Curation & Thought leadership

There are questions on whether Curation = thought leadership?  This post is a response to a couple of tweets with Craig @thoughtstrategy on this subject.  Since Twitter posts are hardly the right platform for philosophical dialog we decided to communicate through our blog posts - Here are my thoughts.

First, to get grounded lets first take a look at the meaning of Though Leadership.  The dictionary defines Thought Leadership as: The characteristics of a leaders way of leading.  So we can deduce that leadership takes many forms and is not a static singular definition. A

Next question is "who is a leader"? - One of the best answers to this question is one I learned many years ago in a workshop and that was:  A leader is someone that has a number of people following him or her.  So whether you blog or curate, as long as you have people following your activity your are in a leadership position.

But I don't think that this is the point that skeptics of curation are arguing about.  Their argument is that creating content is original and creating context is not.  Well I disagree!

Curation is an editorial function.  So comparing curation with content creation is not exactly an apple to apple comparison!  Where the comparison makes sense is in value.  Is there story telling in curation, the same way there is story telling in content creation?

I would argue that there is as much meaning and value in my curated list of articles one "Why Curation" as there is in any of the articles.  Just reading the headlines on the page tells a pretty comprehensive story on curation.  Just like a content creator string together sentences to tell a stroy, a curator selects objects to build a picture!

Each article under "Why Curation" discusses a different aspect of curation, and every tag in the side bar highlights a related field.  

Remember News editors are managers of context.  Fox news is in a position of leadership for conservative view points becuase they carefully choreograph their context!  Just like blogs gave citizens the power to challenge traditional media channels, curation will give citizens the power to be authors of context, and I argue that - That is thought leadership!