Content aggregation and consumption is inefficient. There’s just too much information for people to consume at any point in time. This is true even though the amount of information humans are able to consume continues to increase every year. 

A few weeks back, I read an article from VC superstar Fred Wilson regarding curation. 

I’m a big fan of curation in these services… If you are building a marketplace or a social platform, make sure to build curation into your model. It will make the service easier for everyone to navigate, particularly new users.

Good content aggregation does two things. First, it quickly helps find content that is relevant and interesting. Second, it should help increase the chance you will not miss content you’re interested in. Curation is a difficult problem for content aggregation, but I believe its an area where lloquy.com can innovate. 

• Follow people, not crowds. Most content aggregation websites utilize a system that promotes popular content through a voting mechanism. We think a better system is to follow individuals. If you can find individuals that share your interests, then you receive a much higher success rate discovering content through recommendations from that user. Twitter is a great example on utilizing people for content aggregation, even though it was not the sites’s primary purpose when the site was created.
• Social Discoverability. Discovering people with similar interests is only part of the solution, however. While many people share similar interests, not all of those people share great content. Following people who align with your interests but share inferior content is just another form of noise. You need to be able to quickly discover if the person is worth following. Our reputation algorithm strives to provide you the answer quickly. The great thing about our algorithm is that it takes your actions on other social networks as well as lloquy.com. In other words, while sharing content and being social on lloquy.com is the best way to increase your reputation, sharing great content on Twitter will also affect your score here (Which is how it should be).
• High Signal, Low Noise. With content aggregation, I feel many websites present a high level of noise. Again using Twitter as an example, you have to process a lot of noise to find the content. The problem with solutions that contain high levels of noise is that there is a greater probability of missing the “signal”, or content. 

This morning, I quickly scanned 214 tweets and RSS posts and found 2 articles to read. This is a huge amount of waste, but I think by focusing on the improving your ability to get better content (through the bullets listed above), lloquy.com can greatly increase people’s ability to curate their content.

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