Content farms v. curating farmers Tweet: Content farms v curating farmers: Deeper insights in Demand Media’s model & finding opportunity in finding quality. I spent an hour on the phone the other day with Steven Kydd, exec VP of Demand Studios, to understand their model—using algorithms to assign content creation based on search and advertising demand and to minimize cost and maximize revenue—because I wanted to learn a deeper layer of lessons than I think we’re hearing in the discussion of Demand’s allegedly evil genius. The talk thus far misses their key insight and the opportunities they create. Much of what I see online is fear that Demand Media—with the slightly rechristened “Aol.” following fast behind—will cheapen content and flood the internet—that is, search results—with crap that’s just good enough to fool algorithms. Some also fear that while putting content creators to work they will put better content creators out of work: the dreaded deprofessionalization and deflation of media. They may be right. Like this:
‘Controlled Serendipity’ Liberates the Web - Bits Blog - NYTimes twitter.com/nickbiltonAtul Arora’s Twitter stream shows a constant flow of breaking technology news links. When I finish writing this blog post, I will Tweet it. I will copy this link, go to my Twitter account and spend a minute writing an abbreviated (yet hopefully catchy) description of this piece. Then off I go to scour the Web looking for more news to sift through and ration out to my friends and followers — a natural course of action in my day. Most of us do this to some degree. If someone approached me even five years ago and explained that one day in the near future I would be filtering, collecting and sharing content for thousands of perfect strangers to read — and doing it for free — I would have responded with a pretty perplexed look. More important, I couldn’t conceive of a world of news and information without the aid of others helping me find the relevant links. Mrs. Sharing has become a reflex action when people find an interesting video, link or story.
Google Is Failing More Paul points it out as a failed dishwasher search. Mike complains about automated content as does RWW. And we all have experienced it: The Google ecosystem is failing more – failing to get us what we think we want. Failing to not frustrate us. Paul points it out as a failed dishwasher search. Now, Google’s ecosystem is ripe for a quick buck – “content farms” that build article pages cheaply to make a quick buck off AdWords. As Paul puts it in bemoaning his fruitless attempt to use Google for a researching a dishwasher purchase: This is, of course, merely a personal example of the drive-by damage done by keyword-driven content — material created to be consumed like info-krill by Google’s algorithms. Google has become a snake that too readily consumes its own keyword tail. The result, however, is awful. Yes, it often is. And in the end, this is a good thing. 2010 is going to be a very interesting year.
Why Social Beats Search That's a controversial post headline and I don't mean that social will always beat search, but there's a rising chorus out there about "content farms" and search optimized content creation that is worth touching on. Arrington started it when he posted about "the end of hand crafted content". Richard MacManus penned a similar post the same day called "Content Farms: Why Media, Blogs, and Google should be worried". When a web service like Google controls a huge amount of web traffic (>50% for many sites), it's going to get spammed up. What's worse, and what Mike and Richard are talking about, is the act of search engine driven content creation. I left this comment at the end of a very long comment thread on Arrington's post: social tools will allow us to decide what is crap and what is not. our social graphs will help us. search engines won’t. it’s a lot harder to spam yourself into a social graph. The Internet is a massive content creation machine.
Media Curation Is Now Consumer-Generated SES Chicago 2009 - PageRank for People Presentation | Marshall C « PageRank for People - Making Friends and Spreading Memes » 9 December 2009 Here’s a copy of the deck I presented this week at SES Chicago on ‘PageRank for People and Distributed Reputation Systems’. Feel free to Comment or Tweet any questions. Links to the full version including my speaking points is at the bottom of the post. Download full PPT including speaker notes 2 Tweets 14 Other Comments 12 Responses to ' SES Chicago 2009 – PageRank for People Presentation ' Leave a reply Additional comments powered by BackType World's Biggest Blogging Platform Adds Curation Feature WordPress, the biggest blog software platform on the Web, has added a "reblogging" curation feature much like the smaller innovative service Tumblr has offered for years. It's another chapter in the race to decrease friction in sharing your favorite Web content with friends. If the previous era of innovation on the Web was fundamentally characterized by the democratization of publishing and content creation, the next era may be based on finding solutions for building value on top of all that newly published data. Much of that value capture will be performed by machines, but tools for humans could be a game changer as well. As we wrote yesterday, Google VP Marissa Mayer says the average person uploaded 15 times more data in 2009 than they did just three years ago. The gap between the value that's made possible by all this data, and the power of the tools available to consumers to capture it, is so great that it simply must be filled. Can Curation Catch On? What do you think?
Robert Scoble: @laetSgo Pearltrees is one... Something went wrong, but don’t fret — let’s give it another shot. Firefox’s Enhanced Tracking Protection (Strict Mode) is known to cause issues on x.com Machines like empty calories too but they lack the tas December 13th, 2009 — Mark Littlewood Lots of interesting writing at the moment about content farms, basically businesses that produce tons of crappy content, so that they can be found on search engines, get people to click through to their sites and make money from advertising. Demand Media (main site is eHow.com) and answers.com (who run wikianswers.com) come in for the most flack as they are the largest – both in the top 20 most visited websites in the US. Demand Media is reportedly producing over 4,000 pages of ‘content’ a day both are very heavily reliant on Google adwords for revenue. The main issue with content farms is that they fill up the internet with crap that is cheap and easy to produce, that generates traffic to sites whose only USP seems to be that they have lots of content. McDonalds - a delicious burger ReadWriteWeb have covered this better than anyone here and here for example. “So what really scares me? “So why is Facebook trying to trick their users?
Why Content Curation Is Here to Stay Steve Rosenbaum is the CEO of Magnify.net, a video Curation and Publishing platform. Rosenbaum is a blogger, video maker and documentarian. You can follow him on Twitter @magnify and read more about Curation at CurationNation.org. For website content publishers and content creators, there's a debate raging as to the rights and wrongs of curation. The debate pits creators against curators, asking big questions about the rules and ethical questions around content aggregation. In trying to understand the issue and the new emerging rules, I reached out to some of the experts who are weighing in on how curation could help creators and web users have a better online experience. The Issues at Hand Content aggregation (the automated gathering of links) can be seen on sites like Google News. But all that changes with curation — the act of human editors adding their work to the machines that gather, organize and filter content. Who are curators? Where We Stand Now