Canned and Pickled
The whole web original content creation business is out of hand, especially in the areas of restaurant reviews and home improvement tips.
Just snoop around on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (coincidence) and see how many companies will pay some sucker $2.00 to write a canned home improvement article.
I just spent some time reading a three page guide on how to clean gutters, the first page of which bemoaned the complexity and specialized tools required. By the end all that seemed to be required was a trash bag, a hose, a spade, a ladder, and some high-grade patience. Seriously, they spent a paragraph saying to tie the trash bag to your ladder. Scooping technique was given two or three paragraphs of treatment spread throughout the document.
The operative thing here is that I just loaded three pages of ads before I figured this out. And by that time, as they say, they already have you.
Apparently, you can license this junk from various content providers. Try a quoted-literal Google search on a special-sounding sentence sometime and see. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. This is essentially the cost of using search engines rather than portals to find information. We pay this gladly because the portals sucked worse.
Remember when we used to use Yahoo as a flipping web directory? You got all puffed up that your Hanson tribute page was on the Yahoo directory under Entertainment -> Music -> Popular -> H -> Hanson -> Fan Pages. It was like running a local phonebook by hand for the entire Internet. This worked for a while.
Web rings were another great phenomenon in this vein of thinking. The visual of the term is perfection: it was like tying kids to an interlocking leash to keep track of them at the zoo.
This is all very postmodern to me, the way things are now. Things are very mushy, less organized.
Websites and their associated starry-eyed entrepreneurs are all lined up for a shot at pulling Paul Graham’s sword out of the stone, seeking to be quickly gobbled up through M&A into a company that buys an idea and sells a business strategy. It works, and it’s efficient. Microsoft shifted to this in standalone software. We kind of got a cafeteria-style portfolio. Corporate America could be a “Microsoft shop” or a “Sun shop” because every time something showed up of interest on that platform, the mother company bought it. Much easier than an uncreative copy. Much more risk-averse than blending everything in-house.
For websites, outsourcing the actual creation of content is kind of where to go. Google News, for all its random Al Jazeera links and spurious stories, kind of does this in a passive, not-directly-commercial way.
Reading a blog like Coding Horror kind of illustrates that a proficient writer can sustain life for a family on advertisements viewed by people who like the content created by a knowledgeable non-professional writer. Who needs a publisher there? This means content creation is going to get really cheap. It’s already getting there, but of course competition will drive up the quality, even at a fixed price per byte.
Paying directly for content is becoming kind of like holding an American Express Gold Card. It’s like you know you could get it for free, but you just don’t want to screw around with the free market and kind of enjoy the perks on the side. I honestly looked at subscribing to the online edition of the Wall Street Journal today at $104/year. Went to money.cnn.com and saw most of the same headlines. But, money.cnn.com sucks and starts a streaming video every time you go to the front page. It’s one of the major reasons my computer stays on mute all the time. It’s ultimately a personal value decision.