Curation is the New Search is the New Curation
In the beginning there was curation, and it was good. People found interesting things, created directories of those things, and then you found what you were looking for inside those curated lists. That was the origins of the original lists and directories, from Yahoo on outward.
Context & Ripple Effects
Paul Kedrosky's essay lands mid-wave: Silicon Valley Watcher had argued two months earlier for curation and the Human Web, Curated.By had just entered public beta promising to bundle the whole web into shareable collections, and Nielsen was already framing social media as a content-discovery gateway back in 2009. His contribution is historical framing — that Yahoo's original directory-era lists were curation before search existed, and the pendulum is swinging back.
The piece carries personal weight: its author spent three years running product for Delicious at Yahoo, and weeks before publication Yahoo confirmed it would sunset the bookmarking service after word leaked, triggering what coverage described as a PR disaster and an erosion of consumer confidence — all against the backdrop of CEO Carol Bartz's layoffs and a heavy Flickr user's open letter worrying aloud about that service's future. The essay is partly an elegy for one of the canonical curation artifacts.
First-order effects
- Delicious users must find new homes for their bookmark collections, and newly launched curation tooling such as Curated.By's beta is positioned to absorb exactly this displaced audience.
Second-order effects
- Yahoo's botched sunset handling compounds trust damage across its remaining community properties — the same week's open-letter anxiety over Flickr shows users repricing every consumer-facing Yahoo asset, not just Delicious.
Third-order effects
- If the curation thesis holds, the scarce asset in discovery shifts from ranking algorithms to owned human-filtered collections — meaning the next distribution battleground is whoever hosts the trusted curators, a role directories played before search displaced them.
The trend: Web discovery is cycling back toward human-curated layers layered on top of algorithmic search, with social products rebuilding what early directories once provided.