The Attack of the Infinite Monkeys
Quick Hide the Typewriters!
Online, reading and news are doing OK. It’s just writing and journalism as a profession that seems to be in trouble. Specifically journalism, at least according to the current narrative. The big problem is that writing is easy, and with the Internet, publication is even simpler.
Most of the developed world is literate and the tools needed to write are very common, from mobile phone handsets to desktop computers, tablets and laptops. The sprawling ecosystem of platforms and media the Internet has spawned means making something available is simple. These days the hard part is having something worth saying, and that someone else will care enough about to share.
Before the Internet, the hard part for a writer was making their work public on some kind of scale in the first place. Getting words onto paper, in bulk, and with access to a distribution network of some kind was hard, very hard. Plus the entire process was in the hands of a relatively small number of gatekeepers who only had so many pages that they needed filled. In turn this allowed them to be as picky with content and writers as their business model allowed, restricting access to a handful of professions who met certain standards or had a specific marketable skill set. However, the Internet has changed this, and since the earliest days, creating and sharing content online has been endemic and a major part of the identity of those that use these platforms, from the RFC forum all the way through to Pinterest.
Arguing for Value in the Race to the Bottom
Making content available to the public is easy, far easier than being interesting or articulate. The ability to press ‘publish’, ‘post’ or ‘update’ has no relation to being able to spell, or being interesting, or even understandable. It is easy to do, there is no reason for most people not to, and they mostly do it for free, or in some cases with an optimistic expectation of making millions working from home.
When anyone with an Internet connection is potential competition, where does this leave professional writers, and more importantly, the organisations that package and distribute their work? Even narrowing it down to just the articulate and interesting, there are lot of people giving it away for free.
The quality of content created and consumed both online and offline by news organisations, businesses, consumers and other publishing entities is not arguing strongly for the value of a professional content creating class. It is plainly obvious that you don’t need to be a journalist to churn out content or copy and paste a press release. It is not surprising that building a business based on generating huge volumes of low investment content and sticking ads on it has been popular online.
Bulk Content for Bulk Ad Views
The problem is the number of pageviews required to make it work. To generate the interest and get the required attention, new sites and others using content to generate advertising revenue need a lot of divisive, polarising content. Stuff that provokes an emotive response, headlines that attract clicks and opinions or stories people will want to share. As fast as some legacy media is racing to reach the logical conclusion of this trend, their online-only competition is already there, and doing it cheaper.
A lot of blogs and online news services, from personal blogs to the Huffington Post are accused of lowering the tone of public discourse at the expense of professional writing. In fact, these criticisms have become common place enough to have developed their own collection of predictable tropes. As Arianna Huffington pointed out, “Self-expression the new entertainment”, and it is this trend that has spawned a tidal wave of content posted everywhere from private and public social networks to personal and commercial blogs. Individually they don’t have much of an impact, they don’t scale. What does make a difference is the amount of activity they produce as a group. For every blogger who gives up after their fourth ‘Top Ten Reasons Pants Rock’ post fails to make them internet millions, or walks away from a Tumblr meme blog because their friends don’t share it enough, there are still more who continue to write, post, photoshop, tweet, and so on.
However, to make a play for the mass audience that legacy media is pitched at, they need scale. It is the content farms that have scale, creating masses of content either through aggregation or software tools, or with large teams of underpaid writers churning out short pieces to match a list of targeted search queries. Underpaying for bad content in a way that scales was working so well that it got to the point where search engines had to appear to be doing something once the mainstream press started to criticise the ‘spammy’ search result pages.
Professional Writers versus Professionals Writing
At the other end of the spectrum there are subject matter experts who put their work online. For many, such as scientists, talking directly to the public is an attractive alternative to being misquoted, misrepresented and edited down to a misleading sound byte by journalists from a legacy media channel. There are other benefits for professionals in publishing online and reaching their audience directly, and none of them have to be getting paid per blog post or AdSense revenue.
The critical thing is that there is no shortage of accessible, findable content and specialist content online. There is a large number of experts from a diverse range of fields either already producing content as a part of their job, or doing it because they they enjoy it on their own time. Many are actively engaged in their work and their professional community, and can reach laypeople who are interested in their thoughts and fields of expertise without needing a journalist to act as an intermediary.
Generalists for Cash and Experts for Free
Just as there are a lot of people sharing good quality content just because they can, there is a lot of content created for reasons other than a direct financial return, some out of pure altruism. There are many bloggers and other creators that happily give their content away as fast as the audience will take it because it will help them make money through other means. Their written work might help when pitching for new projects, or build a public profile, sell books, t-shirts, events or just get a new job.
Left in the Middle
Where do the ‘genuine writers’ fit in this world? Content written for broad appeal does not seem to require a lot of skill or attract much return, and material written about niche topics created by subject area experts is easier than ever to find. Writers in general, and journalists in particular, do not seem to fit either end of this spectrum, if literacy and access to a printing press and a newspaper brand is all they can offer.
Professional writers who only provide a link between the information and the means of publication are an artefact of the economics of scarcity. Scarcity of printers, scarcity of platforms and distribution, and even a scarcity of the skills needed to use these tools. In the past to participate in the media you had to be chosen, be employed by an entity that controlled the means of production. It was easier to get picked if you were a professional writer, and because the industry could only support so many writers, most of them seemed to be generalists. With a few exceptions, it was not economical to support someone full time just to write about a niche subject area.
Now you don’t need to be chosen to reach an audience. It does not have to be a full time job just to get access to a good distribution network. There are more writers specialising in obscure topic areas than before, and it is also easier and cheaper to get mass, general, click bait content produced or to aggregate press releases and news feeds. On the whole, journalism appears to be caught in the middle. No longer vital for collecting and interpreting expert opinion, and faced with the falling value of general content. The future demands that writers offer something more than the ability to spell, and the luck to work for someone who owns a printing press.
Won’t Someone Think of the Links?
Anything but the links!
This week Google’s search blog, Inside Search, announced a number of changes that were rolled out during February. Apparently one of them was about links. Unsurprisingly, this change was the one that received the most immediate attention, and generated the largest number of blog posts. Which is not too bad for a single paragraph that really does not say a lot:
Link evaluation. We often use characteristics of links to help us figure out the topic of a linked page. We have changed the way in which we evaluate links; in particular, we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years. We often rearchitect or turn off parts of our scoring in order to keep our system maintainable, clean and understandable.
More than just about a Link
Despite first impressions, there were other changes in the list of 40 updates. These include some related to image search, query freshness, spiking topics and news, as well as a range of language and product updates. While links were only mentioned in one update, image search was in four, and content freshness and emerging queries were covered in five.
Fresher, Timelier Results?
It was hard not to see intent in the changes relating to finding fresh content and identifying emerging search trends. With Search, plus Your World, and how Google has used Twitter in the past to power a real time search product, it is easy to assume that Google may be looking at using social and behaviour signals to modify rankings on a short time scale. The main updates that seemed to fit this were:
- Interval based history tracking for indexing. [project codename “Intervals”] This improvement changes the signals we use in document tracking algorithms.
- Disabling two old fresh query classifiers. [launch codename “Mango”, project codename “Freshness”] As search evolves and new signals and classifiers are applied to rank search results, sometimes old algorithms get outdated. This improvement disables two old classifiers related to query freshness.
- Fresher images. [launch codename “tumeric”] We’ve adjusted our signals for surfacing fresh images. Now we can more often surface fresh images when they appear on the web.
- Improvements to freshness. [launch codename “iotfreshweb”, project codename “Freshness”] We’ve applied new signals which help us surface fresh content in our results even more quickly than before.
- Consolidation of signals for spiking topics. [launch codename “news deserving score”, project codename “Freshness”] We use a number of signals to detect when a new topic is spiking in popularity. This change consolidates some of the signals so we can rely on signals we can compute in realtime, rather than signals that need to be processed offline. This eliminates redundancy in our systems and helps to ensure we can continue to detect spiking topics as quickly as possible.
Once you assume that because these updates appear in the same document they must be related, the changes taken together seem to hint at refining systems for making search more responsive. The updates appear to touch on three different systems: methods for finding new content, methods for assessing a document’s changes over time and a method for identifying emergent search trends.
Building a Better Google News Service
To leave assumptions behind and take a flying leap towards baseless speculation, obviously Google intends to create a search experience capable of responding to spiking topics by altering the temporal range of the content in its results. A search query like ‘Brisbane Floods’ would be a good example.
Spiking Search Query
Prior to January 2011 the best results for this query would have been historic references, most likely to the 1974 floods. To be relevant and useful, the content would not have to be recent, and the results would not need to be temporally sensitive. In January 2011 that changed, and as the Brisbane River broke its banks, the 1974 floods were no longer the most relevant result for that query.
Anecdotally in Brisbane the sites in the SERPs did change in response to new information being generated, and to social media activity around certain sites driving link creation. This process occurred over a few days as the older content was replaced by news and a few purpose-built pages responding to the event. Imagine if Google could respond faster, and on a more personalised level?
Speculation isn’t very useful
However that is just speculation, and what’s worse, speculation in a vacuum. Google is on record saying it makes hundreds of changes to their search products every year, and just because a number of these changes happen close to each other in time does not mean they are related. It is worth reading Google’s blog post, even just to be aware of some of the more specific updates, such as the International Update to Shopping Snippets and improvements to their flight search product.
However, concluding that link building has changed forever on the basis of one vague paragraph of text, or concluding that Google will become a responsive news service, might be reaching a little too far.
