The Web has always rewarded quantity more than quality, but over 2010 this truism became even more pronounced with the growth of Content Farms. These are companies which create thousands of pieces of content per day. Much of it is in the form of how-to articles and is often referred to as "evergreen" informational content, because it's relevant for much longer than news.
By the end of last year, two of these content farms - Demand Media and Answers.com - were firmly established inside the top 20 Web properties in the U.S. as measured by comScore. This year, Demand Media filed for IPO and two big Internet portals - AOL and Yahoo! - joined the trend. Let's take a look back on the year of the Content Farm and their collective impact in the Web.
Google now offers real-time scores and links to game recaps and highlight tapes of NHL hockey games, the company announced in a small blog post this afternoon. Just enter "NHL" in the search box and you'll see a display like the one above.
The links are to pages on NHL.com, something that other sports leagues would be remiss to neglect to offer the search engine themselves. This example of structured data displayed as details on a search results page points towards a future where all websites offer structured data to Google and Google indexes it in real-time. If you remember poor Yahoo Search Monkey, it was just ahead of its time and at the wrong company.
As if the journalism field weren't crowded enough, robot reporters have hit the market with sports statistics company StatSheet's automated sports reporting effort.
Beginning today, nearly 350 Division 1 college basketball teams will receive constant, in-depth coverage of their season in what the company is calling "the world's first network of websites driven entirely by high-quality, automated content".
The latest comScore Top 50 Properties (U.S.) statistics make sobering reading for AOL, the former king of the portals in the 90s and early part of this century. While AOL is the number 5 ranked U.S. web property, with 104 million monthly unique visitors, it's now well adrift of the top 4: Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Facebook. Facebook is just one spot above AOL, but has nearly 44 million more monthly uniques. Meanwhile a company that is virtually an unknown brand outside of the Internet industry, Glam Media, has just about caught up with AOL.
Glam Media had 91 million uniques in September, according to comScore. That's only 13 million less than AOL. Glam Media had 54 million uniques one year ago, so how has it managed to get to within sniffing distance of becoming one of the top 5 Web properties in the U.S.?
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs took questions from Twitter users this morning and answered a select few in a video on YouTube.
"Something new," Gibbs Tweeted,"You take first crack. Use #1q in a q & I'll answer 1 on vid before today's briefing. What do you want to know?" Given that this is a public forum, users can see all the questions asked of Gibbs, in addition to the ones he chose to answer. His video reply below.
As a continuing effort toward becoming a "a multi-platform media leader," today, PBS rolled out an extensive expansion of its website, featuring an improved back-end, significant increase in national-local integration, expanded video offerings; as well as new iPad and iPhone apps.
18 months ago, PBS launched an initiative to make the public broadcasting corporation's site a player in multimedia. They introduced their media player, made 4,700 hours of broadcast offerings available for free, created mobile apps for kids and rolled out a subscription-based teaching platform. The next several months may add significantly to the organization's new media juice.
Pambazuka News, a sterling example of how new media can revitalize news gathering, is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. That's a big enough deal on its own. It's even more important to note that, in a tech world sometimes overly focused on Silicon Valley, Pambazuka News is an African website devoted to African news and analysis run by Africans.
Pambazuka News was launched in 2000 by Fahamu, an African non-profit devoted to human rights and progressive reform. Its goal was, and remains, to connect activists intent on progressive reform in Africa. What is has become is a large, vibrant community of citizen journalists reporting the news from a pan-African point of view and with a focus on social justice.
Cable service Cablevision has stopped broadcasting some of the biggest TV stations in the New York area because it failed to renew its contracts with a number of leading Fox subsidiary stations before the contracts expired this week. Now the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is calling on the companies to sign a deal and resume broadcasting - and by calling on the companies I mean the FCC is Tweeting, several times an hour, mocking the two companies.
The Major League Baseball playoffs are going on right now and millions of people are unable to watch them due to the contract conflict. The official FCC Twitter account is posting live game updates along with calls on the companies to settle their dispute.
Mainstream media in a social media world - who gets it? Who gets the love from readers and Tweeters, Facebookers and Diggers? Social media consultant Adam Sherk ran a list of major media outlets through the API of engagement analytics company Postrank and found out. Postrank looks at any RSS feed and analyzes the items in it based on number of comments left, number of mentions on Twitter, bookmarks in Delicious, votes on Digg, inbound links from blogs and other social media metrics.
Postrank co-founder Ilya Grigorik added another metric to Sherk's analysis: engagement per unique visitor. Can you guess which major media outlet scored the highest? It was the Guardian, in the UK. Next in line for most engagement per unique visitor were Slate, The New York Times, the BBC and The Economist. See below for a chart displaying the top 30.
The advent of the iPad has triggered a new round of innovation in the startup community. And few startups have utilized the iPad's touchscreen UI to create a unique user experience more than Flipboard, a magazine reading application built specifically for the iPad.
As part of our continuing product innovation interview series, I spoke with Flipboard co-founder and CEO Mike McCue. We discuss how he came up with the idea, before the iPad had even been announced, then rapidly developed and launched Flipboard. We also talk about how people are using Flipboard (hint: it's more than just for reading magazines) and its future plans to expand beyond the iPad - including to smartphones.
