Great essay from Sarah Lacy about machines and people:

On the one hand you have a movement towards curation, which Erin wrote an in-depth post about this morning. Sites like Jetsetter, Fab, NastyGal and many smaller ones Erin mentioned, have found that no computer program can determine quality nor can the user generated content masses, so why try? What the Web misses most today is the human touch...

Ironically just as Erin was publishing her post on curation today, the New York Times published an ode to big data. (Although the Times post utterly missed that not all of the Web is pulling in this direction.)

A handful of companies are using both strategies, for example, Quora. The question and answer site has avoided going the way of Yahoo Answers or Formspring, because of its community guidelines and high quality answers. The quality of answers is determined by a mix of technology and curation.

But at their hearts most companies hew to one approach or another.

So essentially:

Curation is awesome, but it doesn't scale.

Automation scales, but does not lead to awesomeness.

Lacy herself comes out on the side of humans as supplement to machines: "People who slavishly see algorithms as the answer always think you just need a better algorithm... any modern Web company really needs both."

I agree with her.

There's way too much noise out there.

A good curator gives me time and finds me things that deeply improve me.

I agree. Traditional journalism is struggling on one side of this issue, Facebook on the other. It's really hard to provide a high-volume of interesting, personalized content to a large and diverse user base.

I think that the key is to take a hybrid approach and use ever-improving technological tools to empower a relatively small number of curators to provide interesting content for a relatively large set of followers.

A bookmarklet with strong facilities for importing both images and text, as well as basic GIF/video editors would go a long way. Tumblr's tools are amazingly crappy, and yet a small number of people still suffer through the process of using and learning them in order to get followers.

Maybe in the end it's a matter of providing the best tools and distribution for whales, and in turn they provide you with rich, diversified content.