Aggregate, Filter, Prioritize

July 2 2009, 3:00am

With the democratization of content production tools, there are so many content producers posting to the web. The supply of content is increasing exponentially. It becomes impossible to consume it all, just as it becomes impossible to keep up with the demand of content production. When I talk about OneSpot, our content curation tool, and presenting the best of the Web to a target audience, the process comes down to 3 steps: aggregate, filter, and prioritize.

Aggregate: Ag”gre*gate, v. To bring together; to collect into a mass or sum. (Websters)

The first step to presenting third party content is to collect it. Like collecting toy cars as a kid, you grabbed as many as you possibly could find because you want the most cars in your toy box. At this point, there is no regard for toy brand, car make or model, scale, or even the condition of the toy. You just want quantity.

Filter: Fil”ter, v. To remove by passing through a filter: filter out impurities. (American Heritage)

The next step to presenting the aggregated content is to filter. Now, take those toy cars and remove broken ones, different scaled models, unwanted colors, different models, or even cars you simply don’t like. Suddenly, your car collection is more focused and more representative of your tastes and interests. Now, you are looking more for quality.

Prioritize: prī-ôr’ĭ-tīz’, v. To arrange or deal with in order of importance. (American Heritage)

The final step to presenting this new filtered, aggregated content is to prioritize. Imagine you can only present your top 20 cars to your friends. After all, you don’t want to show them cars they would not be interested in. So you pick the most pristine, the top of the line models, the most special of your cars to show off. You are giving your friends the best experience by showing the best of the cars you have collected. Now, it is all about quality.

Now imagine this scenario online, utilizing industrial strength technology: you collect every relevant story in your subject area, remove the less relevant, lower quality stories, and display only the best of the best to your audience. Now, you are curating the best of the web and serving your audience. When I talk about OneSpot, I tell people they are curating the best of the Web. That’s because this content aggregation, filtration, and prioritization is happening behind the scenes, without you having to tinker and toil over an overly technical system. Using technology, it becomes simple to sift through the mass amounts of online content available. OneSpot presents a simple Editor Dashboard to make picking the most relevant, targeted, high quality stories as easy as checking email. By aggregating, filtering, and prioritizing, you are ensuring your audience’s experience is as special and valuable as it can be.