Today at the iFocus panel on media and the presidency, I began thinking about web content and curators. During the panel, Brian was talking about the myth of user-generated content (that it’s all great) and the truth of user generated content (the great majority of it is not worth your time). And I agree: probably only I am interested in 90% of the photos I upload to Flickr.

But then there are the gems of the internet—you know the things that make you smile and get all jumpy? Or the things that make you laugh until you cry? Or the things that make you remember when you could spend hours and hours just “surfing the web”? Or the things that fill you with possibility and the drive to make/write/build/describe wonderful things? Or the things that make you so happy about living? So I decided to spend a little time today exploring all of the wonderful things the internet has to offer.

I thought about Mark Lukasiewicz’s quote in Brian’s book: “[we asked] ’Where do young women go to get their news?’ And the answer was: They don’t really go anywhere. They expect that if the news is important to them, it’ll find them.” As a young woman, which news found me? And what were my guides to this endless universe of (mostly-crappy) content?

My friend, Jacque’s emails. Courtesy of Jacque (a prolific emailer) I discovered:

1. A rap about the Large Hadron Collider: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3iryBLZCOQ (her favorite part: Take it back to Conservation of Ener-G.)
2. The Kalima project of translating books into Arabic, and Barry Gewen’s selections: http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/12/books-for-arabs/

Those blogs of amazing things, kottke and dinosaurs and robots:

1. Giant recycled Styrofoam robot: http://www.dinosaursandrobots.com/2008/11/recycled-styrofoam-gundam-robot.html
2. Pictures of Numbers blog: http://www.numberpix.com/2007/09/disproportionate_risk_1.html

Assorted blogs from my google reader account (that I never get a chance to look at):

1. Via EveryBlock, the Atlantic Yards Webcam! (Note: try the slideshow): http://www.flickr.com/photos/atlantic_yards_web_cam/
2. Via Compete-tee-tion: Tee-Fury’s CMYK rain: http://www.teefury.com/

Misc.And then these things that I don’t even know where I found, but they’re so amazing I have to share them:

1. CakeWrecks blogs of professional cake decorator disasters http://cakewrecks.blogspot.com/
2. The ABC3D book (please watch the video, unless you’re my mom, who is getting this book for Christmas…): http://www.amazon.com/ABC3D-Marion-Bataille/dp/1596434252

And, if you think of it, I guess my treasured daily emails from BrooklynBased and NYT are also mini-curations.

But with all of this, it’s hard to keep up. I haven’t visited my Google Reader account in ages, and sometimes I have to catch up on twitter/email in one big binge, and I can’t even begin to stay on top of everyone’s Facebook statuses.

Which made me wonder: which curators of information do you read/trust/follow? And how do you keep up? …and maybe you should just email it to me?