An infinite number of monkeys?

For anyone who doesn’t know attenuation is about reducing the input values that are coming in.  What prompted this short post is a feed I stumbled on to and scanned across to see that there is giant business out there to generate "original" written content for something on the order of $1 an article.  Wow.  Every day dozens of sites are paying a few dollars to people to write whatever they can so that they will have some "original" content that the search engines will index and possibly drive some traffic their way. 

There seem to be an almost unlimited number of sites that are willing to do this in order to generate a few dollars a day in advertising revenue and possibly sell a site from time to time based on traffic.  The whole thing is insane.  We’re sad the newspapers are dying but at least they had editors. 

We have wondered why the expertise of an organization like the NYT or WSJ, even USA Today, might not help cull the wheat from the chaff.  So far it doesn’t seem to be happening.

Of course the new way seems to be link journalism which is based on link sharing and recognizing original and good content.  We’re not an expert in the publishing space and defer to others like Scott Karp and O’Reilly.

But somehow this has to end. This comes after large firms like Reuters got rid of most talented writers to use much cheaper authors of earnings fodder and news updates to feed their user base.

Many seem very motivated to flood the Internet with so much that we actively worry that we can choke on our own volume of an infinite number of monkeys typing away all for $1 a page.  At some point the effort/value equation will drive people away from discovery on the net.

Social networks seem to hold a potential answer. Humans will filter out the good stuff and mark/star/tweet it or whatever.  We will start to ignore everything else.

This reminds us of when the early libraries had no catalog or even a useful labeling system.  Early days indeed.

Tagged as: Markets, Research