"Link Management System" vs. "Content Management Systems" - In search of tools for curators

Content Management systems (CMS) are designed for building web sites.  A CMS system basically offers flexibility to display the same content, or portions of the same content on multiple pages of a website.  So as you add new content to your site, the content is automatically indexed and displayed in designated areas of your site and that's the strength of a CMS system.

One thing that all CMS systems have in common is that once you design a strategy for displaying content (your menus and overall navigation) changing that is not easy and often requires the involvement of your IT staff.

The site "Social Media Informer" is an example of using a CMS platform to do curation.  First I have to admit that they have done a very good job of building a comprehensive taxonomy (classification) system to organize all the content they serve.  But the site also proves my point that CMS systems are not the right solution for managing curated content for the following reasons.

• As the number of links grow, finding the right information becomes harder
• Classifying each link based on tens if not hundreds of categories becomes a huge burden
• Re-engineering the taxonomy is a huge task

A link management system would solve these problems.  A link management system would let you quickly and easily create new categories and move links between categories.

If we take Rohit Bhargava's definition for Content Curation - "A Content Curator is someone who continually finds, groups, organizes and shares the best and most relevant content on a specific issue online. " -

First I must point out that even though the definition talks about finding content and we call the activity "content curation" we should notice that we are really talking about link curation.  A curator finds links from different sources and organizes them.  Therefore a curator needs a link management system and not a content management system.

One of the characteristics that we are attributing to curators is the function of continually finding, grouping and sharing links like this page on search and social media.  As we can see from our example site above, continual link management results in a large number of links.  Additionally as we curate and grow our research our ideas and needs for presenting that information changes.  A content curation system must take this into account.

Our system of authoring has been designed with these challenges in mind.  Optimal Desktop our authoring tool was designed to manage navigation and management of thousands of links and that's why it is such a nice fit for this new and emerging curation market place.