Everyday, we post content that conveys what’s on our mind, shows where we’ve been, or offers a glimpse into a particular moment in time. It could be a photo album you took on a trip to Big Sur, or a status message describing the jubilant moment of a walk-off home run at Fenway Park. If someone wants to ever say Facebook or Twitter doesn’t matter, they should look no further than these moments people capture. Because for every stupid YouTube video we might upload, there is also a piece of content that rings with meaning and depth.

Each of these information artifacts, piece by piece, tell a story about us. And right now, there’s no good mechanism that allows you to capture, make sense and arrange those moments in a digital scrapbook (at least, there’s not a tool that mainstream web users can see in front of them). As Scoble noted, blogs and e-mail don’t work well enough for this endeavor, and they certainly aren’t visually appealing enough.

Today, we can go back and find things we posted, but the experience can be overwhelming and inefficient. Search — and now social search — allows you to go back and find things you shared with friends, but you will likely have to sieve through tons of irrelevant content that might share the same keyword (especially on Twitter). On Facebook, it doesn’t seem to go very far back in time (I’d still like to know how far back it goes — I can’t find a reliable figure).

Some have contended that Clay Shirky’s theory of Filter Failture would solve the information overload problem that some real-time Web services create for people. Twitter hashtags, for instance, allow you to wall off tweets that people tag (#), such as #redsox or #sfgiants. But even though you have a filter and set up a column for it in a third-party service, the stream of information cascades down and eventually out of sight. Filter tools don’t stop the stream; they just slow it down for your eyes a bit. The real-time information stream of a Facebook or Twitter homepage keeps going. On and on. Relentlessly. Persistently. And that, I think, is the opportunity for real-time curation.

If things like tags and columns act as filters, real-time curation tools should act as a stopper or cork. A curation mechanism should let you bottle up moments that make sense to you. Unlike search, it doesn’t have to be linear, relevant to an algorithm, or relevant to anyone other than yourself and the people close to you.

But in order for real-time curation to be beneficial to normal people, I think it must have some common attributes and avoid some old traps for organizing digital information.

1. Let’s call it something else. I don’t think archive is the right word (too boring), but real-time curation is too abstract for normal people. Normal people who use social networking services don’t even call those sites “real-time” technologies. Something down to earth like “scrapbook” might work, but there’s not shortage of people in the tech community that love to coin phrases, so we should expect a better naming convention to emerge.

2. It must be easy to do later. The notion that normal people will want to do the heavy lifting for curation in the moment is unrealistic. While we can already “favorite” or “like” things on Facebook or Twitter, if you do that enough, it’s still creates a crowded laundry list of content that takes forever to sort through later. We need an easier way to save things to arrange or scrapbook later.

3. Facebook matters more. Since Twitter is not the stream of the mainstream, Facebook should realize that it has a tremendous opportunity to be the digital scrapbook of people’s lives. The information people share here is more scrapbook-worthy than most of the stuff they share on Twitter because the network people keep on Facebook is more private, the content mediums they employ more diverse (not only textual). Unfortunately, memories on Facebook today float downstream and eventually of out sight. The only thing Facebook has an organized system for is pictures.

4. Frame it as an opportunity for people who don’t blog. Most of my friends don’t have blogs, at least ones they actively update. They don’t care to hack that much prose all the time. But they don’t find it difficult to write a status message or upload an album. Real-time curation should be marketed as an opportunity to chronicle those events without blogging.

5. The big guns shouldn’t leave this to third-party developers. Facebook, Google and Twitter must do this themselves for it to be popular. Saying “look at how our developers leveraged our open APIs to build real-time curation tools” is a sentence that won’t see the light of day with 95 percent of social networking users. Of course, they might wait for a third-party developer to figure it out and then copy build it themselves.

So this is, by nature, a catch-up post, and naturally it’s on the big thing that I haven’t written on, Google Buzz.

To me, Google Buzz is like the guy who arrives to the party at 2 a.m. and expects everyone to roll out the red carpet so he can hold court. Despite the hour, and because of his street cred, we begrudgingly mix him a drink and hear what he has to say.

The problem?

Google was a little too fashionably late for its own good, and many in the party have already hedged their bets with someone else. It might just have spotted Facebook an insurmountable headstart.

The problem with Buzz is not the technology, which to me seems pretty good. I especially admire the fact Buzz is so open and it takes a much more holistic view of the Web than Facebook. The issue is that Google faces an adoption problem of entering this late, and that’s even with the trove of Gmail contacts it brings to the table.

Sure, Facebook is closed, but when has it hurt them? Although Facebook always goes the proprietary route, it works because they build pretty darn good technology that’s immediately accessible to regular people. This is why Facebook’s News Feed is more popular than Twitter and FriendFeed. It’s why Facebook Connect adds mainstream sites every day while Google Friend Connect is mostly adopted by small and obscure blogging sites.

Two years ago, for many, the idea of letting information flow to us in real-time was too overwhelming. For these people, they were comfortable with their primary online communication mechanisms of e-mail and instant messaging. These folks didn’t even use RSS; they visited websites manually. So when the idea of real-time was being shoved down their throats by one percent of the Web populace (and the media who follow them) before they were ready, it’s no wonder they rebelled. They hated the first big Facebook redesign (but learned to live with it), and failed to stay on Twitter for more than a month.

And that’s where Google missed its opportunity, and I’m not even sure good technology can fix it.

Google could have been the natural conduit to bring the real-time web to these consumers in an easy, palatable way, but it decided that we would continue to live primarily in a search-centric and e-mail based world for a couple more years (and hey, why not hope for that? It does those technologies better than anyone). It let Facebook take the mainstream eye balls for the real time web. The Facebook News Feed and design was far from perfect, but it was good enough. Meanwhile, you still had a large swath of people who couldn’t be bothered by the fun and games of Facebook, and who found Twitter too limiting and geeky. They would have been game for a real-time Google offering, but it didn’t come.

So in the absence of that option, about 400 million of them caved and joined Facebook anyway, and now their social stream is there.

So on one hand, my overriding feeling about Buzz is the hackneyed “too little, too late.” Again, this isn’t because the technology isn’t good. Rather, it’s because social networking users, who were once fickle (see: Friendster), are now becoming complacent and comfortable (see: Facebook). That complacency could have massive consequences on the social Web.

/cgl

Luckily, I don’t think he’ll go through with it. Although he seems to have surrounded himself with a lot of old, curmudgeony newspapermen and lawyers who don’t understand the opportunities of the Web — or fair use for that matter — Murdoch is ultimately too smart a businessman to let this happen. My guess is that it’s just bluster in the hopes Google will make some concessions to newspapers for the their content (which it won’t).

As much as I abhor his politics, and the assault on democracy his FoxNews carries out everyday, Murdoch has always been a stalwart for the importance of newspapers in our society. He’s even taken big hits financially to keep them going. And if you don’t believe new media and bloggers can completely fill the void that will be left in our local communities after newspapers fold — and count me among those who feel that way — then you should admire him for this fact alone.

Consider what happened in 1982 in Boston. (Seeing as I wasn’t alive then, I know this story from a former editor and friend, David Rosenbaum). The Boston Herald was in danger of closing, and Murdoch swooped down at the last minute to keep Boston a two newspaper town. Granted, Murdoch, shrewd as hell, laid off tons of people and bought the paper for peanuts. But over the long run, he might have saved more jobs than he eliminated (including DR’s), and provided balance to the Globe across town.

But even giving him his due, Murdoch shouldn’t explore this no-Google idea. The effects would be devastating. Hitwise already has estimated that the WSJ would see a 25 percent drop in traffic. The web statistics firm also noted that “44 percent of WSJ.com visitors coming from Google are ‘new’ users who haven’t visited the domain in the last 30 days.” Given the short-sighted, quarter-to-quarter way in which newspapers are run, such a drop wouldn’t just cause a “tough month” where you fail to sell your available inventory; we’re probably talking people’s jobs.

The stories and posts about Murdoch’s comments on Google this week keep coupling this issue with paywalls, and that’s wrong. They’re completely different animals. As it becomes even more clear that online advertising can’t provide the monetary support to support the journalistic resources these institutions need to influence our society, then many of us will have to decide how much we really value that type of content creation.

I’m cynical. I don’t think the majority of the web populace cares enough to pay, which would make the people like me (in the minority) who are willing to pay shoulder more of the burden. Traditional journalism will become a high-end commodity for the few. In simple terms, that means if they cannot get a huge swath of people to pay, say, $25 a year, then a small group of us will pay much more and the content will be longer, specialized and investigative.

(By the way, the only reason the Journal has had success with a paywall could be because so many people will expense the subscription for business purposes, so it’s still something that’s unproven on a macro scale for the industry, but that’s a whole other post.)

As it concerns Google, like it or not, it’s the card catalog for the world. It’s where people turn not just to find where they want to go out to eat or to find which site can offer the cheapest plane ticket, it’s where people do research and find critical information. While much of the discovery process for new information is moving to social technologies instead of search, the two ultimately work in tandem.

Before information can be shared on a social network, someone has to find it first. And often, that mechanism is Google. Simply put, if the WSJ doesn’t show up on Google, it would be a huge loss for the paper and all the people on Web trying to find the best information.

But it will be pure business reasons that prevents Murdoch from going through with such an action. People on the sales sides of these organizations will make it clear: If you want people to pay, you should at least index the articles on Google and use it as a way to drive leads to your subscription services.

/cgl