- Article written by: Michael Ridley
- Article published in: The Ontarion 164.11 (March 31st 2011)
- Article appears on page
If you thought “information literacy” was just for sissies – think again. Those faculty and librarians aren’t kidding when they go on and on about the critical appraisal of information. There’s a lot of crap out there. Way more than you might think.
An entire industry has sprung up on the internet to provide low quality information just for you. And it is very big business. We’re not talking just plain old internet crap. This is on-demand, responsive, targeted crap. Content spam from content farms.
Here’s one way it works. People search for things on Google. Companies track those searches to watch what people are looking for. They immediately commission short articles about those topics from a legion of part time writers they have available. Those articles are posted in a variety of websites within hours, even minutes. People continue to search for those topics and those newly posted articles rank highly in a Google search (who looks beyond the first page of a Google search anyway?). People access these posts. Those pages are filled with online ads and people click on those ads. Online advertising is very, very big business. Essentially this is a money factory based on cheap, low quality information designed to drive your eyeballs to online ads.
Nothing here about quality. Nothing. It’s just spam in another form.
The poster kid for all this is a company called Demand Media. It is estimated that they produce well over 4,000 pieces of content day. They talk about themselves as a new type of media company being responsive to consumer needs. They went public in January through an IPO and the resulting valuation of the company was $1.5 billion. That makes them valued higher than the New York Times.
Of course, trying to scam the Google search results is an international sport. Everyone is trying to get their website on the first page and has high up as possible. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a very lucrative (and legitimate) business. However, when manipulating the search results goes bad (and content spam is bad IMHO), we need to pay close attention. The terms for all these things are fascinating and evocative: black hat SEO, relevancy gaming, and (my personal favourite) link bait.
Google took a huge amount of bad press on this. Since content spam was undermining Google as the preferred search engine, they have taken steps to alter their famous PageRank algorithm to push these sites further down the search result list (i.e. they show up on pages 4 or later – who goes there?).
It seems to be working – for the moment. Demand Media share prices fell and other such companies announced layoffs. However, don’t kid yourself, crap content is surprisingly resilient.
So we are back to quality. Quality matters. Finding quality matters. Paying attention to the good stuff is what information literacy and critical appraisal are all about. As the motivational writer Wayne Dyer is fond of saying, always go the extra mile, it’s less crowded there. That’s where the quality is.
Are content farms evil? Or are they simply responding to consumer demand? Are you being manipulated or adequately informed?
Shutting down content farms is censorship. I’m not suggesting that. Manipulating Google search results is an acceptable business practice. I’m not really caring about that either (although it is fascinating – sorry, my propeller head is showing). For me it’s about critical appraisal and information literacy.
Spam is spam. Crap is crap. You need to know how to assess the validity of what you are reading or viewing. If you don’t have these skills, good luck to you. You are an info victim. You will be grazing at the content farms and the nourishment will be very thin.
Michael Ridley is the Chief Information Officer (CIO) and Chief Librarian at the University of Guelph. Contact him at mridley@uoguelph.ca or www.uoguelph.ca/cio.
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