YouTube Australia Blog: "The Key to Curation Is Curiosity" Meet Our Curators of the Month

"The Key to Curation Is Curiosity" Meet Our Curators of the Month

Thursday, 15 October 2009

We're thrilled to have the folks behind the Wooster Collective, one of the Web's most-trafficked sites devoted to urban and street art, curating our homepage today. For anyone interested in cool art videos, their YouTube channel is a must-subscribe; from their vast network of artists, they're often the first to know about videos like notblu's MUTO, which has gone on to garner more than 5 million views.

The Wooster Collective are a model of an important -- but often under-the-radar -- group on YouTube: curators, those people who have a knack for finding great videos, organizing and archiving them on their YouTube channel, and perhaps also distributing them off of YouTube via a blog or social media. In this case, the curators post daily to the Wooster blog, while on their YouTube channel they cluster finds into playlists with themes like The Classics, Outdoors, Timelapse, Geek Graffiti, and Guerrilla Knitting. Learn who they are, how they find such gold on the site, and a bit about their philosophy on all this:

How do you find such great videos?
A few different ways. First, amazingly talented artists and videographers from all over the world share links with us of new videos they upload to YouTube. We receive a hundreds of emails about new work every day. But, in addition to this, we use the terrific tools that YouTube offers to keep up with what's new on the site. We subscribe to many artist and videographers' channels. We also check out the videos that are recommended by YouTube. Every day we discover new things.

For us, the key to curation is curiosity. The best curators in the world, both online and off, are curious people by nature. We love seeing new things, learning about new artists, and exploring new subjects. We’re constantly wanting to be inspired and wanting to share what’s inspiring us with others.

Can you offer any tips about organizing these videos on your YouTube channel?
We love organizing the videos into playlists. The playlists feature is great because you can show both breadth and depth of what you’ve curated. We also like changing the featured video three or four times a week so when you go to the Wooster YouTube channel, it’s different each time.

If someone's into street art, what are some of the must-subscribe channels on YouTube relating to that topic?
Some of our favorites are: Walrus TV, Wallkandy and Romanywg.

Which video that you've found do you think is criminally under-seen?
Here’s one of our favorites, a timelapse by our friends The Barnstormers.

Subscribe to the Wooster Collective's YouTube channel to get a notice in your feed every time they favorite, rate or comment on a video.

Know of other great video curators on YouTube or on the Web? Leave their channel name or site URL in the comments below.