The 463: Inside Tech

This Isn’t Your Grandma’s Farmville: The Alien World of Content Farming

(Kelsey Kirchmann) Everyone has seen the malformed beasts produced by content farming. Those weird, slinking articles titled “How to Fix a Lawnmower” or “Top Ten Summer Camp Themed Movies” that have little or no valuable content, but will take an unsuspecting netizen to a page filled with pop-up and sidebar ads if he chooses to “read more…” Some people spend hours stuck in the vortex of content farming and come away from the Internet no wiser or at least without an answer to their original query. Welcome to the weird world of content farming.

Most of us have been exposed to content farming when we are performing a routine query on a search engine. We search things like “How to Make Smores” or “LSAT HELP”, and we receive ranked search results by our preferred search engine. Some of the links in the search engine results are helpful and from reputable sources. Others would make our sixth grade English teachers cringe with republished content or a hodgepodge of words and pictures that are merely designed to suck the uniformed netizen into a rabbit hole of farmed content.

Content farms are often dressed up as legitimate websites or come from reputable sourced with broad name recognition. Some content farmers include Associated Content, e-How, wikihow, Cracked, Demand Media, CNN, AOL Seed and Patch, and Yahoo! Answers. These content farmers hire content farm workers for the hard labor.

Content farm workers are actual people who once dreamed of writing the great American novel or winning the Pulitzer for an article on populist revolutions in the Middle East, but are forced by circumstance (the economy, the decline of print media, really bad dates) to produce low quality content for even lower quality salary.

Content farms use computer algorithms which track trending search terms to produce a list of topics that will generate the most page views. Content farmers then work on impossible thirty-minute deadlines to produce bologna content on these computer-generated topics.

The quality of farmed content is not important; the content is merely a backsplash for the ads on the page. The central purpose of content farming is to garner ad revenue through page views. Read this horror story from a former content farmer for AOL and you will understand that the above summary of content farming is far from melodrama.

As a casual netizen, I first truly began to understand the alien concept of content farming a few days ago after reading an opinion piece in the New York Times. This blog post by Virginia Heffernan documented Google’s war on content farming with a new algorithm named Panda. Panda works to send farmed content to the bottom of Google’s page ranking system, making farmed content less valuable to content farms. Being at the bottom of the page ranking system does not equate to a high number of page views or ad revenue.

Google has just released Panda 2.2, the revised second edition of the Panda algorithm created to fight farmed content. Since Panda’s February 2011 launch, Google has been refining this algorithm and quietly releasing updated versions. According to this legal brief, Google Panda has been increasingly effective at weeding out worthless farmed content with eHow and Wikihow being the hardest hit of the content farms.

But Google Panda does not mean cybercitizens and their computers can sleep soundly. There is a new frontier, wild and lawless, that content farmers are beginning to exploit: e-books. A recent article in Salon titled “Spamazon” talks about the farmed content that is beginning to infiltrate the Amazon marketplace for Kindle books. Content farmers buy the rights to popular books or book titles then rearrange the words or completely change the content. Content farmers sell their product for a fraction of the cost of a legitimate e-book. Cybercitizens are then tricked into buying a low-cost, garbage imitation of Alice in Wonderland or The Yogurt Diet for Dummies. It is becoming increasingly difficult to sort the cheap imitators from legitimate e-literature. So Panda may be protecting your Google searches, but Panda cannot protect your Kindle.

I’m not sure if cheap imitations or get rich quick schemes are human nature or a law of the universe, but for now content farming will continue until the entire global community of cybercitizens fully understands the way content is generated and presented on the internet. We should all arm ourselves with knowledge and be our own Pandas. As long as we can recognize farmed content and steer ourselves back to the more reputable sources of online information, we can be responsible and empowered netizens. 

Skype from your couch

(Emma Nay) Imagine that you’re sitting on your couch, watching your favorite television show, and then all of a sudden your show gets interrupted. This time it wasn’t a commercial that took over the screen; it’s your boss calling in to see why you didn’t go to work today.

You guessed it. The cable giant, Comcast, and the Internet video program, Skype, are developing a partnership to help bring the latest bit of entertainment from the Internet to the television screen. Comcast customers who wish to have this feature will need to buy a special adapter box and an HD camera along with an HD television to get the maximum experience. A cool feature is that you can have an option where you can use Skype and watch television at the same time.

Personally, I’m not so sure if I would like to have this feature added to my television set, simply because I’d like to keep the Skype feature on my computer. I like to watch TV when I want to relax after a long day of work or listen to the news, not video chat with a friend to see what they’re doing Saturday night. Another thing that I’m not too fond of is that this will add extra expenses to my cable bill, as if the adapter and camera weren’t expensive enough!

If you do decide to purchase this application for your TV set, make sure to sign out when you don’t want to be bothered from your boss, ex-boyfriend/girlfriend, mother-in-law, spouse, or whoever else that may interrupt your favorite program.  

We’re Gonna Party Like It’s 1999

(Kelsey Kirchmann) In 1999, I was nine-years-old. I had never been out of the country, I had never operated a motor vehicle and I was five years away from holding my first real job as a line cook in a pizza joint. I had barely discovered the Internet past AOL Instant Messaging in the elementary school computer lab.

 

1999 was an exciting year. This new currency called the Euro was established as the official currency of the eurozone (which did not yet include Greece). The world population reached 6 billion people, ExxonMobile became the world’s largest company and this guy named Hugo Chavez became the President of Venezuela.

 

Bill Gates’ fortune exceeded 100 billion dollars with the release of Windows 98.  This amazing new music-sharing site called Napster was launched and the music was totally free (until they were prosecuted for contributory and vicarious copyright infringement). Apple released the Power Macintosh G4. China started restricting the use of the Internet in these things called Internet cafes. We were all afraid Y2K was going to be the beginning of Armageddon, starting with our bank accounts because you just can’t trust those computers.

 

At that time we had no idea about Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIN, Hulu or Groupon. Google was a brand new search engine, a few years away from its IPO. We didn’t use the word netizen and we spent significantly less time on the Internet. Oh, and did I mention there were no smartphones (collectve gasp).

 

Last Thursday, the FCC released a report called “Information Needs of Communities”. This report is the product of the FCC’s examination of the future of media and information launched in 2010.

 

This project was launched after the FTC published a staff discussion draft in 2010 of policy recommendations to “support the reinvention of journalism”. These policy suggestions include massive federal subsidies for the press, a journalism division of AmeriCorps, expanded postal subsidies and taxes on cell phones and consumer electronics to pay for it all.

 

Now please pause for a moment to take all of that in. How different would our world be if those policy suggestions were taken in 1999? I am almost positive I would not be using my iPhone to tweet about Facebook in China after a quick Google News search.

 

The FCC’s report is broad where the FTC’s staff discussion draft was controversially specific. The FCC report focused on an objective overview of modern media. Instead of trying to suggest policy that will most likely inhibit the rapidly-evolving, organic nature of modern media, the FCC suggests streamlining policy and promoting transparency in media online. Instead of a strident regulatory framework, the FCC’s policy suggestions favor a light regulatory touch.

 

The FCC’s approach seems both rational and highly intelligent considering the amazing information revolution that has taken place over the past few decades. It remains hard to say what will become the next Facebook, Google or Twitter and it is even harder to say why Prince wore this sparkling trench coat, but it easy to see we will continue to experience the lightening-fast progress of innovation in the digital age.

 

 

“Infotainment” Systems: A Solution or a Distraction?

(Emma Nay) From smart phones to refrigerators with built-in TVs, technology seems to be creeping up on to just about everything. In fact, technology giants like Google and Intel are bringing the power of the PC right on to the dashboard of a car. As if we didn’t have enough distractions on the road!

“Infotainment systems” is what they are called and they are supposedly going to be on the market this year. Infotainment systems have a variety of features including: 3D maps, HD videos, car and fuel information, and even the Internet. Even though some systems may prevent drivers from viewing videos while the car is in motion, drivers can still access information on the Internet, such as news articles and social media.

I guess these technology giants thought it would be a great idea to bring smart phone-like applications to the dashboard without considering the consequences. “Unfortunately and sadly, it is a continuation of the pursuit of profit over safety — for both drivers and pedestrians,” says Nicholas A. Ashford, a professor of technology and policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

I could only imagine if I bought a new car with a built-in infotainment system. Let’s say I wanted to head over to a local restaurant to celebrate my new purchase. I wanted to see some reviews of this restaurant before I head out but didn’t have enough time to look them up at home. I could easily press a button on the 10-inch screen above my gearshift to access the Internet and find out what this restaurant is all about. Add that to another list of things that could be distracting me behind the wheel (such as my smart phone vibrating uncontrollably, my beverage spilling all over the place, or some friends that are chatting away in the back seat) and before you know it, I’m in a wreck, or hopefully just a fender bender!

Needless to say, I’m probably going to stick with my simple Jeep and leave these infotainment systems to the tech fanatics. As much as a safe driver as I am (knock on wood), I really would not want to jeopardize my safety over something so unnecessary.

 

New Fitness Technologies to Help You Stay Fit

(Emma Nay) Do you have a resolution to stay fit year-round but are having trouble staying motivated? Is exercising slowly becoming more repetitive and boring? Well, with today’s new fitness technologies, people are finding more ways to stay in shape and stay entertained. From mobile apps to gaming consoles, there are so many different fitness tips and routines to help get you the beach body you’ve always wanted.

So, how do we get people to enjoy exercising? Last year, the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) did a Getting Fit with Consumer Electronics study to influence consumers to use technology to get them off of their couches to stay fit, instead of using technology to be sedentary

Rhonda Daniel, manager of market research at CEA, states that fitness technologies are ranging from scales and pedometers, to mobile applications, MP3 players, and gaming systems. This helps these technologies reach out to as many different types of people as possible. New mobile applications such as the Lose It! app, can help give consumers an ideal workout schedule to reach their personal goals, track their calorie intake, track their progress, and even see how their friends are progressing with the app. I have used the Lose It! app before and I absolutely loved it! There are other mobile apps such as CardioTrainer Pro, JogTracker, Adidas miCoach, and various other apps to give tips to fit the consumer’s needs.

There’s no need to sit on the couch to watch your favorite show anymore!  Many elliptical trainers and treadmills are now being built with televisions so you can stay entertained while melting off those calories. If there isn’t a television present, there are apps you can put on your phone to watch movies or you could simply listen to music while you work out. Are you a video game fanatic? How about trying some new fitness games for the Xbox Kinect and the Wii? There are tons of strength training and cardio games to choose from such as Zumba and even skiing!

With today’s fitness technology, it seems like there is virtually no excuse not to work out. These apps could definitely help whip everyone into that fantastic, beach body, all while having a great time doing it. So, get up off of that couch and start working on that body that you have been dreaming of all year.