Down in Half Moon Bay, Robert Scoble started a discussion on Sunday about the value of “creation” versus “curation” — a discussion centered around Wednesday’s media event at 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino. Should he attend the Steve Jobs press event and “create” original copy, an eye-witness report? Or should he sit in Half Moon Bay and “curate” news and commentary for his readers? Which path would add the most value?

Curation is a buzz word in journalism and social media circles. I don’t think that curating digital content — news and information — is the same as curating an exhibit of Degas. On the web, we don’t want to see the entirety of each artifact: each article, Tweet, video and op-ed that, in this case, Robert might use to provide us with his unique point of view on Apple’s newest gadget. Instead, we want Robert to pull the best bits (no pun intended) and synthesize them into a coherent narrative.

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In an op-ed at his flagship Wall Street Journal today, News Corp chief Rupert Murdoch rehashed some of his recent barbs (such as claims of fair use abuses) while wrapping News Corp. with the American flag. Those prior public statements now seem part of a regulatory “reform” strategy as he adds a call for relaxing media cross-ownership rules to the litany of remedies needed to maintain the News Corp. oligopoly.

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The SeattleTimes tried an experiment Monday. It created a public Wave (pdf) to share information about the Sunday shooting of four Pierce County police officers. Here are some tips if you are considering GoogleWave* as a platform for engaging the public.
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Matthew Stringer produced this video as part of class discussion of Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks. Have a look – it’s excellent!

Google holds 71% of the search market; Bing, 10% (chart).

Cory Doctorow has a clear crystal ball. Earlier this month, Rupert Murdoch accused Google of stealing his content and threatened to cut the search giant off. Cory guessed that Murdoch might be angling for a search-engine payment deal: Read more…

At one minute past midnight, YouTube announced a new tool for news organizations: YouTube Direct. With this tool, Google makes it clear that it wants to nurture individual “acts of journalism” (Shirky). And in the spirit of motivated self-interest, should news organizations adopt the tool, the quality level of Google’s YouTube content can only go up.

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For those of you who are in the Twitter “retweet” beta test, I have a word of advice: proceed cautiously.

Here’s why. Currently, retweets that are executed via the Twitter web “retweet link” are visible to your followers who are using the web interface to read your tweets but are not visible to popular third party clients. Read more…