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Like in a large public Asian night market with hundreds of kiosks, the greatest value is in knowing which ones are best at x and y, so to in a culture of information over-abundance, the act of vetting other curators creates a secondary trust layer, where the ‘filter’ itself - and not any individual kiosk - becomes the primary source of value. The trusted guide.
.Think of music. Now that thousands of new songs are released every single day, who carries greater value? The author of a new track, the blogger/curator who reviews and curates interesting new songs, or a trusted DJ compiling the best new jazz tracks of the month?
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Meta-curation makes it possible for any sufficiently experienced expert to become a vital value-building block inside a knowledge network because primary curators are over-abundant and they by all competing with each other create more fragmentation than real understanding.
2) Key Insights
The key insight for experts is that the ability to evaluate and organize the work of others is increasingly seen as a more valuable sign of competence than traditional authorship. Acting as a secondary critical filter separates the many who simply share links – whether with their own framing or not – from those who we would normally call thought-leaders.
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Meta-curation is therefore particularly relevant for experts who wish to position themselves as the ultimate information brokers in their specific niche. By “curating the curators,” an individual identifies the most reliable and insightful voices within a field, thereby reducing the “noise” for their audience.
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By highlighting quality sources such as key curators, specialized newsletters and repositories, an expert can direct a community's appreciation toward key issues while becoming familiar and trusted. This looks to me as a new form of truer, more honest and transparent form of “influencer” than the one we have been seeing for many years on social media.
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Curation may soon become more popular than creating new content. If my assumptions above hold true, there is no reason to think that creating new content will achieve the same results. For example, in technical communities, such as those on collaborative coding platforms, curation has become more popular than original creation because it centralizes fragmented information.
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While algorithms and bots now strongly determine what people read and pay attention to, human curators, doing critical evaluation of other people’s work, appear to be the primary route to surface cultural value.
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Whether you like it or not, the opportunity for influencing the world by controlling the flow of information is slowly but inexorably escaping the traditional media conglomerate and moving into curators and meta-curators’ hands.
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References:
”Curating the Digital World: Past Preconceptions, Present Problems, Possible Futures” - Susan Cairns, USA, Danny Birchall, UK, 2013.
“Digital curation as learning activity” | PDF - ResearchGate
“Understanding How GitHub Supports Curation Repositories” - MDPI
3) Emerging Trends
Finding Those Trusted Guides
As modern technology allows anyone to be a curator we will soon need new tools to help identify the good ones from the rest.
.From Gatekeeping to Gatewatching
Traditional media operated on a monopoly of gatekeeping, where editors decided what was newsworthy before publication. Now, the networked environment fosters “gatewatching,” where individual authors, curators and bloggers, pick and evaluate content to pay attention to from what has already been published.
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Curation Becomes a Common
Post-publication gatekeeping allows curators to provide broader context, evaluate and critically analyze official sources, while providing a new common
(shared public good)..
Curation Goes Mainstream
The skills of curation are no longer “niche” but are becoming the standard for any professional seeking to maintain authority in the public sphere..
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References:
- “Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media and the Public Sphere” by Alex Burns - The Stacks
- “Gatekeeping, Gatewatching, Real-Time Feedback” - ResearchGate
4) Real-World Examples
Here some good examples of meta-curation at work both in highly popular and broad-focused publication as much as in much smaller and very-niche focussed ones.
NextDraft is a daily brief that identifies the most important stories, effectively “curating the curators” of the news world. Offers a summary and a specific viewpoint while saving readers time. Has built a massive following based on author’s unique perspective.
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Instead of Doomscrolling by Mapu
Finds curated sources across the internet that are actually worth your time. Focus on: literature, philosophy, fashion, media literacy, internet culture, technology, ecology, cosmology, feminism, mythology, and more..
Michel’s Substack: Fourth Generation Civilization by Michel Bauwens
Curates research, case studies, and theory around commons-based peer production, mapping alternatives to traditional economic and governance systems..
Content Curators by Javier Guallar
Highlights curation-related insights, trends and opinions mostly from Spanish-language based journalists and writers.
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Brings together links to a limited selection of recent articles, targeted at indie entrepreneurs and creators and focusing on online business growth and building in public.
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Techmeme
Focuses and highlights what to pay attention to in the area of new technology, startups, VCs and investments from a US-centered perspective. It creates value by curating (through humans supported by algos) hundreds of individual primary curators and news outlets.
5) What To Do in Practice
Build your trusted sources list. To become an idea-, rather than product-, influencer (what we’d normally label a thought-leader) one must constantly monitor the space(s) in which one wants to provide guidance to others. This monitoring is necessary to spot and bring together emerging ideas, observations and stories that shed light on new opportunities, trends, futures. Thus a careful - and constantly vetted - selection of the primary curators in your space coupled with a basic system to keep them under tabs is the first essential step toward becoming an AI-age influencer.
.Be transparent. A powerful but often overlooked trust-building strategy for experts is the use of “paradata.” By sharing the “how” of your curation process, how you have found a story, why you chose it, and what sources you cross-checked, you provide an “audit trail” that builds deep trust with your audience. In this context, transparency becomes a powerful key “differentiator” as a) many experts rely on AI for writing polished content with no depth or roots, b) secret, invisible algorithms have de facto become the primary agents of meaning.
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Collaborate and synergize. Influential online leaders build credibility because they are “centrally placed within a network” (or multiple loosely connected networks). Thus, a curator’s influencing power is directly proportional to how central they are in their networks. For experts wanting to leverage the curatorial approach, this means that their curation should not be a solitary activity but - as much as possible - something they do in collaboration with others.
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.References:
“The Role of Paradata in Algorithmic Accountability” - SJSU ScholarWorks-
“The Construction and Influence of Information Trustworthiness in Social Movements” - UCL Discovery - University College London
6) How It Connects To the Rest
Meta-curation is a relevant concept that emerges from connecting the dots between many of my previous analyses. To trace and better understand how my understanding has been evolving please refer to these:
7) Paradata
This TRUST-able issue has been entirely written by a human hand. Here’s the process I have followed.
Using StackContacts by Finn Tropy — which in synergy with Claude AI can precisely identify your audience preferences and their engagement with any Substack content you have published before — I have identified 20+ potential themes to address. From these I have selected to focus on meta-curation, as it brings together and gives sense to many of the articles I have recently published, while also being a concept rarely covered online.
I have then researched the topic using ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini and saved all of the relevant papers and articles while annotating the key concepts in each inside Sublime.
At this point I have personally created the structure and sections you see here, and proceeded to write each one manually, with no draft or rough outline from AI.
I purposely decided to experiment with a different editorial format by filling each section with the essential ideas I had arrived at, to pack more insightful value in a shorter and more scanable format. I am afraid this may put some readers off, as the final results looks more like AI-generated typical recommendation summaries, but I hope to be deeply wrong about this.
In a networked culture like the one we live in now, authority is no longer built by controlling access to information or having new ideas, but rather by developing the skill of observing and highlighting what is most relevant.
Those who can effectively “curate the curators” will not only build their own visibility and authority but will also perform a vital social function: reducing the noise and increasing the signal in a world of overwhelming information.
N.B.: From time to time I reference and link products and tools I use and recommend. When a reader follows any such link and then decides to purchase that tool I may receive a small commission. Be aware that I recommend only apps and services which I have personally bought, liked and which I regularly use.
Cover image: Sunset over São Jorge island, Azores islands (PT). 2017.
What I Can Do For You
I help experts, consultants and advisors - who are a building a new online career - in gaining in a relatively short time, the authority, credibility and visibility they initially lack.
I do this by teaching them how to become top trusted curators in their niches, field of work, area of expertise.
For this purpose I’ve created a free, focused 55-minute video workshop that walks you through:
Why curated content formats are so useful to build credibility and authority
When to use them and what requirements do they have
An updated list of real-world examples of curated formats at work
The specific tools you need to curate
The actual key steps that transform researching and writing into curation
The 11 typical mistakes novice curators do
No fluff. No boring stuff.
The Curation-Based Authority System - Video Workshop.
Follow a path with a heart.
From Koh Samui (TH)
Robin Good
Hi Robin - I really love your (or John's) thesis about the meta-curator. I could not agree more.
I have been creating a tool called webcurator.io that fits precisely in that new stack you speak of. And actually my tool curated your article, which is how I found you (I'm not a bot tough).
I'd love to get in touch and discuss the topic more.
This is the tool: https://webcurator.io
Karim
Thank you sharing the process as well as the importance Robin. You give meaning to my way of thinking on this topic. I am also very curious and like to share and contextualize what I see. Cheers!