ABSTRACT
As the world’s stores of information expand, we are putting a high price on businesses that can collect, filter, contextualize, and link to relevant information online, or that help us to do it ourselves. The Huffington Post, a business built on aggregating blogs and snippets of political news, was valued at $315 million when it was bought by America Online in 2011. A year later Instagram, the photo-sharing application, sold to Facebook for $1 billion, while startup ventures Pinterest and Storify have already attracted equivalent angel investment in the democratization of social media curation (and in the hope of “monetizing” their users’ labor).
