The big topic at the moment, even as evidenced even by Fever/Chill Pill–
- Doc Searls Weblog · The Revolution Will Not Be Intermediated
- Content Farms: Why Media, Blogs & Google Should Be Worried
- The supersizing of content; or how we are turning the Web into an obese mess
Which makes me think about the early days of professional blogging. When people decried what I was doing, that professional blogging would lead to crap content. Maybe it has in the case of Demand Media (and others), but I also think what I started doing in 2004 paved the way for more bloggers to make money as bloggers for Techcrunch, ReadWriteWeb, TUAW, and all the other big content-driven sites. These content-driven sites that did a damn good job at toppling the mainstream media for dominance of the media megaphone. But there’s a (somewhat) new challenge out there sites rife with quickly written content that might answer a question or provide links to resources, but little else. We’ve had mass content sites for a while, they aren’t terribly new, just the tools for promotion and buzz building have gotten better.
The question that’s being raised today is can content like I, RWW, TC, TUAW b5media produce survive when we’re out-posted and out-linked by content farms. I think we can, if we work more together than apart. If we’re serious about good content, then good content needs to be supported. Sure, Doc Searls has a valid point that he has been producing great content for years. So have I, and I’ve supported myself through the other things that come with great content (consulting, etc), but I think we have to do a little more this time around.
If part of the power of Demand Media and others is scale then we can fight back with scale of our own. What if there were customized WP-MT plugin like Zemata or Outbrain that pulled recommendations only from posts within a federation of sites? Sites where great content is the rule, not exception.
No, it wouldn’t be easy and yes, it would lead to “I’m good enough for…” discussions. However considering one of the biggest issues is the inter and intra site linking of content farms reinforcing and augmenting the SEO value of the posts, I think this is worth a look.
Or maybe we need to summon back the blogroll and be more in the habit of linking to each other.
Or Techmeme could launch a widget like I’ve talked about to show “related posts on Techememe”.
Regardless, in the end what we, as crafters of content, need to remember to do is: keep crafting great content.
Tris Hussey is a writer, teacher, blogger, and speaker on all facets of Internet life, WordPress, and social media. He is the author of Create Your Own Blog: 6 Easy Blogging Projects to Start Blogging Like a Pro and Using WordPress.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Tris-
Nice post and some great thoughts in here, thanks for mentioning Outbrain. One of the nice features of our content recommendation platform is it does precisely what you outline: it lets web publishers create their own virtual network of sites and link just to those they choose. You provide us a list of sites you want to recommend and we pull the most targeted links in from just that set. You can even control what percentage of links you want to “link out” versus point back into your own content.
We have large publishers with many branded assets using this functionality to connect their content in an automated way, and we have individual sites using these features to link out to complementary sites with whom they have an affinity and whose content they think their readers will enjoy.
We are also pioneering a new approach to letting bloggers/publishers monetizing great content by providing their users links to……more great content! It’s a link out strategy for content producers that lets them kill two birds with one stone: 1) provide their readers pointers to great external articles and 2) get paid for it.
Keep the great crafted content coming! We readers need (and very much appreciate) it.
Thanks for the comment David. I had OutBrain running here for a long time, but turned it off just recently for testing! Clearly I need to turn it back on and configure my settings.
I hope that with some careful selection we can encourage linking to good stuff, and try to ignore the remainder. Easier said than done, I know.
Hi,
Good ideas on how to solve it. Part of the problem is that people aren’t linking as much as they used to that is why TechMeme has hired so many editors.
My company, BuzzBox, was thinking that the best way is to let the user have tools that let them select sites they like and they don’t. Then they can get the top news from those sites. The hard part is the discovery of new sites. Having the sites be public will encourage people to find what other people are reading kinda like on Twitter. What do you think of that?
Anu