Is Human Curation Underrated? Are Promotional Algorithms Overrated?

Human curation, in digital publishing, involves human involvement, editorial work. Promotional algorithms -- even when community powered as in the case of Digg -- are mostly the work of mathiness. From eMediaVitals:

"Is human curation underrated? There are, of course, limits to the real value of information gained solely by one's social network. That was the implication in last week's announcement by Digg that it will be adding a breaking news feature to highlight stories of interest to their readers that aren't getting pushed to the front page of the community-powered news aggregation site.



The involvement of staff curators introduces a measure of human involvement to the process and should benefit reputable brands and publications. Human curators are probably more likely to gravitate toward that value in a story from a respected publication. Digg, which relies on submission and recommendation of stories using a promotional algorithm, has undergone many updates over the years. The introduction of staff editors upgrading trending stories to the front page is a novel attempt to turn around the company's fortunes, and to differentiate it from Reddit, which has stolen quite a bit of Digg's thunder (and traffic) after staging a mini-rebellion against Conde Nast which occured almost simultaneously with Digg's badly executed redesign."

Read more here.