Content Creation: The New Sweat Shop of the Mind
Posted by Bill Ives on Mon, Jul 11, 2011
One of the intended consequences of the success of Google’s Page Rank is SEO and in its dark form, black hat spam. I reported on a milder version of this in Trying to Game Google on Mother’s Day. The New York Times covered a darker side with its article, Google’s War on Nonsense. It reported on a new form of sweat shops, the content farms. As they wrote: “Content farms, which have flourished on the Web in the past 18 months, are massive news sites that use headlines, keywords and other tricks to lure Web-users into looking at ads. These sites confound and embarrass Google by gaming its ranking system.”
The Economist described two content farms, Associated Content and Demand Media, as cleverly cynical operations that “aim to produce content at a price so low that even meager advertising revenue can support it.” The Times goes on the write: “The insultingly vacuous and frankly bizarre prose of the content farms — it seems ripped from Wikipedia and translated from the Romanian — cheapens all online information.”
It sounds like machines create such prose but actually, as the Times reports, “they are written by writers who work like robots. As recent accounts of life in these words-are-money mills make clear, some content-farm writers have deadlines as frequently as every 25 minutes. Others are expected to turn around reported pieces, containing interviews with several experts, in an hour.”
Why does this occur? Because Google uses algorithms that attempt to impose order on the chaotic universe of the Web. As Nick Carr quotes Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, in his Atlantic article, Is Google Making Us Stupid?, that it is “a company that’s founded around the science of measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize everything” it does. Carr adds that what Fred Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind. Nick goes on to write, “in Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed.”
In response to this the Times writes that these writers attempt to work within Google’s quest and, “cram together words that someone’s research had suggested might be in demand on Google, position these strings as titles and headlines, embellish them with other inoffensive words and make the whole confection vaguely resemble an article.” All of this is done in the interest of clarity and avoiding ambiguity?
Instead of sewing cheap clothes or building poorly made toys in bad conditions these workers are attempting to build content in bad conditions which is the outcome of doing, as Carr wrote, “what Fred Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind.”
These writers are not interested in journalist quality but, as documented in The AOL Way, “a company document leaked to the press not long ago. That document reduces the art of journalism to a process that begins with using metrics to “identify high-demand topics” and ends with the review of this “hi-vol, lo-cost” textual content — those are articles, folks — for such important literary virtues as Google rank and social-media traction.”
To its credit Google is striking back. As the Times reported, “the corporation concocted what it concocts best: an algorithm” to sift out the content farm content. And the SEO war continues. So far Google is making progress but they are up against a highly motivated set of foes. The war will continue as long as some version of reputation, relevance, and recency remain in play to determine what you get to see first. This war will never end as long as Google tries to impose external order on a chaotic and complex world of unstructured content created by humans, not machines.
To be fair Google sees these sweat shops of the mind an unintended and unwanted consequence and I am sure Fred Taylor would not like sweat shops of the hand. This is also not really an attack on Google. I used it every day and it is my home page. I used it to write this article. It is the best source I know when I know want I am looking for like when the Red Sox game starts or the name of the Thai restaurant in my hometown. I do not know of an alternative that works better but we should be aware that measurement has its place and cannot provide the perfect answer. That is an illusion that most statisticians will agree with.
This war will never end as long as Google tries to impose external order on a chaotic and complex world of unstructured content created by humans, not machines. We need computer models that partner with people, rather than simply ones that try to do tasks for us.
Google’s algorithms also have their cost. While most serious online writers do not act like the content farms, there is a small portion of their cognitive space that does keep SEO in mind so people will find their articles. I do it. This activity brings no real value outside SEO and keeps a portion of our brain working in the new sweat shop of the mind.
When the phonetic alphabet was created it freed up portions of our mind form having to remember so much content. What will be the next breakthrough that frees us up from using a part of our cognitive space for SEO?