As we covered last week, content is all around us and there is thousands of new content created everyday. We discussed in class how our time to screen and accessing content after we wake up can as quick as one second.
This is material, data, information or creative work provided by a client to a service provider. It can be very wordy, complex and hard to read such as spreadsheets, graphs or reports or easier to use content such as images, videos, audio recordings, graphics, website content.
This is content that you have generated yourself usually for personal or professional use. Today self-generated content is becoming more and more present on online platforms such as personal blogs, social media posts, YouTube videos, podcasts. In recent years self generated content has produced jobs such as Social Media Influencers, Content Creators and Bloggers. These jobs create content allows more creative expression, knowledge sharing, community building, and can also serve professional or business goals, such as marketing, brand building.
Examples of self generated content I consume is the Zoella blog, YouTube content creators and Instagram content creators.
User generated content is the content we generate everyday through the use of social media applications such as Instagram, Facebook, YouTube etc. This is content such as text, images, videos, reviews and other materials.
An example of user generated content would be this Instagram post. There is so much content just on one screen from likes, comments, shares which builds more traction and attention which essentially causes more content to be consumed and more interaction.
This is the process of gathering, organising and sorting through content from various sources on a particular topic or subject. The goal of content curation is to provide a collection of information that is useful, informative and meaningful to a specific audience.
Content curation is so important as there is so much content created daily. For example think about when you scroll on Instagram, once you refresh you will probably never see that piece of content again unless you had it saved or liked it as there is millions of pieces of content so there is lots to sort, organise and sieve through. A great example I saw recently was at the Tate Modern museum in London. They had an expedition of the pieces of art which had been discarded of due to content curation. A lot of museums such as Ulster Museum have storage containers where they keep all the content which had been archived or no longer in use.
By using content curation for your own work, it enables you to follow the basic principles of having good content that is appropriate, useful, user centred, consistent and concise.