NetCurator: Content Curation Made Passively

The Internet today serves as a large content distribution platform. It carries a diversity of content types from traditional news, TV series, and movies to specialized blogs and family pictures shared over social networks. The recognition that the amount of information available online today overwhelms most users is giving rise to content curation services [1]. The term "curation" is often used in the art world to refer to the act of organizing and maintaining a collection of artworks. In this paper, we refer to content curation as the process of identifying and organizing online content so that users can easily focus on what is relevant and interesting. We split current content curation services into two classes. The first relies on individuals' expertise or passion for a given topic. This includes traditional news media, following experts on Twitter or Pinterest, and Spotify's shared playlists. The second family relies instead on crowdsourcing, with Reddit and Digg being prominent examples. For instance, in Reddit, users submit a link to their favorite content (e.g., a video or a news article), which the "crowd" of other subscribers then rate. The higher the rate, the higher the chance that Reddit shows the link on their homepage. Some content providers also use crowdsourcing when they list the most popular content on their homepage. For instance, YouTube presents the most watched videos and Google News the hottest news [2]. Unfortunately, each existing content curation service has some limitation.