There’s mounting pressure for content creators to, well, create content.
Not necessarily to satiate audience demand (though people seem to be upping their content intake) but rather to stay atop the constantly growing heap of content that other content creators are creating.
So we get lazy resourceful and we pick the low-hanging fruit.
While I don’t think we suffer from information overload, I actually think we suffer from a more sinister problem. Curator overload.
Not good curators like Robert Scoble or Jason Kottke. Those guys are worth their weight in gold, in fact we need more curators like them: they uncover unique, useful and obscure things before everyone else. And if they do repost they always add something.
I’m talking about curator overload in the form of people taking popular content (usually images, but not exclusively) surfaced on sites like Google+, Reddit, or Stumble and reposting again (as if it is new and / or they originally discovered it) on a different network or blog, without bothering to credit the original sharer.
I understand that sometimes it is difficult to credit, especially when digging for content on your own. But it is painfully obvious when you belong to multiple networks and see someone basically copy-pasting content someone else has surfaced recently. In essence, it’s different when you’re sharing something you searched for / found, vs. something you’re specifically taking from another.
I’m not sure if I’m in sync with the spirit of Adam’s post (or if I took something entirely different from it), but I do have this to say to all content curators (myself included) before we hit publish:
Add content, add context, or add a comment. Anything else is just adding a copy.
[Image: bettyx1138]
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