Microsoft has launched a new portal, which promises to offer the best tech answers on the web. Microsoft Curah, aims to be a one-stop portal where all content is well-organized, and solutions are developed by technical experts. The curation portal hopes to be the clear, calm voice in the wilderness, the solution you have been searching for.
Microsoft Curah
Lets say you have a problem. You spend hours searching the Internet for answers and reliable technical content. You’ve dug through piles of content on various tech blogs and forums, but you don’t know what source to trust and what answer to pick. Curah will ensure that the best resources are presented to you.
Curah empowers the Microsoft community & partners to share your knowledge and expertise. We love Bing’s artificial intelligence, but we need you and the rest of the technical community to fine-tune the information-gathering process and make it more personal. We invite you to step in and specify how to find and present information even more effectively. The content on curation site will range from high-level technology descriptions to deep technical articles covering specific problems that developers commonly face., says Microsoft.
Curation portal will provide a new community similar to existing content-sharing sites such as Experts-Exchange or StackOverflow. But this portal is more like an air traffic controller on a busy holiday, getting users where they need to go faster and more reliably with improved direct searches and aggregated-answer data.
Microsoft wants the curation portal to be the place users go to solve their issues. The benefits of curation extend beyond the portal’s content. MVPs can answer common questions on popular forums by adding a curated view and then linking this to their blog and relevant forums. If you are MVP or Community Expert, you can grow your influence by sharing your passion for technology and your expertise.
I asked Microsoft, “Who are the contributors? Microsoft will have to be careful on this one. If everyone was allowed, you could potentially open the flood-gates for spamming – and the whole purpose of highlighting only reliable & trustworthy content would be defeated. Restricting it groups that Microsoft can trust and monitor like MVPs, MSPs, MS Star contributors, MS employees, etc. might instead be a better idea“. To this, Microsoft replied:
The notion of curation services is community outsourcing. In the initial stages of the project we rely on internal experts (DPE, CSS, CSI) and MVPs to create curations that can be served as great examples to the rest of the community to follow later on. Of cause the integrity of the published curations is a valid concern, since the service is opened to everyone. We will have a moderation process in place where content of the portal will be reviewed, and spam will be removed.
Currently however, there is no facility for uploading images. When asked, Microsoft replied:
By current design, we don’t intend to have graphics or a lot of content within curation. The idea is to only reference already published content within the set of links. The best, would be to have these graphics published and reference it in the curation within the link.
It is my understanding that the site is currently open to MVPs, MS engineers and potential Microsoft communities and Partners, currently – but I may be wrong. Both internal and external partners are encouraged to deliver messages to users through curated content.
Go visit curah.microsoft.com and check out how one of the curations I created looks.
