Digital scaffolding in socnet culture promises to elevate and optimize our experience online. Curated iPhone apps & web video sites highlight best of the net.

In a culture of information overload, we rely on our social graph, friends, networks, and trusted experts to help filter, navigate and illuminate what’s relevant on the web.

Social networks are built on shareability, and as members we sift through the everyday torrents of digital pop culture to find the brilliant bits we can offer up to each other—enhancing our own value to the network by spreading cultural capital around, rather than hoarding it. This sharing happens willy nilly on Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Slashdot, Friendfeed, StumbleUpon and Reddit—crowdsourcing on digital culture sites, once niche, now mainstreamed, driving forward a link economy. But it’s busy on those sites these days, isn’t it? Unprecedented creative content abundance.

Then there is the next generation of coolhunters: stand-alone content aggregators, curators, channel-builders and list-makers—the collectors. From these folks comes a mapped out version of the internet—the best-of, don’t-miss, must-see content. To escape the crush of Google search results and the tangle of Twitter hashtag searching, they offer a digital overpass that promises to speed us toward our destination: relevant, quality content, on-demand.

Subject specialists, the credentialed, and authorities, together with fans and amateurs are demonstrating their engagement (and building expertise) by erecting cyber catwalks through digital pop culture. Out of an age preoccupied with automated SEO emerges a microweb composed of hand-picked and human-rated sites, people, projects and products deemed glance-worthy. And in an attention economy, having this kind of digital valet service assemble your media tasting menu is deeply satisfying.

Here are two of the cooler sites that were on my screen lately—very different in content, but similiar in purpose:  they collect, curate and critique digital objects, while claiming to optimize time spent online. Take a look.

app.itize.us described as “a painstakingly curated presentation of the best of the best designed iPhone apps that are available via the app store (for free or paid). it is intentionally a very small hand picked selection compared to what is currently available via the app store (now upwards of 100k)…”

Ryeberg: site proposes to “make good use of some of the video content pouring through cyberspace, and to surround it with intelligent, convivial discourse…”

These projects are tools for constructing digital cultural coherence, in both senses of the word—they are cohesive and promote understandability. Whether they gather together apps, videos, or lists of follow-worthy folks on twitter (Listorious), cyber catwalks connect and direct us with a goal of enhancing, economizing, and elevating our online experience. Nice.

Converged into a microweb, for a limited time these sites successfully accelerate our experience of digital culture—a fast-lane to discover, favorite, and bookmark the best the web has to offer, detouring around the spamosphere. Inevitably, microwebs become bloated with content creep and lose their edge. We can blame the ever-evolving richness and abundant, organic creativity of the web for that.

Thank you to Design Observer who tweeted the link to app.itize.us, and to my friend Clarke Mackey who brought Ryberg to my attention.

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