Webwork - 12:59 pm on Oct 30, 2009 (gmt 0)

Read it and weep, oh thee who thinks highly of . . . that stuff now commonly known as "content".

An article in Wired.com [wired.com], entitled "The Answer Factory: Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell" explains, in somewhat painful detail, how a company called "Demand Media" - which operates sites such as EHow.com, is perfecting the mass manufacturing of "content" - reducing . . . err perfecting . . the manufacture of "profitable" content through data mining, algorithmic topic/title selection, and outsourcing a la "Mechanical Turk" - breaking down article writing into components and steps that are distributed to vast masses of workers being paid $15.00 an article and $1.00 for fact checking and $2.50 for editing and $.08 for article title rewriting and . . .

READ THIS ARTICLE if your life/livelihood is in any way tied to Adsense.

The latest production target of this operation is to hit 1,000,000 new "articles" a month.

And guess what? Like Wikipedia what's the chance of a manmoth website like EHow.com ranking for words and phrases . . that appear in their articles?

Brought to you by . . Made profitable by . . Underwritten by . .

Mind boggling. So much a better world than I thought the Web would ever produce. :P