“Our wandering curiosity may be being replaced by an appreciation of good curating,” observes Leigh Householder on her Advergirl blog. “After all, why would we dig around for the next great idea, beautiful thing, innovative stain fighter, first date, etc., when those things are being fed to us by our trusted network?” Great question! In fact, because curiosity is fed by curation, as Richard Budman observed, this trend toward real-time curated microweb is less about displacement (of search by social) than complimentarity between two modes of web participation.

Real-time search and social media are converging by necessity, and as a result, filtering for content is becoming increasingly socially mediated. Relevance is defined by the ratings our trusted referral network provides as we redistribute information amongst ourselves. Content with legs is created not by marketers, agencies, or traditional news media industries per se, but by “the people formerly known as the audience”—our friends and followers.

We know that the shareability of digital content is determines its virality, plain and simple. Without portability there’s no chance that even the most wickedsmart creative can be pushed/propelled along by an organic P2P recommendation mechanism. As users get more social, the web becomes increasingly powered by real-time communication—and because people connect over content, the backbone of social search is user-driven and to a great extent, consumer generated.

Today Generation C(ontent) has matured into Generation C(uration) and we crave agile creative.