Soft Machine³ - Arts Tech and Other

UPDATE: in defense of Demand Media

Demand Media May Be Bad for Social Media, but Not for Journalism

The history of the Internet is being re-written so quickly it makes the future web a constantly moving target, even for the simple question “how will we access general information?”

 

(you really expect me to give up and go home?)

Overshadowing this issue is the way search engines crawl the Internet and rank pages on relevance. Google and Bing seem to be the two left standing. I remember having to sift through pages of AltaVista results back in the day. 

Search engines can be considered your primary filter for the Internet; but as they are bombarded with new content from “Content Farms” they — or we — must adapt. Some think “social search” will become the new primary filter, creating ad-hoc “ambient feeds.” These feeds would use human filtering to fight search engines defeated by 1) “SEO” gaming, or 2) drowning in a sea of mediocre content.

I already use Google reader, Twitter and FriendFeed for much of my content discovery; search engines are most useful when I need references for a topic I’m writing about.  However, it’s hard to imagine this solution working for the vast majority — who don’t “stay on top of” breaking news, and are happy enough with answers returned from any old portal like Yahoo.com or Ask.com.

Completely separate from yet completely bound up with the issue is business and profit, open collaboration and community and social issues, online public libraries and access to educational resources. Many blogs are profitable and growing, where news organizations are failing; some by federation and streamlining, some by ad revenue and huge traffic numbers. Some have started down the road of quantity over quality, and often echo each other, especially in the tech sector. This isn’t nearly as large a problem as that presented by “Content Farms” however.  The number of “hot stories” in the tech sector is a drop in the ocean compared to the number of different search engine queries at any given moment. The latter is what “Content Farms” aim to capture.

(if you don’t accept our low buyout offer, we will bury you until dead)

“Moderated collaboration or curated knowledge gardens”:

• Imdb (October 1990) — Film and television database started before the Internet as we know it today
• Wikipedia (January 2001) — Arguably the most successful open collaboration effort to date
• Stack Overflow (July 2008) — Upstart latecomer; programmer’s Q&A site with innovative “points” system

“Content farms”:

• Demand Media (May 2006) 
• Answers.com (January 2005) 
• eHow.com (April 2006)

(don’t let this happen to you)

Required reading

• RWW: Jay Rosen Interviews Demand Media: Are Content Farms “Demonic”?
• RWW: Richard McManus: Content Farms: Why Media, Blogs & Google Should Be Worried
• Inquisitr: Duncan Riley: Why Demand Media is Good
• Inquisitr: Steven Hodson: The supersizing of content; or how we are turning the Web into an obese mess
• BuzzMachine: Jeff Jarvis: Content farms v. curating farmers

(live to fight another day)

Still images from 300 (film) Imdb link

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