Back in the good ol’ days, before we talked about content curation as a next-generation web service, we lived in a curated web. Yes that’s right. Long before there were social networks, even before there were mainstream search engines, people found content online by navigating catalogs of carefully curated content, collections of hand-picked links, or hierarchies of meticulously organised pages. Back in the day, Yahoo! was the king of the curated web, providing millions of early web adopters with access to a carefully curated hierarchical catalog of pages and links. The catalog still survives today even though, by and large, we web users search for, rather than navigate to, the content we seek, but nonetheless in the pre-dawn of the modern web people located content by navigating through Yahoo!’s comprehensive catalog. Of course, then along came Google. And the rest, as they say, is history.
