Last week I wrote a bit about the idea of Curating -- that is, identifying for our readers the most useful and relevant articles that are being posted on websites, social media platforms, etc.and then collating them for ease of discovery.  Not surprisingly, others have also been writing about that topic and you might want to check out what they have to say.  Here are two posts that came across to me via my social media network this past weekend. 

1.  Curating the Legal Web? (http://www.slaw.ca/2010/08/13/curating-the-legal-web/) -- posted on a Canadian legal commentary site called "Slaw".   The author correctly points out that the idea of curating content is neither new nor original.  But he makes it clear that, at least in his view, no one is doing it very well right now for the legal community.  So maybe there's room for someone to step in and become a true hub for discovering news of interest to lawyers throughout the legal web.  The question is, should it be us?

2. The Growing Importance of Content Curation (http://talkingdigital.wordpress.com/2010/08/15/the-growing-importance-of-content-curation/) -- posted by Australian tech blogger Ben Shepherd.  His is a more general discussion, raising the question of whether the audience one would attract by creating a curation hub would be attractive to advertisers. He obviously thinks it would be.  For me, the jury is out.

We're in the process of redesigning law.com as a portal to all of ALM's content.  Is it too late to ask if we should be expanding our horizons, turning law.com into a curation portal for the legal web (or at least the parts of it that we focus our journalism on)?  I'd love to hear from our editors and journalists how they feel about Curation in general -- whether we truly have the expertise to become "guides" to the legal web on behalf of our readers.  And if we should pursue that course more seriously.