The Docent

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"You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help enough other people get what they want." — Zig Ziglar

Curation has always created value.

In the 1950s, Alan Freed decided what the country listened to. He's the Cleveland-based DJ who put "rock and roll" into popular use, and when the payola scandal broke and DJs were caught taking money to play certain records, Freed lost his career inside 18 months.

Audiences kept listening to FM radio, but they stopped trusting it the same way.

The cultural authority and curation migrated to magazines, then MTV, then Pitchfork, then playlists, then algorithms running For You pages.

Or take Tina Eisenberg; she’s run Swiss Miss as a design blog for almost 20 years, and she has consistently refused pay-to-play sponsorship.

What’s on offer from Tina is her curated worldview of design and art.

Her audience trusts her, so when she points at something, the recommendation lands with the weight of every generous recommendation she's made before it.

Twenty years of deposits and no withdrawals.

The pattern is the same in every era. The platform changes. The value of trusted judgment doesn't.

1️⃣ Google Just Told You Where the Value Is

Google's AI Overview now sits at the top of nearly every search result. You type the question, the answer appears, and the 10 blue links are still there but below the fold, with click-throughs collapsed or hidden altogether.

This is a public declaration about where the value lives.

For 25 years, Google's job was to point you at the best ten pages on the internet, one page at a time, based on what you dropped in the search box.

The pages did the work, Google did the routing, and the whole business model assumed the destination was where the answer lived (and that ads related to your query and those destinations could be auctioned off.)

That assumption is being retired in real time.

Google has decided the most valuable layer is no longer the destinations. It's the docent at the front, telling you what you need to know without making you wander through the museum.

Whoever owns that layer owns the relationship with the visitor.

If you're publishing content to grow a business, the implication is uncomfortable and clarifying at the same time.

The pages-and-posts model – produce content, hope it ranks, hope they click, hope they convert – is being squeezed from above by exactly the move you should be making yourself.

2️⃣ The Homepage Is Dead

If Google's move tells you where the value is migrating, your homepage tells you how far behind your own approach might already be.

For thirty years the assignment has been the same: build a page that serves 3 or 4 user personas with slightly different needs. The casual browser, the buyer, the skeptic, the comparison shopper.

Every team with a business-critical website has spent enormous time and budget trying to be “perfect” to the “right” person, the moment they arrive.

The result is the buffet-style homepage.

Hero image, 3 value statements, a grid of features, a row of logos, a blog feed, and a footer with twenty-eight links.

Designed by committee, optimized for nobody, and defended by analytics that show nobody is doing the thing the homepage was built to help them do.

The docent move, the curator, kills the buffet.

The next-generation homepage isn't a “better” layout. It's the docent principle applied to your own archive: an AI-powered guide, trained on your actual work, that walks a visitor to the right answer without them having to wander.

Not a chatbot popup that interrupts. An agent that's earned the right to say, "I know what you need, and I can take you there."

What changes when you adopt this posture is that your content archive starts being a much more useful library.

The newsletter you sent eighteen months ago isn't old content. It's a book on the shelf the docent can pull when somebody asks the right question.

The podcast episode from last spring isn't in the feed graveyard. It's part of your archive, available when somebody needs it.

That's the same curator-value Alan Freed lost and Tina Eisenberg kept.

The trust is the asset. The content is the inventory. The interface is whatever lets the right inventory reach the right person at the right moment, without them needing the full map.

3️⃣ Mass Production

For most of the history of media, the constraint was production. Studios were expensive, cameras were expensive, distribution was scarce, and whoever could afford to make the thing and ship the thing had the advantage.

That constraint is gone.

Anyone with a laptop can produce a podcast, a video, a newsletter, or an entire season of content in an afternoon. AI moves the needle from "anyone can produce" to "anyone can produce to infinity."

The instinct in this moment is to compete on volume – produce more, show up everywhere, match the pace of whoever appears to be winning.

That's the broadcaster's reflex, and it leads exactly where you'd expect: a market where everything sounds the same, nobody trusts anything, and the only thing left to compete on is how fast you can race to the bottom and make more of it.

The curator's posture is the hack.

When production is free, the scarce (valuable) resource moves to judgment: what to surface, what to leave out, what to recommend with your name on it. The trust you've built with a specific audience over time is the one asset “more stuff” cannot replicate.

So the trusted curator will always be valuable.

What's changed is that the curator may now be the only thing that is.

Once you adopt the curator's posture, you also inherit the responsibility that comes with it.

For example:

There’s no way around it; the value and power of curation is real.

But it also means that we are responsible for the ideas we choose to spread.

The Curator Audit

Copy + paste this prompt into your AI tool of choice:

Prompt

You are a strategic advisor helping me audit my work through the lens of a curator, not a publisher.

My Context:

Help me evaluate:

Be direct. No hype. Tell me what I need to hear.

Ask me clarifying questions in order to execute this request effectively.

I co-host Slackers with Jonathan Sasse, a podcast for leaders, builders, and creators who want to make work better.

Check it out: Apple | Spotify | Web

We just wrapped season 1 and cross my heart, if you want to deliver better work, it’s worth a test drive.

Here are other ways I can help:

And I’d appreciate your help:

Both make a real difference.

Thanks for spending time with Red Threads this week, I’m glad you’re here.

~ Jaime