Synthesizing Books - CM #13
Interconnectedness, making ideas accessible, finding needles, synthesizing books, curating vs collecting, curating vs social sharing, top paid newsletters leverage curation
Welcome to issue #13 of Curation Monetized.
It’s an honour for me to have you as a reader.
Your feedback and comments, in helping me improve this publication, are always highly welcome. Feel free to write me at robin.good@masternewmedia.org
Robin
Key Curation Insights
1) Interconnectedness - Ted Nelson
Duration: 3’:52”
The true curator mission is to highlight relationships and synergies between apparently unrelated resources, objects or writings.
His ability is expressed in how well he can make visible the interconnectedness and influence that each one has on all others from a specific perspective.
“…the world is a system of ever-changing relationships and structures”
Expressing interconnection has been the key focus of Nelson's computer work, particularly in representing relationships among writings.
In his view everything is interconnected and being able to keep and visualize those infinite interconnections it is of enormous value.
“…all my computer work has been about expressing and representing and showing interconnections among writings especially. And writing is the process of reducing a tapestry of interconnections to a narrow sequence. And this is, in a sense, illicit. This is a wrongful compression of what should [instead] spread out.”
That’s a great part of what a curator does. Seeing patterns and interconnections that are not evident to most and illustrating the value they possess when connected (or seen in context with other things).
Despite facing criticism and being labeled insane for his ideas, Nelson has remained firmly committed to his vision of interconnectedness.
Source: TheTedNelson - “Ted Nelson in Herzog's "Lo and Behold"
2) Make Ideas Accessible
Duration: 0’:35”
“Curation is not about ownership. It’s not about proprietary rights to whatever environment or resource or experience you create.
The job of a curator, Paolo Antonelli reminds me, is not to take and possess but to show and educate.
The job of a curator is to make ideas accessible to as many people as possible.
Because creativity is about more than copyrights and patents. It’s about inspiring people to make something, be something, think something, do something – to change themselves so that we just might change the world.”
Source: Voice: Jim Kast-Keat - Thirty Seconds or Less - Curation Is Not About Ownership
3) Finding Needles
The value of a curator is measured by his ability to be thrown into a ton of undifferentiated garbage and to come back with a necklace in his hands.
That’s why great curators have great curiosity, patience, are good at searching where others don’t look, and have developed a keen sense of recognizing patterns and noticing holes, relationships and similarities that others fail to see.
“The Internet is a world of abundance,
and there is a new power that matters:
the ability to make sense of that abundance,
to index it, to find needles in the proverbial haystack.”
Source: Ben Thompson - Stratechery - “Curation and Algorithms”
Curation Trends
Synthesizing Books in a Niche
You should have already noticed the trend.
With less time and increasing demand for learning, people are looking for ways to capture and learn more info in less time.
That’s why whoever can do a good job of synthesizing what’s written in a book, can easily find people interested in it ( and willing to pay for it).
There’s a rapidly growing sector around this problem/opportunity and these are the key 20 top players in it:
What is interesting and looks as something to think about, is the opportunity to become a point-of-reference in whichever niche sector you operate by reading, studying and summarizing the very best books available on that topic.
Curating vs. Collecting
Here’s the difference in simple words:
“Collection is additive.
Curation is subtractive.
Collecting is for yourself, curating is for others.
I’d say that the web seems to be mostly comprised of collections, because we don’t frequently arrange the things that we have found.
Curation is marked by a larger structure, a gestalt made by the arrangement of individual items, sort of like a constellation of stars.
The first step of curation, much like collecting, is selecting (and there is an art to that).
The second is arranging and sorting those things in a purposeful way.
We choose the stars in a constellation, but they become Orion’s Belt because of their position, arrangement, and the prescribed meaning we put on that particular arrangement.”
Source: Frank Chimero - “Sorting a Mass”
Curating (Contextualizing) vs Social Sharing (Filtering)
Content Filtering is folks finding and sharing “helpful” articles, research, etc., on social media or via email.
Content Curation takes Content Filtering one step further on the helpfulness meter.
When you curate content, you don’t just find and share.
You find and share along with some kind of contextual information you add.
It’s this context that helps your reader understand why he should pay attention to the content you’re sharing and what it should mean for his business.
It’s what converts the content you share from noise to signal.”
Fonte: Jay Leonard - “Social Selling: Why Salespeople Should Be Curating Content”
Top Paid Newsletters Leverage Curation
One of the most utilized content formats among the top 100 newsletters on Substack is “curation”.
I discovered it by reading The Top 100 Paid Newsletters written by
.In it, he shares *with his paid subscribers* a link to access a growing database of top paid Substack newsletters that he has been putting together.
For each successful paid newsletter, Michael lists the editorial type, and when you look at that column you can clearly see what the most popular newsletter type is: Curation.
Source: - “Top 100 Paid Newsletters / Newsletter That's Pioneering A Unique Curation Approach”
Curated Tech Newsletter Makes 5+ Million a Year
TLDR, a curated daily newsletter, makes over $5M a year, by just selling sponsorship and advertising space in it.
The newsletter is about tech news and it is written by Dan Ni in less than 30 minutes a day.
The key strategies adopted to achieve these results:
1. Paid advertising.
Not everything has to grow organically – Dan has been wisely using social and paid ads since the beginning of his newsletter’s history.
2. Experimentation and testing.
Dan has been refining his landing page for a long time, and also cleverly takes feedback from his readers without asking them.
3. Other people’s audiences.
Dan used a combination of sponsoring other newsletters and cross-promotions to grow in the early days.
Other key takeaways from this story:
✅ Make your website fast
✅ Make it easy for people to sign up
✅ Collaborate with other newsletters
✅ And don’t be afraid to use paid advertising.
To learn more check out this issue of
: The story of TLDRCuration Tools & Resources
(only for Premium subscribers)
In this issue:
Turn Google Docs into knowledge bases. 100% free.
Create and share link collections on specific topics. Free.
Collaborate and organize projects and ideas visually. Free version.
Publish collections of educational tools & resources. 100% free.
Create playlists of content to watch/listen later. 100% free.
Curation Monetized: Real World Examples
(only for Premium subscribers)
Catalog of Key Components of Successful Newsletters
Directory of Special AI Custom Apps
Catalog of Best Online University Courses on Specific Subjects