Curation and Find

I keep telling people that the future of the internet if find. Everyone looks at me like I'm speaking in tongues, but what I mean is that if the last decade has been dominated by search, think Google, then the next will be dominated by find. Meaning we often spend lots of time on the web searching for what we really want, only to be inundated by lots of crap we don't want. Services that help you find what you want are becoming more and more important.

In film, we're all seeing thousands of movies migrate online, and I've been on many panels where the woe of the year seems to be that there's too many movies being made. But I've always felt like this is a ridiculous argument - I never went to the record store and said, damn, there's too many bands and albums out there. And I don't feel that way in the online world.

Instead, I've always relied on trusted sources to help me find the bands/music I really want to hear. Their recommendations, be it friends, magazines, zines, blogs, radio, or whatever - helped me navigate through the crap to find the good stuff. That's exactly what I think will define the best online services moving forward, especially with video - finding trusted source folks to help you find the gems you really want. This will take multiple forms, but over at my day job, we've been building a system to help people use this idea to find the videos they want. It's not perfect yet, heck we're still in beta 2.0 of a soft launch, but it's getting better.

Reframe is build around the idea of curation. We know there's tons of film sites out there, but hopefully Reframe can be a place, probably one of many, where you can go to find quality films that you want to see. We've got lots of great curators helping us - filmmakers, film critics, film professors, average joes, writers, walkers, and out staff, all curating lists of the best films, or their favorite films, on different topics. We selected the first batch, but now it's open to anyone, with the idea being that you can select who to follow and perhaps someone you never knew will become a trusted source.

Check out this post on how it works if you're interested and join us as a curator.

photo from Reframe - "Screening Room With Stan Brakhage" a film from Documentary Educational Resources directed by Robert Gardner