I’ve got a short definition for you and a long one. Let’s start with the short one.

Content curation is sorting through a large amount of web content to find the best, most meaningful bits and presenting these in an organized, valuable way.

For the slightly longer definition, I’ll paraphrase Mike Kaput’s great analogy on Content Marketing Institute about how curation has evolved to its place of prominence on today’s Internet.

For a long time, our preferred method of consuming content was to visit blogs and websites that provided content specific to a niche or topic. This was the milkman model: We wanted milk, so we asked the milkman to deliver it.

All this is changing. We are now more interested in a Costco model: We want milk—and eggs and cereal and batteries—so we go to one spot to get it all. Content curation could be intended as this one-stop shop for quality content, saving time for others by digging up the good blogs, awesome sites, and killer posts and presenting the best stuff in one place. Sites like Medium—the specific one mentioned in Kaput’s article—fall under this umbrella.

Here’s how Mike Kaput summarizes the story: