Peartrees: Multi-dimensional Curation
A few weeks ago now, I posted an opinion piece on Technorati titled, 'Why Social Media Curation Matters'. Following this I received quite a lot of feedback and it’s thanks to one of these comments – posted by on my blog – that I was led to Pearltrees. In addition to this, I was also motivated to re-evaluate my position on the subject of curation and take a closer look at what I perceived that to be.
At first I made the rather naïve assumption that the difference between Pearltrees and the services I’d discussed in my previous articles both here and on my blog, was purely aesthetic – Pearltrees has a beautifully designed Flash interface. However, as I delved further into the service, and further contemplated readers' feedback, I began to realise that there were actually some fundamental differences both in the approach of the developers and in my perception of curation. I began to look over the data that I gathered in tools like Curated.by, Storify and Keepstream – was I curating or just creating lists? To be honest the answer to that question is somewhat irrelevant, each of those services had done exactly what I’d asked of it in a suitable elegant manner.
Nonetheless, they are just lists. Don’t get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with a list – particularly, a well structured list – and that format seems particularly well suited to the curation of social media data. So what could Pearltrees possibly have to offer, other than the nicely designed Flash interface?
The answer can be summed up in one word, depth. Rather than just creating lists of pages, tweets, or embedded content, Pearltrees allows the user to branch away from a 'Pearl' and drill-down in more detail. In the very simple example above I created the initial Pearltree (titled HTML5). From there I've branched off into two separate Pearltrees (one titled W3C, the other Code). Immediately, the difference in methodology is clear. Rather than curating to a flat list, Pearltrees, with its added depth, gives the user the ability to curate with far greater complexity and thus greater detail. Add to this the ability to embed Pearltrees into your own web pages and you have a service that has to be considered alongside the other key services in the ongoing curation revolution.
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