Tonight I emailed someone I follow on an un-named social network. It felt a little bit creepy and a little bit exciting, much like friending a not-quite-mutual acquaintance on Facebook once felt. I have been following this person for over a year, and almost all of their posts resonated with me because we share a similar aesthetic sense of what it means for something to be well-done, or successfully designed, or generally pleasing to the senses.
So why, after nearly a year of asymmetric loyalty (web voyeurism, almost) did I reach out today? The answer is relatively simple, but it tells a complex story about how media trends are changing. I wanted to know where this person found the inspiration for their posts, many of which contain fantastic photos seemingly culled from a vast repository of design-oriented source material that I can’t find, despite what I consider relatively exhaustive searches.
What’s more, I’m convinced that any sources this person returns to me will be of a higher quality and have a higher degree of relevance than the results of a continued search on my own (I’ll follow up and let you know if that’s true). While I often preach the benefits of social curation, and Pinyadda’s design places this act at the very center of our user experience, this struck me as a particularly tangible example of how and why this type of connection is important.
I’ll be adding all the sources I receive to our index (and tagging them under the ‘Design’ topic) so that all of our users can enjoy them. I’m willing to bet that most of these sites will have content whose quality far outpaces the quantity of their audience. And hereinlies the beauty of content-specific aggregation: other users will be able to find them and follow them, without having to beg and plead with their followers in a creepy, email-based way. Good content finding its audience is what we’re all about, and I’m proud to be part of a company that’s trying every day to make that vision a reality.
The story, then, has two morals:
1) Social curation is incredibly valuable. By following this un-named design maven (who may not even know I consider them as such) I was privy to hundreds, nay thousands, of awesome articles, posts, photos and music that more accurately matched my tastes and preferences than any publication or blog, no matter how niche-focused, might have. This isn’t to say I don’t like niche blogs (I do, a lot), but instead that humans like me will almost always do better at finding the stuff I like.
2) Good content will find a way to find its audience. I truly believe that the end result of the disruption we’re seeing in the media industry will be a complete eradication of barriers to distribution and the ultimate triumph of content. I think that Pinyadda and others like us can play a huge role in helping consumers and producers of content find each other. If we provide readers with the tools to find the content they want and then make it easy for them to share it with each other, we can create viral marketing and distribution 
loops that move faster and wider than all the trucks in the history of newspapers ever could.
This is what big media doesn’t seem to understand, and it’s the beauty of the web we’re helping to build: when people find great content, they want to support it, evangelize it, and help it be found by others. It’s not a chore or a burden but a real feeling of goodness that comes with adding value to other people’s daily lives, if only in small, small ways. Instead of trying to find ways to trick me into paying for their content, big media should be trying to find ways for me to pay it forward.
Do you have any blogs or publications you find yourself evangelizing, even by accident? I bet you do, and I’d love to hear about every one of them in the comments.
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