The End Of Hand Crafted Content

Old media loves nothing quite so much as writing about their own impending death. And we always enjoy adding our own two cents – the AP not knowing what YouTube is, the NYTimes guys reading TechCrunch every day, etc. Speaking broadly, I like what Reuters, Rupert Murdoch and Eric Schmidt are saying: the industry is in crisis, and the daring innovators will prevail. But as one of the innovators in the last go round, I think there’s a much bigger problem lurking on the horizon than a bunch of blogs and aggregators disrupting old media business models that needed disrupting anyway. Old media frets over blogs and aggregators that summarize content and link back to the original source. These are the cavemen, or whoever, who were afraid of fire when it was discovered because it burned, or was too technologically advanced to really understand. For our part, we throw a party when someone “steals” our content and links back to us. But even then, companies like ours can find a way to compete.

The Revolution Will Not Be Intermediated So I just followed this tweet by Chris Messina to Mike Arrington‘s The End of Hand Crafted Content. The tweet-bite: “The rise of fast food content is upon us, and it’s going to get ugly.” Meaning that FFC “will surely, over time, destroy the mom and pop operations that hand craft their content today. It’s the rise of cheap, disposable content on a mass scale, force fed to us by the portals and search engines.” Just as an aside, I’ve been hand-crafting (actually just typing) my “content” for about twenty years now, and I haven’t been destroyed by a damn thing. I kinda don’t think FFC is going to shut down serious writers (no matter where and how they write) any more than McDonald’s killed the market for serious chefs. Mike explains, “On one end you have AOL and their Toyota Strategy of building thousand of niche content sites via the work of cast-offs from old media. His penultimate point: Good advice. Mike concludes, “Forget fair and unfair, right and wrong. Well, no.

Micro Persuasion: The Digital Curator in Your Future The Clip Report: An eBook on the Future of Media In the early 1990s when I began my career in PR there were clip reports. These were physical books that contained press clips. Today my role is to form insights into how the entire overlapped media landscape - the pros, social channels, and corporate content - is rapidly evolving and to help Edelman clients turn these learnings into actionable strategies. Today I am re-launching my Tumblr site with a new name, a new focus and a new format. It all kicks off today with a 15-page installment of The Clip Report. Audiences aren’tStupid. Quality’s not dead 13 December '09, 11:50pm Follow There’s been a lot of doom-laden talk today about ‘The Death of Hand-crafted Content‘. If you believe Michael Arrington, quality online writing and video is being pushed out by ‘Content Farms’ that publish endless articles and clips about whatever is trending highly on search engines. It’s a ‘race to the bottom’, apparently. While it’s true that the reduction in cost of content creation in recent years has led to a flood of poor quality content, I take the optimistic view. Audiences aren’t stupid. Cream always rises to the top and ‘quality’ content will find its target audience thanks to a combination of search engines, content aggregators and sharing services like Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader, Digg and Stumbleupon. Even if you think I’m full of nothing but blind optimism here, there’s an uncomfortable truth that ‘quality’ content producers need to bear in mind too. Sometimes it’s the ‘low-quality’ content that fulfills an audience’s need.

PC Perspective - The #1 Choice for PC Hardware Reviews and Infor La communaut? participative des ?diteurs du Web ? Cratyle.net Vous l’avez certainement compris d’un précédent billet. Pearltrees veut développer ce chainon manquant de la démocratisation du Web, l’édition du Web par ses utilisateurs. Pour être plus précis: Pearltrees veut bâtir la communauté participative des éditeurs du Web. Pourquoi une communauté ? Parce que la masse de contenus disponible sur le Web dépasse les capacités d’édition de n’importe quel individu ou groupe d’individu. Pourquoi participative ? Mais enfin, dans ce cas, pourquoi un projet spécifique ? Voici véritablement la clé du sujet. Toutes les œuvres collectives du Web s’appuient sur deux éléments à la fois contradictoires et indissociables : d’une part, la liberté et l’irréductible diversité de leurs contributeurs, d’autre part l’unité du média au sein duquel ils s’expriment. C’est de la complémentarité des wikipédiens que nait Wikipédia, mais aussi de l’unité de leur support. Ce n’est pas l’envie d’éditer qui manque sur le Web. …dont il me faudra bientôt parler

The Answer Factory: Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable, and P Illustration: Stephen Doyle Christian Muñoz-Donoso is going to make this job pay, he’s got to move quickly. He has a list of 10 videos to shoot on this warm June morning, for which he’ll earn just $200. To get anything close to his usual rate, he’ll have to do it all in two hours. Today’s topic is kayaking. He climbs a flight of stairs to his studio above a strip mall, unloads his gear, and keeps up his breakneck pace. Thousands of other filmmakers and writers around the country are operating with the same loose standards, racing to produce the 4,000 videos and articles that Demand Media publishes every day.

Smarter grids, appliances, and consumers More and more utilities are beginning to realize that building large power plants just to handle peak daily and seasonal demand is a very costly way of managing an electricity system. Existing electricity grids are typically a patchwork of local grids that are simultaneously inefficient, wasteful, and dysfunctional in that they often are unable, for example, to move electricity surpluses to areas of shortages. The U.S. electricity grid today resembles the roads and highways of the mid-twentieth century before the interstate highway system was built. What is needed today is the electricity equivalent of the interstate highway system. The inability to move low-cost electricity to consumers because of congestion on transmission lines brings with it costs similar to those associated with traffic congestion. In the United States, a strong national grid would permit power to be moved continuously from surplus to deficit regions, thus reducing the total generating capacity needed.

10 Web trends to watch in 2010 Mashable's Pete Cashmore says real-time communication, Internet TV and social gaming will be big in 2010. Mashable's Pete Cashmore lists his 10 Web trends that we'll be talking about next year Sparked by Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed, the real-time communications trend will grow The cloud-computing movement will see a major leap forward in the first half of 2010 2010 will be the breakthrough year of the much-anticipated mobile payments market Editor's note: Pete Cashmore is founder and CEO of Mashable, a popular blog about social media. (CNN) -- As 2009 draws to a close, the Web's attention turns to the year ahead. While Web innovation is unpredictable, some clear trends are becoming apparent. Real-time ramps up Sparked by Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed, the real-time trend has been to the latter part of 2009 what "Web 2.0" was to 2007. But real-time is more than just a horde of new Twitter-like services hitting the Web in 2010 (although that's inevitable -- cargo cults abound).