Since the beginning of time, human beings have collected the best humanity has produced in art, literature, science; we invented the museums, the libraries, the Encyclopedia and have written essays and done research. We have always looked at those ones, the curators who were knowing the right sources of that knowledge, to which being able to access to will have solved our needs.
Source: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/content-curation-guide-for-seo
Aggregation, which consists in curating the most relevant content about a topic into one single location. This is the most common way of curating content, and it is at the base of the majority of the content curation services actually present online;
Distillation, which purpose is to distill the overall noise about a topic to its most important and relevant concept. The best cases of social content curation can be catalogued into this definition;
Elevation, when curators draft a more general trend or insight from a mass of daily musings;
Mashups, or to merge different content about a topic creating a new original point of view of the same;
Chronology, which could be defined as historiographical content curation. Usually it consists in presenting a timeline of curated information to show the evolution of a particular topic.
