Today, a new news site launched in Finland. Called Topiikki (www.topiikki.fi), the service is a bit like Huffington Post and The Daily Beast (both excellent, innovative services) in its news curation. Topiikki sources the best-written and most insightful news items about the most important daily news and links to them. Topiikki for example gathers the ten most important news items each day and features them on Twitter and on the site as the daily “10X” collection. The site also features own content and debates. I am both an advisor and a columnist on the site.

Content curation is not a new phenomenon, but we are seeing more and more implementations of the idea. I think it the move from aggregation to intelligent curation – partly by humans, partly by smarter technology – that is at the heart of the move from a 2.0 to the x.0 web. I see it in different forms and platforms: from news curation to hyperlocal sourcing to hyperniche services. It may not be a disruptive revolution, but it is certainly rapid and fundamental change in operating logic and principles online.

For curation to work, the curated parties must receive something in exchange. In the case of news curation, the sites receive traffic. The curator acts as the gatekeeper who has the power to reward good content by directing traffic in their direction. This also makes curation an important content discovery method. In the case of news, if the best write-up is in an independent blog, why would the curator link to the incumbent news provider whose coverage is run-of-the-mill?

Successful curators are nodes, mavens and connectors, whatever dictionary you want to subscribe to. I think the online world could well benefit from the centuries of history in art curation, where curators have amassed knowledge on balancing content, value, accessibility and novelty at the same time. I predict a hip-and-cool buzz book on the topic in the near future.

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• Curating Content With LOUD3R (fashionablymarketing.me)
• Curation. Can you Filter Free Content (outspokenmedia.com)
• Digg Changes Coming Shortly? (soshable.com)
• The Curator and the Docent (personanondata.blogspot.com)