I am attempting to approach this topic with an open mind. Let me begin with this – the big winners online are the content creators. Facebook, Google, Bing – make the big bucks by “bringing value” to the content generated by others. For this most part, these companies return little to the creators. Google might be the exception if the content creators add ads to their material.
Social bookmarking when used in a social way allows all of us to curate content. We can organize content to meet personal needs and share this effort in case others want to try to benefit from our efforts.
Educators now are getting into the content creation game. Ed bloggers for example may focus their blogs on identifying a certain category of resource and offer the link this material with a short description of the purpose this resource might serve. I guess this is what I had originally intended to do with this site.
I have read that the number of active bloggers or at least posts is declining. Perhaps the role these individuals served is being taken up by commercial content which comes with its own price and biases. Blogging is also on the decline among younger users of the Internet unless you count Facebook activity as content creation.
Is it possible things are getting out of balance? We convince ourselves we are making a contribution by posting interesting links via Twitter or a social bookmarking service. A little of this, while valuable, goes a long way.
I think there are too many curators and not enough creators.