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<title>Techdirt. Stories filed under &quot;curation&quot;</title>
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<pubDate>Tue, 8 Nov 2011 10:19:02 PST</pubDate>
<title>Steve Jobs' Real Genius: Tweaking, Curating, Editing &#038; Remixing To Make Things Better</title>
<dc:creator>Mike Masnick</dc:creator>
<link>http://www.techdirt.com/blog/innovation/articles/20111108/00231716674/steve-jobs-real-genius-tweaking-curating-editing-remixing-to-make-things-better.shtml</link>
<guid>http://www.techdirt.com/blog/innovation/articles/20111108/00231716674/steve-jobs-real-genius-tweaking-curating-editing-remixing-to-make-things-better.shtml</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ We've argued a few times that Steve Jobs' real success wasn't in <i>inventing</i> anything particularly new, but in taking what others had done and <a href="http://www.techdirt.com/blog/innovation/articles/20111021/16380816459/steve-jobs-was-willing-to-rip-off-everyone-else-was-pissed-about-android-copying-iphone.shtml">making it better</a>.  That's why we found his complaints about Android seem so odd.  Now, as a ton of you have submitted, Malcolm Gladwell has penned a piece on <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/11/14/111114fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all" target="_blank">Steve Jobs' "real genius,"</a> which he describes (eloquently, as always) as a "tweaker" more than inventor.  Elsewhere, he's described as an "editor," rather than inventor.
<blockquote><i>
Jobs&rsquo;s sensibility was editorial, not inventive. His gift lay in taking what was in front of him&mdash;the tablet with stylus&mdash;and ruthlessly refining it. After looking at the first commercials for the iPad, he tracked down the copywriter, James Vincent, and told him, &ldquo;Your commercials suck.&rdquo; <br /><br />
<blockquote>
&ldquo;Well, what do you want?&rdquo; Vincent shot back. &ldquo;You&rsquo;ve not been able to tell me what you want.&rdquo;<br /><br />&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know,&rdquo; Jobs said. &ldquo;You have to bring me something new. Nothing you&rsquo;ve shown me is even close.&rdquo;<br /><br /> Vincent argued back and suddenly Jobs went ballistic. &ldquo;He just started screaming at me,&rdquo; Vincent recalled. Vincent could be volatile himself, and the volleys escalated.<br /><br />
When Vincent shouted, &ldquo;You&rsquo;ve got to tell me what you want,&rdquo; Jobs shot back, &ldquo;You&rsquo;ve got to show me some stuff, and I&rsquo;ll know it when I see it.&rdquo;<br /><br />
</blockquote>
<b>I&rsquo;ll know it when I see it.</b> That was Jobs&rsquo;s credo, and until he saw it his perfectionism kept him on edge. He looked at the title bars&mdash;the headers that run across the top of windows and documents&mdash;that his team of software developers had designed for the original Macintosh and decided he didn&rsquo;t like them. He forced the developers to do another version, and then another, about twenty iterations in all, insisting on one tiny tweak after another, and when the developers protested that they had better things to do he shouted, &ldquo;Can you imagine looking at that every day? It&rsquo;s not just a little thing. It&rsquo;s something we have to do right.&rdquo;
</i></blockquote>
This is a key point that we've been arguing about for years.  There's <i>tremendous</i> value in what Jobs did: innovating not actually by inventing, but by tweaking and "editing" the ideas and designs of others to make them "perfect."  That act of taking what others have done and making it more valuable is such an underrated skill -- and yet it's really the key ingredient to innovation.
<br /><br />
If you look back, historically, it's what <a href="http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20061219/014818.shtml">Thomas Edison really did</a> as well.  He didn't actually invent very much himself.  But he took others' ideas <i>and made them better</i> -- often recognizing how valuable the ideas were much more than those who originally came up with them.  That's a form of <i>editing</i> and a form of <i>remixing</i> to make things better -- and Edison and Jobs were both amazingly skillful at it.  So skillful, that many people falsely credit them with "inventing" things they really just remixed.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.techdirt.com/blog/innovation/articles/20111108/00231716674/steve-jobs-real-genius-tweaking-curating-editing-remixing-to-make-things-better.shtml">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://www.techdirt.com/blog/innovation/articles/20111108/00231716674/steve-jobs-real-genius-tweaking-curating-editing-remixing-to-make-things-better.shtml#comments">Comments</a> | <a href="http://www.techdirt.com/blog/innovation/articles/20111108/00231716674/steve-jobs-real-genius-tweaking-curating-editing-remixing-to-make-things-better.shtml?op=sharethis">Email This Story</a><br />
 ]]></description>
<slash:department>indeed</slash:department>
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<pubDate>Fri, 19 Feb 2010 19:39:00 PST</pubDate>
<title>The Role Of Curation In Journalism</title>
<dc:creator>Mike Masnick</dc:creator>
<link>http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100215/0036438160.shtml</link>
<guid>http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100215/0036438160.shtml</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ <a href="http://twitter.com/jayrosen_nyu/status/9060563106" target="_blank">Jay Rosen</a> points us to an article out of France that takes a stab at presenting <a href="http://owni.fr/2010/02/12/towards-the-google-newsroom-a-revolution-for-media/" target="_blank">what a modern internet-era newsroom should look like</a>.  The point that I find most interesting, that helped clarify a few different ideas for me, is that it splits "journalism" into three distinct categories, all of which have a role in the newsroom:
<ol>
<li>Reporters -- who go out and do first person reporting -- creating original stories, not just reposting rewritten wire copy.
</li><li>Columnists -- who "start conversations and give stories another perspective."
</li><li><b>Curators</b> -- who "'cover' the news by sorting, verifying and editing live everything good existing on the web and in the media. They make link journalism, they make the news more accessible."
</li></ol>
Now, this is interesting in a few respects.  First, many "reporters" today don't really do what is described as reporting above.  That is, they often do try to take wire copy or stories that were written elsewhere, and go through the wasted process of "re-reporting" them just to pretend it's a new and unique story for that publication.  In many ways, this is a waste of resources.  What would be better is if they actually encouraged #3 above -- let a "curator" handle that sort of news.
<br /><br />
Unfortunately, for the most part, newspapers seem to look down on "curating" as if it's some sort of lesser form of journalism, and this is a sticking point that they're going to need to get past if they want to understand how people engage with the news today.  These days, everyone is a curator of the news in some fashion: they share news, comment on it, post about it, etc.  But they also look to the "pros" to add more value to it as well.  But if the traditional press looks down on this function, they won't do a particularly good job of it.  It's sometimes tough for a press who used to want itself to be "the final word" on every story to admit that others may have reported it better/faster, as well as the fact that sometimes it's better to involve the community, rather than treating the community as riffraff waiting for the word from the god-like journalists.
<br /><br />
If a newsroom were set up with a focus on those three roles (I would add editors as well...), with the understanding that they work together as a team to both bring the most information <i>and</i> community to a particular story, I doubt we'd see newspapers struggling as much as they are today.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100215/0036438160.shtml">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100215/0036438160.shtml#comments">Comments</a> | <a href="http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100215/0036438160.shtml?op=sharethis">Email This Story</a><br />
 ]]></description>
<slash:department>don't-knock-it</slash:department>
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<pubDate>Mon, 1 Jun 2009 20:20:00 PDT</pubDate>
<title>'Radio' Means Something Very Different Online Than It Does In The Traditional Sense</title>
<dc:creator>Carlo Longino</dc:creator>
<link>http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090529/1548305054.shtml</link>
<guid>http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090529/1548305054.shtml</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ Over at the New York Times, Saul Hansell has written a post about online music based around an interview with the CEO of Tivoli Audio, which has been building radios that can connect over WiFi to internet radio stations. Hansell contends that <a href="http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/29/the-ascendance-of-internet-radio/">internet radio will be the dominant form of digital music</a>, ahead of downloads and "lots of other ways" to listen. It's an interesting argument, particularly when it's juxtaposed against the backdrop of a floundering terrestrial radio business and the <a href="http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090211/0135563731.shtml">struggles</a> of satellite radio. It's also one that's likely to create a lot of pushback from download devotees, such as Hansell's first commenter, who <a href="http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/29/the-ascendance-of-internet-radio/#comment-292221">chimes in</a> with "keep your hands off my music." Sure, the freedom from restrictive playlists that do-it-yourself digital music offers is powerful, and terrestrial radio may not be particularly satisfying for many people, but it's important to realize that the term "radio" takes on a much broader meaning online than it does in the terrestrial broadcast context. There's still a lot of room for curated musical experiences -- which used to solely be the domain of broadcast DJs -- whether it's in the form of human-programmed streams, algorithmically or genre-based channels, podcasts, MP3 blogs or even social-network recommendations. And, as Hansell points out, there's a real convenience factor at play as well. What online radio offers is the ability to take many of traditional radio's good aspects, like convenience and exposure to new music, while doing away with the aspects that turn off so many listeners, whether it's annoying DJs, too many ads, or the wrong choice of music. It then takes these aspects, puts them in different formats, and expands them across tens of thousands of different kinds of music. So while the traditional idea of "radio" may be struggling a bit, its online evolution will keep going strong.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090529/1548305054.shtml">Permalink</a> | <a href="http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090529/1548305054.shtml#comments">Comments</a> | <a href="http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090529/1548305054.shtml?op=sharethis">Email This Story</a><br />
 ]]></description>
<slash:department>online-radio-killed-the-radio-star</slash:department>
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