… or so says Harry Gayner in Contagious magazine.

(This article appeared in the Contagous newsletter on February 10th, 2009.)

Some excerpts:

Harry Gayner:

“Barack Obama’s presidential inauguration was the first ‘crowd-curated’ media event in history. Understanding how crowd-curation works may help us to be better citizens, and even better marketers.

And that was what was so different about Barack Obama’s inauguration. The Facebook-CNN link up that accompanied the inauguration broadcast created a new type of meaning-making for the news: ‘crowd curation’.

It worked like this. You logged on to your Facebook account and had CNN’s broadcast of the inauguration ceremony live-streamed to your computer: TV on your computer. But instead of having the CNN experts comment on the proceedings, you could comment on what was going on yourself by changing your status bar, opt to see what your friends were saying, or opt to see what everyone was saying.

The result was a very different media experience. For me, it was certainly much more rambunctious. You knew exactly what people thought of the incoming and outgoing administrations, in real-time. It was also funnier, messier, more immediate, and slightly less informed than what you’d normally get on CNN. It was also far more demanding as a viewer. It meant that you had to listen hard, think clearly and speak up.

The implications for politics are startling. If you can ‘crowd-curate’ a meaning, perhaps you can ‘crowd-create’ a policy, or ‘crowd-rule’ a country- living out the true meaning of ‘democracy’. This would turn modern politics from being passive entertainment – showbiz for ugly people – into a participation sport.

This co-creation of value is already happening. This is what makes services like designyourowning.com and the customization engine behind Volkswagen.co.uk so exciting. This is why Amazon’s recommendations or Apple’s Genius service are so compelling. But these services are often thought of as add-ons to existing brands. The realities of ‘crowd-curation’ will mean that in time, this sort of co-creation will be the core offering of the brands that provide them.

‘Crowd-curation’, whether it is of a news event, or a political issue, or of a brand offering, ultimately means putting people in charge of their own decisions. This was long thought to be an impossibility – a nice idea, but we could never do it. Obama’s inauguration has told us: ‘Yes, we can.’ “