In my recent post about the rise of content farms like Demand Media and the current incarnation of AOL, I posited that Google (and search in general) risks becoming less relevant as the Web gets drowned in lesser quality content. This is due to the scale at which these content farms are operating at - Demand Media alone pumps out 4,000 new pieces of content every day . The solution is of course for Google and other search engines to find better ways to surface quality content , whether that be from traditional news media, blogs or even Demand Media ( not all of its content is poor quality ). So how can Google evolve to identify quality content better? Sponsor Quality! Pah, Does Google Need to Bother? Perhaps we should first answer the question: why should Google be worried about the quality issue? After all, it has a virtual monopoly on the search market. The obvious and PR answer is that Google wants to provide the best search results possible for its users. But there is another big reason why Google needs to do something. So-called "quality" content providers are already well advanced in routing around Google, or at least making them less relevant. As I wrote yesterday, Reuters is onto something with its subscription business model. According to Chris Ahearn , President of Media at Thomson Reuters, the company already makes the "vast majority of its revenues" from subscription-based business models targeted to "vertical and niche markets." Reuters also provides services as well as just content. Bloomberg is another leading media company finding success with this strategy. The subscription model is making inroads, because the users themselves are flocking to it. A prime example comes from VC Paul Kedrosky , who became frustrated after doing various Google searches for "dishwasher reviews" and getting unsatisfactory results. He says that this has made him "more willing to pay for things" - in that case a Consumer Reports review of dishwashers. As Kedrosky archly noted, "the opportunity cost of continuing to try to sort through the info-crap in Google results was simply too high." What Google Can Do Google surely knows that quality (or lack thereof) in its index is a problem. As one part of the solution, Google is currently experimenting with real-time search results from social media sites like Twitter, MySpace and even Facebook. The theory is that users are more likely to get timely, relevant results by tapping into their social network. That's all well and good, but real-time search is unlikely to give you better results on the dishwasher search and other topic-focused search queries. So what else can Google do to identify and surface quality material? Some readers in Sunday's post (Tadhg, Charles Coxhead and others) argued that Google's current algorithm accounts for quality well enough, through the link economy. But many others thought that Google must improve its ranking of quality. Here were some of our readers' suggestions: Neutralize the link dilution; A.J. Kohn , who further wrote that "the introduction of SearchWiki, their measurement of short-clicks versus long-clicks, the new domain/brand SERP listing, snippet links, and use of breadcrumbs all point to a gathering movement to help determine quality without such a reliance on an ever diluted link ecosystem." Do a better job ranking authority; for more on this read Clay Shirky's post on "Algorithmic Authority." Introduce a user rating system; Tony Masinelli. Leverage sharing networks to determine where the quality is; Alex Kessinger . Special curation and algorithms on top of that; William Mougayar, whose company Eqentia does precisely that. p2p recommendation (i.e. filtering through your peers); Nick Taylor . Capture engagement data; Mark Littlewood . Give special weightings to categories of content, e.g. content farms, social media bookmarks blogs and Twitter; Aaron Savage . Use anti-spam type software to identify content that makes too much use of keywords; Barry . Track reputation against authors rather than URLs - a 'PageRank for People'; Marshall Clark . These are all great ideas. Google is almost certainly already doing some of these things already - as will other search companies. John Battelle is expecting a "major breakthrough" in search in 2010 and I hope he's right. One thing is for sure, Google will need to do more in 2010 if it's to stay ahead of the content farms and continue to surface quality content for its millions of users. Discuss

Here is the original post:
How Google Can Combat Content Farms

A storm of news points to a future of frictionless publishing and subscription, across platforms. Google just announced that its FeedBurner RSS publishing service now supports automatic publishing to a Twitter account. If you're among the many people who use the service Twitterfeed (like CNN, the WhiteHouse, ReadWriteWeb, etc.) then you may very well find that startup expendable starting now. That's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this and a series of related announcements over the past few days. Sponsor The new feature looks relatively sophisticated and will use a new URL shortener, goo.gl . FeedBurner has not proven the most reliable service in recent years and is now part of the ad network AdSense, but the little startup Twitterfeed isn't always reliable either. It does, though, have more incentive to innovate and work in user's interests. Ultimately, the service you use to publish content updates to Twitter is just a small part of a much bigger story. The Twitter/FeedBurner integration uses secure OAuth authorization, so you don't have to give Google your Twitter password. It will check the links coming through that shortened URL for malware and bad sites. Right now other apps won't be able to use Goo.gl, just Feedburner and Google Toolbar, but that might change in time. Consider this announcement side by side with the WordPress announcement this weekend that WordPress blogs can now be posted to and read from Twitter clients , the rumor today that Facebook is experimenting with its own URL shortener , this afternoon's announcement that the ability to expose your geographic location is now live in Google Toolbar and now longer a Labs product and last week's go-live of real-time search on Google. All of this combined says one thing to us: the web is getting a whole lot faster and much more free of friction, quickly. WordPress, Google, Twitter and Facebook will force each other to agree to common standards for reading and writing content updates, those updates will be delivered in real time and the standards will allow an ecosystem of 3rd party client software to proliferate and play along with the big guys. Authentication is being done by OAuth, real-time feeds by RSS, Atom, PubSubHubbub. WordPress is the wild card because it is huge, more supportive than anyone else of Open Source and it could force everyone else to open up to interoperability. The next step? This morning Google's Marissa Mayer said in an interview that Google is working hard on intuitive search , the ability to show users what they want before they even have time to search for it. Publish once and your content is everywhere, immediately. Open your browser and it will show you just the kind of content you need, from all around the web, targeting your particular circumstances like clickstream, social graph and geographic location. If that's the kind of platform that's coming - how will people innovate on top of it? The foundation is being laid right now for a whole new web in the near-term future. Discuss

Go here to read the rest:
Google, Twitter, WordPress & Facebook: Publish/Subscribe Matrix Could Explode Into Glass-Smooth Platform

Google amazed us last week with 5 fantastic demos of innovations like Google Goggles and near instant speech-to-text mobile translation. That was before the company showed off its new real-time search , a key problem it solved with grace while its competitors floundered . Now we're told of a whole new batch of far-out search innovations that are in the works, in an interview with Google's vice-president of search products and user experience Marissa Mayer in today's UK Telegraph . What are they? Translated search, social/personalized search and intuitive search . Here's what Mayer has to say about these three projects. Sponsor Translated Search See also: Google's Eric Schmidt on What the Web Will Look Like in 5 Years "Imagine what it would be like if there was a tool built into the search engine which translated my search query into every language and then searched the entire world's websites," Mayer told the Telegraph. "And then invoked the translation software a second and third time - to not only then present the results in your native language, but then translated those sites in full when you clicked through." That sounds like a great way to move beyond an internet dominated entirely by English, or to help English-only speakers cope with an internet dominated by content in other languages. It could help open up monetization to more content and it could greatly expand all our horizons. To think that a significant portion of the world's information is inaccessible because of something as almost-solvable as language differences seems like a real shame. Related: Google Announces New Translator Gadget for Website Owners Social Search and Personalization "Although we search the web right now, what we really want to do is search it as each individual user sees the web. We want Google to be the most accurate reference tool which allows people to search the web and each have an individual experience," Mayer told the Telegraph. The Telegraph's Emma Barnett identifies social network friend connections as a key part of this. "Right now Google can only include the updates and information from these networks if the users' privacy settings are 'public'," the reporter writes. "According to Mayer - the ideal will be to get access to your friend's updates in search." Mayer: "Understanding the social network structure and the permission rules around social networks status updates when they are not public - will really empower us in terms of search." Understanding the structure and permission is one thing but getting access to Facebook's social graph would be another. Have you noticed that Google doesn't leverage Facebook Connect anywhere in any of its products? So far the company's experiments with social search have been impressive if small in scope. Now that Facebook is opening up, if Google can connect with it then hundreds of millions of people could have social search placed front and center in their search experience. But if connecting Google and your Facebook social graph was a simple matter, it probably would have already happened. Microsoft, meanwhile, is a big investor in Facebook and may seek to do something similar with Bing. See also: Google Search Gets Personal: Social Search Launches in Google Labs Intuitive Search Recommendation technology is something we've written about extensively here and Mayer seems to be telling the Telegraph that recommendation is going to be a big part of Google's future. Intuitive search sounds pretty far-out, but Barnett writes that it may be closer than we think. Barnett: "The ultimate prize for Mayer is intuitive search. She wants Google to be capable of presenting information to users before they even know what they're looking for. Amazingly she doesn't think her team are that far away from achieving what she calls the 'omnivorous' search engine -i.e. one which is able to take a user's total context - where they are, what they were just reading, which direction their mobile phone is pointed and so on." Mayer: "You could have some information waiting for you when you turn on your computer or some relevant URLs forming part of your browser background (presumably if you use Chrome - Google's browser) or on your side wiki". Our take: This sounds cool but shouldn't be too surprising. Last week Google demoed a mobile search product that automatically recommends categories you might want to search for and gives you a way to find nearby restaurants, etc. with a single click. Search engines have long struggled with the limitations of human users and their abilities to explain what they want. Search queries are maddeningly short and compared to many of the other signals we emit implicitly - like location, click-stream history and more - explicit search queries are relatively rare. The future of search may very well be in semi or unprompted recommendations based largely on our implicit behavioral data. That sounds like the movie Minority Report, but it's also the direction that search companies are moving in. You didn't think Google was going to leave a Minority Report type future untouched, did you? Check out Barnett's full coverage in the Telegraph at 'An omnivorous Google is coming' . Discuss

See the article here:
3 New Forms of Search That Google is Working on Now

I've been writing a lot about so-called 'content farms' in recent months - companies like Demand Media and Answers.com which create thousands of pieces of content per day and are making a big impact on the Web. Both of those two companies are now firmly inside the top 20 Web properties in the U.S. , on a par with the likes of Apple and AOL. Big media, blogs and Google are all beginning to take notice. Sponsor Chris Ahearn, President of Media at Thomson Reuters, recently published an article on how journalism can survive in the Internet age. TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington also riffs on this theme , mentioning AOL's "Toyota Strategy of building thousand of niche content sites via the work of cast-offs from old media" and quoting a Wired piece on Demand Media from October. I started my analysis of Demand Media in this August post . I wrote then that Demand Media operates based on a simple formula for success on the Web: create a ton of niche, mostly uninspired content targeted to search engines, then make it viral through social software and make lots of money through ads. Demand Media has been heavily funded to carry out that mission, to the tune of $355 million. In short, it's a well-funded, well-oiled page view generating machine. In November I explored more about how Demand Media produces 4,000 pieces of content a day , based on an interview I did with the founders in September. I followed up by asking: is ad-driven content crossing a line? Low Quality, High Impact The bottom line is that the quality of content produced by these 'content farms' is dubious, which has an impact on both publishers and readers. Last week I analyzed the way wikiHow produces its content - its users do all of the writing and editing for free, via a Wikipedia-like platform. There was evidence that wikiHow's model is producing better content than its Demand Media counterpart for how-to articles, eHow. More worrying though is that Demand Media is producing thousands of these types of articles a day. So is the Web becoming awash with low-quality content produced by content farms like Demand Media, Answers.com and now AOL? Yes it is. From my analysis of Demand Media and similar sites, such content is very generic and lacks depth. While I wouldn't go as far as wikiHow founder Jack Herrick and say that it "lacks soul," it certainly lacks passion and often also lacks knowledge of the topic at hand. Arrington's analogy with fast food is apt - it is content produced quickly and made to order. Can Quality Survive? Given the impact that content farms are having right now, how can producers of 'quality' content survive? Chris Ahearn from Thomson Reuters claims that journalism will "do more than survive the Internet Age, it will thrive." Ahearn notes that Reuters makes the "vast majority of its revenues" from subscription-based business models targeted to "vertical and niche markets." Plus Reuters, he says, provides "valuable services - not just content." Ahearn also implies that syndication technologies, like Reuters' semantic analysis platform Open Calais , will lead to a new kind of "B2B content network" - where content creators and publishers can easily collaborate and make money together. Google Needs to Wake Up and Smell the Coffee In my view both writers and readers of content will need to work harder to get quality content. I know I'd rather read an article by The Economist on any given topic, than one generated by Demand Media. But we, as readers, need more help from Google and the other search engines. Right now 'quantity' still rules on the Web, 'quality' is hard to find. Perhaps that's why Reuters is betting on the subscription model - it hopes that consumers will just subscribe to quality content, thereby removing the need to search for it. I think there's something to that, which if true implies that Google will become less relevant in the future. Should Google be worried about that? Yes; and they are . I can only hope that Google and other search engines find betters ways to surface quality content, for its own sake as well as ours. Because right now Google is being infiltrated on a vast scale by content farms. If you thought it was bad enough that many professional blogs pump out 30 posts a day, often regurgitations of press releases or quick write-ups of "news" such as Twitter being down for a few minutes (note the irony of that tweet), this new type of Google gaming is on a far bigger scale. What Demand Media, Answers.com and AOL are doing is having a much greater impact on the quality and findability of content on the Web. See also: Demand Media Is a Page View Generating Machine - And it's Working Answers.com: 31 Million Copied and Pasted Web Pages Can't Go Wrong The Age of Mega Content Sites - Answers.com and Demand Media How Demand Media Produces 4,000 Pieces of Content a Day Ad-Driven Content - Is it Crossing The Line? Photo credit: ~Darin~ Discuss

Read more:
Content Farms: Why Media, Blogs & Google Should Be Worried

Facebook announced this morning that its 350 million users will be prompted to make their status messages and shared content publicly visible to the world at large and search engines. It's a move we expected but the language used in the announcement is near Orwellian. The company says the move is all about helping users protect their privacy and connect with other people, but the new default option is to change from "old settings" to becoming visible to "everyone." This is not what Facebook users signed up for. It's not about privacy at all, it's about increasing traffic and the visibility of activity on the site. Sponsor Information like your email address is recommended to remain limited to friends, but make no mistake about it - Facebook wants you to make the status messages you post visible to the entire internet. According to the video explaining the changes, the new default for status messages is "everyone." That's a huge change. Of course it's not hard for people to keep their existing privacy settings, but confusion around what those settings are is hardly resolved by the phrase "old settings" and a tool-tip phrase appearing when you hover over that option. A substantial backlash has already begun in comments on t he Facebook blog post about the announcement. Previous moves by the company, like the introduction of the news feed, have seen user resistance as well - but this move cuts against the fundamental proposition of Facebook: that your status updates are only visible to those you opt-in to exposing them to. You'll now have to opt-out of being public and opt-in to communicating only with people you've given permission to see your content. Will users go for it? If Facebook becomes a lot more like Twitter, will users stick around? The network of friends you've created on Facebook can't be taken anywhere else - access to those people off-site is limited due to "privacy concerns." This is an amazing move that was announced with limited press attention. A Facebook group message to press was sent out at 6am, two hours before a press phone call. The announcement is a long, wordy and unclear text putting undue emphasis on Privacy when the new options clearly favor going public. Earlier this week the company made an announcement about forthcoming privacy policy changes and Open was not the recommended setting . Facebook confirmed to us in a press call earlier this year that the company does in fact want users to post more publicly and we expected a site-wide call for users to loosen privacy restrictions - but not like this. This announcement was couched in language of user control and privacy. A much more honest approach to privacy would be to encourage users to create lists of contacts and encourage them to select which list any update was visible to . Instead, that's greatly underemphasized. Expect to see this story blow up for the rest of the year. It's a very big move. See our previous coverage for context: Facebook Wants You To Be Less Private - But Why? A Closer Look at Facebook's New Privacy Options Is Facebook a Cult? Discuss

Read more:
The Day Has Come: Facebook Pushes People to Go Public

Jack Herrick knows a bit about Demand Media , one of the top 20 web properties in the U.S. and the subject of several ReadWriteWeb articles about sites that are pumping thousands of pieces of content into the Web every day. Herrick sold the business he founded, eHow , to Demand Media in 2006. eHow is one of Demand Media's flagship properties, but Herrick became frustrated with the focus on quantity over quality. So he created another business, wikiHow , which he claims produces higher quality articles. wikiHow has today unveiled a redesign (screenshot below). However we were more interested in the content quality question, so we asked founder Jack Herrick what makes him think wikiHow is any better than Demand Media's content farms? Sponsor The newly re-designed wikiHow How Jack Herrick Went From eHow to wikiHow "When I ran eHow," Herrick told us via email, "we produced content in a manner somewhat similar to the way Demand Studios does today (although at a much, much smaller scale.)" However Herrick ultimately became frustrated with that model when he realized that "it would fill the web with a bunch of mediocre content." "It's like eating a McDonald's burger vs. a wonderful, home cooked meal." At the time Herrick thought that the mediocre content production would hurt eHow's long term brand. Although he now concedes he may've been mistaken on that point, given Demand Media's success over the past couple of years. When Herrick sold eHow in 2006, he began to work on wikiHow - a wiki how-to manual which now competes with eHow. wikiHow currently generates 19 million unique visitors per month, according to the company (it's about to hit 20 million monthly uniques). Demand Media's eHow is still the market leader in how-to content, however wikiHow is a small unfunded company with only 7 employees. Herrick is convinced that the wiki model for producing content attracts "passionate volunteers." He thinks that the wiki way will "ultimately result in a higher quality product," compared to eHow. The other prong of Herrick's argument is that eHow gets what it pays for in terms of content quality. "When you pay $15 for an article, you get a $15 product...and nothing more," he noted archly. Wikis Aren't Perfect Either Jack Herrick admits that "wiki content typically starts out as low quality," but claims that "once it matures and receives enough edits it can be amazing." And that is really the crux of this argument. A quality wiki article, whether it's found on Wikipedia or wikiHow, will generally be one that has received a number of edits from people who know the topic well. wikiHow itself has done research which shows this. Herrick told us that in previous research, wikiHow found that "the more people who edit an article, the more readers it attracted and the higher quality the article became." The problem is, there's no guarantee any given article will attract passionate volunteers to edit it. Wikipedia is a non-profit organization and so it's more likely to be attractive to volunteers - they're contributing to the world's knowledge base and no corporation is profiting from that. wikiHow, on the other hand, is a commercial enterprise. It calls itself a "hybrid organization," meaning a "for-profit company focused on creating a global public good." But it's a company nonetheless. While the content of wikiHow has a Creative Commons license , the company profits directly by it. The company vs. non-profit issue may not be a big influence on many of wikiHow's current volunteers, but it may prevent wikiHow from scaling to Wikipedia's size. Next page: We compare wikiHow to eHow and ask which is better... Comparing wikiHow to eHow Although by no means a perfect approach, I decided to choose a random topic and compare wikiHow and eHow. The topic I chose was: decorating a room using Feng Shui. The wikiHow article had been contributed to by 8 authors and it was a comprehensive, helpful article - complete with diagram and video. A comparable eHow article was helpful too, although much less comprehensive and with no accompanying media. The verdict? In this case the wikiHow article was better. But your mileage may vary per topic and article. Which Approach is Better, Wiki or Paid Content? When done on a large scale, is paid-for content (such as Demand Media's eHow) better than volunteer wiki content? Herrick makes a good case, but in reality it isn't black and white. The most famous example of a wiki, Wikipedia, generally produces quality content - although there have always been instances of contentious content on the site. wikiHow founder Jack Herrick: eHow content "lacks soul." Herrick contends that wiki content is inherently better because "volunteer writers are passionate about their topics and we allow anyone to continuously edit articles." In comparison, he claims that sites like eHow produce "static, low quality" content that "lacks soul." Herrick even used the ol' McDonalds analogy: "it's like eating a McDonald's burger vs. having your friend who happens to be a great chef cooking you a wonderful, home cooked meal." Ultimately I don't completely buy Jack Herrick's argument that wiki-produced content is necessarily better than paid-for content from "content farms." Both types of content could be either good or poor quality, depending on the quality of the people who write and edit it. How-to content needs to be precise and well-researched, which requires time. The best wiki how-to content is likely to be articles which have been edited by multiple people. But equally, well-informed writers can easily produce quality how-to articles in one go. However, the feng shui examples above showed that (in this case) multiple wiki authors produced better results than a single paid contributer. Let us know your thoughts about which is better: wikiHow or eHow? Or neither? Discuss

Visit link:
wikiHow vs. eHow: Is The Wiki Way Better Than Content Farms?

Dell Computers announced today that it has now sold more than $6.5 million in product through links broadcast out to its Twitter followers. The company has more than 1 million followers on Twitter, a handy gift from Twitter Inc. via prominent placement of Dell on the Suggested Users List shown to all new Twitter users. The news will no doubt be celebrated by social media marketers all the world over but I believe there's reason to be very skeptical of this tidbit of information. Sponsor Specifically, such celebration of sales through social media broadcast is unrealistic for most firms, it's overstated in Dell's case (if all $6.5m was made in one year that would mean 1 million people opted-in to get these ads and only delivered .015% of the company's annual revenue) and most importantly: such seductive facts detract from the real, much larger value of social media. That's listening. We offer below our article written in June, when Dell was heralding the number $3m. Much of the research is based on interviews we did for our ReadWriteWeb Guide to Online Community Management . Social Media ROI: Dell's $3m on Twitter and Four Better Examples Dell Computers announced last night that it has surpassed $3 million in sales via links from one of its Twitter accounts, making one of the most high profile examples of social media Return on Investment (ROI) all the more juicy. Telling your reluctant boss that social media is worth using because Dell made $3 million on Twitter, however, runs the risk of encouraging e-commerce broadcast as the model for engagement in conversation. Other, more conversational, examples of ROI make important additions to c The @DellOutlet account has more than 600k followers on Twitter and frequently posts links to discounted computer hardware. Revenue from those links is great to be able to point to, but there is a risk of reinforcing traditional business thinking where it is not fully appropriate. New media is a new world and while the ultimate bottom line is important, many participants argue that the greatest benefits of engagement do not draw a straight line to the cash register. Building a strong community of customer advocates, listening to community concerns and discovering new business and product developement opportunities are softer benefits of social media engagement that skeptics often don't see when they presume that old-school methods of pushing calls to buy is what should be done on these new channels. Hard and soft ROI are matters we focused on extensively in the ReadWriteWeb Guide to Online Community Management , our first premium report for businesses. Dell itself does a lot of listening and conversation from this same Twitter account. The public benefits of that conversation have been all but lost now that Twitter has changed its policies regarding the visibility of public @replies . Dell followers no longer see public replies sent to other followers they themselves aren't following. That's a major lost opportunity for public education and good will. As Pandora community manager, Lucia Willow, told us in an interview for the Guide: "I intentionally respond to most customer service messages with private direct messages. If it's a question that a lot of people have, then I answer back publicly with an @ message." Shhh...those public conversations are now invisible, for Pandora, for Dell and for all the rest of us. Though Dell reports good results from Twitter over the last two years, changed policies over the last two months may require a change in the way the company uses Twitter if it wants to keep seeing those kinds of results. Four Better Examples of Social Media ROI That Dell has made $3m from Twitter links is cool, and it's a good arrow to have in your social media advocacy quiver, but here are a number of examples we think better capture both the bottom line and some of the soft benefits of conversation. Joe Cothrel, Chief Community Officer at enterprise online community vendor Lithium , gathered these numbers in 2007 and we included them among other resources in the RWW Community Management Guide. These examples reference older related forms of online social interaction, but they also concern far greater sums of money than $3m. A Cisco study in 2004 found that 43% of visits to online support forum are in lieu of opening up a support case through standard methods. Cost per interaction in customer support averages $12 via the contact center versus $0.25 via self-service options. (Forrester, 2006) Jupiter Research (now Forrester) reported in 2006 that customers report good experiences in forums more than twice as often as they do via calls or mail. Ebay found in 2006 that participants in online communities spend 54% more than non-community users. Better customer experiences, far lower support costs and more buying activity in the long run. Those are observations that can help provide context to the high-profile example of Dell pushing e-commerce links out over Twitter. Dell is clearly doing a lot of the same kind of customer service via social media that the companies above cite, but watch out for falling into the trap of telling your reluctant boss that Twitter is important because Dell bagged $3 million there. Interested in learning more best practices for online community? Check out the ReadWriteWeb Guide to Online Community Management . Thanks to Ben Parr for sharing the Dell Community announcement link. Discuss

See the original post here:
Don't Tell Your Boss: Dell Made $6.5m on Twitter