What the world needs now is an editor
Posted by Giles Lury on September 7, 2012
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They used to say “Knowledge is power” with the unwritten assumption that acquiring knowledge was difficult and time-consuming but that’s no longer true.
We’re drowning in knowledge and at the click of a button there are megabytes more waiting for us. Knowledge isn’t power - it’s overwhelming and as such less valuable.
The value comes now from analysis and interpretation, from synthesis and editing, and what everyone wants is to be your ‘editor’. They want to edit and give you a bite-size list of the best/ the most/the worst/ the only ones…
I took a snapshot of the front page of Mashable – it has 26 items on it. The main lead was “The top 5 things parents should never do on Facebook”, there were 8 other lists (edits)
However there clearly is no agreement on how long your list should be (5, 10, 12, 15 and 18 are all candidates) – perhaps I should do another list of the most used number of items of the best of lists.
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