Angela Hoy of writersweekly.com recently posted an article, “Are Content Mills Lowering the Quality of “News” on the Internet?”, on the sorry state of quality writing ushered in by the “content mills”. She specifically cited allvoices.com, examiner.com, associatedcontent.com and ehow.com for transgressions of poor quality writing. Among the examples she shares is the use of loose where lose was what the author really meant. Wii for weightloss is one article she mentions by way of example. Throughout the article she hits several articles of questionable quality from these “content mills”. Her quality questions focus on the sole point of spelling and grammar, including typos.

Carson Brackney weighs in with his take on Angela’s article, pointing out that she never really reaches a conclusion to her question about content mills being responsible for a general decline in writing on the Internet. He points out too, that quality is a subjective thing, and her article makes no real statement about the measure she uses, save her mentions of grammatical errors. In short, the reader is left to make their own connections between her premise and her citations, using innuendo as the sole glue between the two. Carson’s main problems with the article center on Angela’s treatment of her agenda in the piece and her failure to complete her argument.

Deb Ng posted her take on both Angela’s and Carson’s articles and made a couple of points I liked. “There’s a difference between bad writing and bad proofreading.” and “The problem here is the content site’s purpose.” are two thoughts she puts out there, that I think could be expanded on further. While she admits that loose/lose is a peeve of her’s and she believes that poorly proofread articles should not be published, she takes the tack that the quality of the idea and the quality of the presentation are not necessarily joined at the hip. This is a position I have maintained for as long as I care to remember.

So to get to the point, I have a couple of thoughts on this topic I felt like sharing.

• Writers do bear a responsibility to correctly presenting their ideas. When poor grammar is employed, or misspellings are ignored, the meaning of your message can be altered or lost. I can’t come up with a sentence right off-hand, but I am sure there is something that could be said that would differentiate between loose and lose critical to understanding and context would not help the reader make their own correction. Also, when we use the wrong word, as in the weight loss article cited, even if the reader can correct the error on the fly, they have to come out of the thought to do so, which makes our message less accessible. The sole point of writing is communicating a message and that is more difficult when we make it hard for the reader to stay with the thought.
• Readers who judge quality based solely on things like grammar, typos and misspellings, miss much that is good. We can argue from now to eternity whether poor writing makes an article poor even if the content is good. But that argument misses the point if your goal is to learn. Not everyone is a gifted writer, but I believe everyone has a story to tell, from which I can benefit. if the person who’s story you need now has poor spelling and grammar skills, you’re going to have to get over it. If you just decided that an article was crap because of spelling and grammar, and failing to read it missed a key piece of information you need now, who lost more?
• Quality of message and quality of delivery are not so much divorced as they have never been married. There are garbage ideas that are expressed with great eloquence and there are brilliant ideas that are expressed with great dullness. It’s up to the reader, in a marketplace of free ideas to discern between the two.
• Thomas Jefferson said “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” In a similar fashion, were I to choose between widely available personal publishing with no grammatical quality and perfectly written articles without the freedom of personal publishing I would choose the former in a heartbeat. I would never look back or regret that decision.
• Finally, what about lean? The simple fact is that writer’s just like everyone else are living in a recession. In recessionary times sensible people practice lean. The core of lean is waste reduction and a core aspect of waste reduction is that any quality above what is necessary is waste. For the content mills, or indeed most other sites on-line, the level of writing quality they need to get the job done just isn’t all that high. I know this will ruffle some feathers, but it’s a simple business fact. Hiring $1.00 / word authors is not going to earn these companies a single dime more than hiring 1 or 5 cent / word writers will. So any quality they pay for beyond that is waste. There are plenty of outlets that do need higher quality levels and the quality needs of one outlet has no influence on those of another.

So are the “content mills” destroying the quality writing Internet? I doubt it. They aren’t the first thing down the pipe that was going to destroy the Internet, I doubt they’ll be the last. Both sides in the debate have their points, even if they sometimes fail to actually make them. Higher quality delivery will make content more accessible and ignoring content for poor delivery will cost opportunity.

One more point I have to make here is that sometimes, on the internet, things really are different. really.

We do things on-line that we wouldn’t do off-line, because on-line, they work out for us. “Loosing weight” now enjoys a full 14 percent of the search share for “losing weight”.

And if we switch to “lose” vs. “loose” the search share for the misspelling climbs to 17 percent.

Most “content mills” live and die on the strength of their search traffic, and “loosing” may be more of a business decision than an editorial one. It’s becoming an outmoded method, but there is a long tradition of keyword targeting misspellings to gain more search traffic. Right now Google will display the results for the correctly spelled “losing weight” when you search for “loosing weight”, but Google is Google and not all search engines play the game at that level, so there may still be value in this approach.

It is worth pointing out that the article in question also uses “weightloss” instead of the correct “weight loss”, and that there are similar search relationships between these spellings. Indeed, Google suggests the correct spelling on this search, but still displays search results for the term as it stands. There can be big money in grammar and spelling mistakes.

What do you think is the right approach here? Should all website strive for some artificial quality level? Is the search game changing in ways that will raise the quality requirements anyways? Should authors stick to their guns and demand a certain pay as a group? Or should free market forces reign supreme? Is there something in the middle?

The Power Of The Press Belongs To The people

Each day people realize they can add their own unique view of to the world by publishing information online. Many of these authors find their way to content sites like Associated Content, Ezine Articles, and Squidoo. Once there, they publish articles, audio, and video information. They add thousands of new content pages to these sites daily.

Even more people add content to their own blogs on sites like Blogger and WordPress. Some even add content to blogs hosted on their own domains. Aggregators like Technorati, Topix and Google Blogsearch pick up the combined weight of these blog posts and present them in indexed directories. Together these bloggers and aggregators form an informal syndication network publishing the collective thoughts of the world.

This is an amazing historical period for personal publishing. Easy, inexpensive access to the Internet gives anyone who desires it the means to publish their own works. The full power of the press belongs to everyone, not just to those who can afford a press.

Open Publication Produces High Noise Debts

This creates an overwhelming amount of content available on nearly any topic imaginable. That can become a problem when you are researching information. It is not the only problem open publishing causes for researchers.

A lack of editorial filtering produces an atmosphere that allows publishing of everything regardless of merit. A lot of noise makes it into the mix with the real content. For each valuable article published, much more junk also joins the ever-growing information stack. Identifying good content burried under all of the noise can be difficult at times.

This noise debt further compounds the problem of identifying quality content. Automated efforts to qualify content are problematic and the results are often less than optimal. Algorithms go only so far in filtering quality. This is clear when searchers find parked domains at the top of search pages for some search terms.

Search Solves Some Of The Problem

Nearly all content sites have search features. Most of them offer some limited level of advanced search options. Ultimately they are content publishers, not search engines. They simply can’t devote the resources to search that the dedicated search engines can.

So searching content falls back to the search engines. The search engines often magnify the content volume, and with it the volume of noise accompanying it. They strive to filter for quality, but there is more information than they can handle.

Useful searches require creative searching methods to separate the good content from the noise in as short a time as possible. Often searching for indicators of quality offer better results.

Fortunately Google provides many powerful search operators, allowing us to craft precise useful queries. Crafting a power search query cuts through the clutter and delivers results pages filled with valuable information. This approach does require a little forethought. First you must find a useful criterion, and then determine the best way to apply Google’s search operators to the data.

Using Content Quality Criteria: Power Searching

Useful criteria for identifying excellent content include the content’s freshness, popularity and engagement.

Fresh content is more likely to be relevant than older content. Limiting the age of a query’s results will return information that applies to current ideas, markets and trends. We can reasonably expect content generated last week to be more relevant today than content created a year ago. Freshness is not a hard criteria though. In some cases older authoritative articles offer more quality than newer articles. This is especially true for topics that receive significant amounts of rehashing.

Popularity is a sign of quality, but factors other than quality can drive popularity. Automated tools can simulate popularity indicators. False popularity occurs frequently and can invalidate query results.

Engagement is another sign of quality. Engagement is more difficult to simulate than popularity. This makes it a more robust quality filter. Some content sites don’t encourage interactive use as much as others. For instance, the highest comment count on any Ezinearticles.com article now is 32 and fewer than a dozen have 20 comments. Gauging engagement on these sites.

Power Search Operators Make It Possible

Google provides powerful search operators. Advanced queries to find content based on these three criteria are possible using these operators. Power search operators aren’t well-known. Most searches have never heard of them, much less used them.

You can use these operators to drill to the heart of a research topic very quickly. They allow you to search for both your research topic, and for quality indicators at once. Filtering out less desirable content with quality indicators yields more good content to consider.

The two most useful power search operators Google makes available are the number range operator and the wild card word operator.

The number range operator is two dots combined with one or two numbers defining the range. You can use the number range operator to look for several signs of quality, such as the number of comments, page views, diggs, or votes on an article.

• 5..10 yields a result for any page containing any number between 5 and 10, inclusively.
• ..25 yields a result for any page containing any number lower than 26.
• 1001.. yields a result for any page containing a number larger than 1,000.

The wild card operator uses an asterisk to serve as a symbol for a matching pattern. You can use this operator to search for a range of dates, a common sentence with a single word that changes often or pages that contain any of a specific set of attributes.

• “submitted on *, * 2009” would match a page with any day and month in the year 2009, preceded by the words, submitted on.
• “submitted on *, June 2009” would match a page with any day in June, in the year 2009, preceded by the words, submitted on.
• “the * ways” would match any word preceded by the and followed by way, such as ‘the best ways’ or ‘the top ways’

These operators can also be strung together in a single search query. You can for instance, use the number range operator to find pages with a number of comments and the wild card operator to specify a date range or a specific group. Combining these and other Google search operators allows you to target your search very precisely for quality articles within the general topic you are researching.

For a list of specific power searches that I have created to aid in topical content research you can visit my Power Search  category.