Internet Content Curators

The concept of “curation”—searching for and identifying the highest quality artifacts and historical items—has existed ever since the first museums were founded.

Internet content has been available ever since the early days of the Internet. The first Internet browser (Mosaic) was created in 1993. Mosaic made it much easier to access, retrieve, and present resources on the Internet. The first blogs were launched in 1994, and traditional media companies such as the New York Times Company had an early presence on the Internet—launching its Web site in January 1996. Other noteworthy events that fueled the rapid growth of content on the Internet include:

• the creation of MySpace (one of the world’s first social media networks) and the introduction of Wordpress blogging software (2003)
• the launch of Facebook as a private social media network to help students at Harvard University stay in touch and network, and the founding of Flickr, a popular photo-sharing site (2004)
• the founding of YouTube, the first video sharing and hosting site (2005)
• Facebook becoming available to users beyond Harvard, and the launching of Twitter, the most popular microblog site (2006)
• the founding of Pinterest, a social-bookmarking site (2010)

As the amount of content on the Internet grew exponentially, a need developed for skilled curators who could assess large amounts and types of content about a particular subject and select only the best for recommendation to various audiences. Businesses also began to realize that presenting quality content could serve as a means to draw customers to their Web sites and sell more products and services. Hence, the career of Internet content curator emerged to satisfy this need.