The Corruption of Content

There’s a problem with digital content right now, incentives exist for creating crappy content: content is defined  by SEO (Search Engine Optimization, creating content that will rank highly in Google) and “realtime” (breaking stories quickly).

As for SEO-driven content, Content Creators play the game of mass-producing content for niche-based searches (What are people searching for?  Let’s pay someone $10 to write an article on it.  Rinse and repeat thousands of times per day.)  Michael Arrington wrote a good post on this topic “The End of Handcrafted Content.”

The increased incentive to be “realtime” and break stories quickly over services like Twitter also lead to poor content.  Take for instance, the “Black Screen of Death” Episode.  PC World essentially spread a completely unfounded rumor about a technical problem on Windows.  PC World’s editor’s justification: “We were chasing the story in realtime.”  (Give me a break.  Just say you fucked up.)

Ed Bott at ZDnet had a good write-up about the representative fiasco here: “What the Black Screen of Death  story says about Tech Journalism.”

Then of course, there’s the problem of content creators ripping off quality stories from real journalists and doing sub-par writeups to catch the story.  This only adds to the crud littering the web, burying quality content.

ReadWriteWeb has a good synopsis of the issues facing content here: “Content Farms: Why Media, Blogs and Google should be worried.”

The incentive to churn out poor content dilutes the value of the information on the web, as well as throws in misinformation.  It’s difficult to tell the difference.  How much time do you really want to spend sifting through content? And still, how do you tell if it’s good information, particularly if its an area outside your expertise?

The internet can provide easily accessible information and should be the ultimate educational/informational resource.  Allowing people to easily become well-informed is vital.  And while there is plenty of quality content that can be found, if you’re adept at it, it needs to be much better.  (I still largely rely on word of mouth to find good sources.  Best way to find good content: ask someone knowledgeable on the topic what they read.  What if you don’t have access to such people?)

It will get solved.  In a way, I’m working on this problem.  I hope others are as well.

-Kevin
12.28.09