Investigating social curation websites: A crowd computing perspective

This paper analyzes five social curation tools, chosen for having a relevant number of users and for being subject of other academic studies. Based on existing literature, the concepts of curation, digital curation, and social curation are discussed. Three main research questions are the objective of the research: how ‘social’ are the studied tools, if they are adequate to crowd work, and how good they are as search engines. It is concluded that in the current state of affairs, these tools are quite social as social media sites, but little social as social curation sites; that they are not adequate to crowd work. It is observed, however, that these tools use the wisdom of the crowds to filter the vast web content, and that they may be seen as crowd computing tools.