"...I don't think curating is the answer either. You can't easily distill quality content out of a sea of junk." These two sentiments seem contradictory to me.

"...I don't think curating is the answer either. You can't easily distill quality content out of a sea of junk." These two sentiments seem contradictory to me. The fact that it's not easy to filter for quality is what makes curation valuable. I'm not sure if the dichotomy presented is correct, though. Really, all the old institutions like the ones you state, are in some sense curators. They curate news, fact, analysis, etc. The democratization of content creation and the decoupling of creation and curation means it'll be easier for amateurs to participate without going through the old bureacratic regimes these institutions represent. I think the more interesting frontier is the digital curation by human/machine teams. You can understand Google and Facebook as curation, too, but they use a combination of human and algorithmic curation (more G than FB), and to me the Tumblrs and Quoras seem like a step back toward more heavily human-curated. I'll be more interested to see more combinations of different people and different algorithms working on different data.