‘Controlled Serendipity’ Liberates the Web

Image by JB via CrunchBase

By NICK BILTON

twitter.com/nickbilton Atul Arora’s Twitter stream shows a constant flow of breaking technology news links.

When I finish writing this blog post, I will Tweet it.

I will copy this link, go to my Twitter account and spend a minute writing an abbreviated (yet hopefully catchy) description of this piece. And I’ll follow the same actions on Facebook and other social networks.

Then off I go to scour the Web looking for more news to sift through and ration out to my friends and followers — a natural course of action in my day. I spend a considerable amount of time each day looking for interesting angles about technology, news, journalism, design or just the latest comic video to pass along the daisy chain.

Most of us do this to some degree. We are no longer just consumers of content, we have become curators of it too.

If someone approached me even five years ago and explained that one day in the near future I would be filtering, collecting and sharing content for thousands of perfect strangers to read — and doing it for free — I would have responded with a pretty perplexed look. Yet today I can’t imagine living in a world where I don’t filter, collect and share.

More important, I couldn’t conceive of a world of news and information without the aid of others helping me find the relevant links.

For example, Atul Arora, an engineering manager at a Silicon Valley start-up, spends two to three hours a day scouring the Web for the latest technology related blog posts and news stories. On an average day, Mr. Arora will share 15 breaking news technology links with his Twitter followers. When I asked him over e-mail why he does this, he said, “In the past, I may have used this time in the day to read newspapers, magazines or books. Now I have just substituted the same time with reading and sharing news online.”

Another purveyor of fine content is Maria Popova, who calls this curating “controlled serendipity,” explaining that she filters interesting links to thousands of strangers out of her thirst for curiosity.

Mrs. Popova uses a meticulously curated feed of Web sites and Twitter followers to find each day’s pot of gold. She said, “I scour it all, hence the serendipity. It’s essentially ‘metacuration’ — curating the backbone, but letting its tentacles move freely. That’s the best formula for content discovery, I find.”

Sharing has become a reflex action when people find an interesting video, link or story. Great content going viral isn’t new. But the sharing mentality is no longer confined to the occasional gems. It’s for everything we consume online, large or small.

John Borthwick, chief executive of Betaworks and Bit.ly, the URL-shortening service, said each month more people were clicking on shortened links from social networks and e-mail. Last week, Mr. Borthwick said bit.ly processed 599,100,000 clicks, its highest number since starting in July 2008.

Surfing the Web has become even more of a challenge as more content appears online. We are asked to navigate any number of new obstacles when finding new content: which site should I click through to read the latest earthquake news? How many blogs should I check on a daily basis? What if I miss something? Do I read the comments everywhere, too? Which social network should I update in the morning, noon or night? The list goes on.

But we are solving the problem, through our aggregation. We’ve reduced the fear of missing something important because we share “controlled serendipity” with others and they with us. And without this collective discovery online, I couldn’t imagine trying to cull the tens of thousands of new links and stories that appear in the looking glass on a daily basis.

We are all human aggregators now.