The new rules of content are simple:

• The content must be SEO-friendly.
• The content must be available for every topic imaginable.
• The content must be cheap to produce.
• The content must generate ad buys.

Yahoo’s purchase of Associated Content last week, for a whopping $90 million, highlights the growing race for ad dollars going on among the Internet’s biggest players. The best way to get those ad buys is to offer companies highly-targeted content that will attract a niche audience. The best way to get the most esoteric content in the shortest amount of time is to prioritize quick and dirty efficiency over expression.

The result is something akin to an online industrial revolution, with content sweatshops churning out cheap, choppy, but sufficient bullet point lists and how-to videos. Like most physical factories, the emphasis is on making money, not producing quality work.

Sure, the content has to hold up, but it’s far from thoughtful exploration. The fact that I’ve been working on this post for about four hours (I wrote the end first) would make me worth less than $4 an hour to Demand Media.

Demand Media advertises itself as the leader in social media, claiming:

“Every day Demand Media makes it possible for people to create and publish valuable content, for millions of Internet users to engage around passionate communities, and for thousands of websites to grow with social media features their audiences want.”

The idea of “social media” has been through more mad libs than I can count, but there are still surprises to be had by the liberties taken at its expense. Media is media, but affixing the word “social” implies that there is some emotion, some modicum of unprovoked human expression involved.

Or it seems it should be that way. Phrases like “the death of journalism” have been thrown around for years, but if you were looking for the smoking gun, here it is.

The goals of companies like Associated Content and Demand Media are light years different than those of the Star Tribune or Los Angeles Times. Both need money to survive, but while content factories produce useful content solely to sell ads, we have to believe that most writers at these newspapers still want to tell a story.

But it takes too long, and it’s too inefficient. Major newspapers across the country now rely on this Sam’s Club model to fill the empty space by writers they could no longer afford to keep on staff. In turn, many of these writers now find themselves absorbed into the very system that is working hard to replace their brethren, churning out 30-minute articles and videos on how to draw horses or steep green tea.

We want content, we want it now and we want it pre-digested.

In 2009 Wired covered Demand Media in depth, dubbing it “The Answer Factory,” and the nickname is scary accurate.

Content Sweatshops, Algorithm-based Ideation

Companies like Demand Media employ a huge number of freelancers, producing content in bulk for pennies per piece. These are the “how-to’s” you find on sites like eHow, and each one pays about $15 if you’re a writer – $20 if you’re a videographer. You get paid even less to proofread.

The process is more machine than human, a journalistic terminator of sorts – intent on subjugating search results through esoteric optimization and algorithm-based imperialism, while struggling to portray a human facade.

Contributors operate more like factory workers than content creators, fitting blocks of information into prescribed patterns without much creative flexibility, racing towards mindless efficiency. It’s not a commentary on the creators themselves, but the system they’ve been left to create within.

With Demand Media, it’s all about the idea-generating algorithm. Computers analyze user searches, ad buys and competitor content to find holes in the material that’s online – ranging from semi-general (kayaking) to very specific (origami frogs) – and spit out keywords.

Another algorithm then determines what context these keywords might be queried within and regurgitates a meatier, but jumbled lump of search-optimized  phrases terms. Finally, a human editor picks this up and, for 15 cents, turns the mess into something resembling a title.

Then it’s creation, editing, plagiarism-checking and posting. Someone, somewhere, will now be able to find a tailored article detailing the fine art of constructing a pirate hat out of construction paper. Perhaps they will also click on an ad for a trailer of the upcoming Pirates of the Caribbean while they’re at it.

And it’s not just about content that people will want to read – it’s about content that advertisers will want to pay to have their ads placed on. Most of the money generated by these companies comes from PPC-based ad buys. To get make more money, you’ve got to have more ads – to get those ads, you have to have content to attach it to.

So the machine continues to turn. In the near future Demand Media hope to produce one million pieces of content a month. Sooner or later, traditional journalism will seem like John Henry racing the steam engine.

Mass Production Gone Mainstream

Demand Media isn’t alone in this quest for content, either. AOL’s Seed system, introduced last year, operates in a similar fashion, and Yahoo’s recent purchase of Associated Content highlights the search engine’s desire to join the fray.

In light of Yahoo’s recent partnership with Bing, the move makes sense. With Bing handling search and Yahoo taking over the ad network, it’s no wonder Yahoo is looking for ways to produce more advertising revenue. For $90 million, Yahoo now has a stable of 350,000 contributors shelling out content based on algorithms designed to maximize ad buys.

Even Google has dipped a toe, using video content from Demand Media to pursue more ad buys on YouTube. Google also powers ads on sites like eHow, so while they’re not yet in the content game they seem more than content to dine at its table.

For those of us who still like our answers with inflection, there are places to go, but how far are you willing to dig. Are you prepared to siphon two-three pages of Google search results to find something worthwhile?

Remember the stimulus package – that controversial, Titanic piece of legislation? Well you can thank our government, at least in part, for this leap forward on the part of GM. Way back in March, the president announced plans to reward advances in battery technology for the support of electric vehicle proliferation in the states.

General Motors was one of many companies that applied for some of the $2 billion+ in federal funding under the Electric Drive Vehicle Battery and Component Manufacturing Initiative.

The money wasn’t just to boost hybrid vehicles in the United States, but to boost our competitiveness in the “battery wars.” Most of the batteries that power your phone, laptop, and various mobile devices and pending tablets come from overseas. Companies like LG, in South Korea, currently hold a rather large market share. While General Motors will be using cells from LG, the actual manufacturing of the battery packs will be going on right here – or in Michigan, rather.

Just as the United States has a role to play in battery production, GM, and the Obama administration, is hoping that there are also gains to be made in the area of more efficient automobile. Having grown up on a steady diet of Buick Leasers, Oldsmobile 98s and Cadillac DeVilles, I can say without reservation that I do not equate U.S. automobiles with either efficiency or the future of driving.

That’s not to say that I don’t love Buicks – just drop by and I’ll take you for a ride in mine.

But when I think compact efficiency, I think Honda, Toyota, Hyundai, etc. However, with the exception of the Prius, most of the models rely on fuel efficiency. Battery-powered cars, while not new in concept, have yet to reach any sort of critical mass. So, cars like the Chevy Volt enter into a race that is still very much anyone’s game.

The Volt’s lithium-ion battery pack will be able to charge both on board, by way of an internal combustion engine, and externally, from a plain, old household current. This means that, just as we now plug our phones in overnight, so too may we, in the future, charge our cars while we sleep. According to Discover Magazine, that’s a good 40 miles out of 80 cents of electricity. Not too shabby!

Learn more about the Chevy Volt below.

[via earth2tech]

Farmers are using satellite views of their land for strategic management of their crops, marketing, and soil.  Strategy, no matter what you’re ‘field’, is a always a matter of perspective.

From National Geographic:

The images help the Thomases root out problems caused by Canadian thistle and other weeds, NASA adds. “They help confirm that their crops are growing at least 10 feet from the borders of a neighboring farm–required to maintain organic certification. They can also spot the telltale signs of bottlenecking in the fields—where flooding is over-saturating crops–and monitor the impact of hail storms.”

Said Thomas, “We’d have to walk our entire 1,200 hundred-plus acres on a regular basis to see the same things we can see by just downloading satellite images.”

Thomas recently began providing her farm’s coordinates to her buyers in Japan. “There’s no more ideal way I know to show how healthy our crops are to someone thousands of miles away,” she said.

Oh, didn’t you hear? Sometime ago RSS died. There wasn’t a big going away party – just a few close friends. And yet … it wanders the Web … hungry for brain.

I’m late to the party. To be fair, TechCrunchIT is not in my Google Reader and I wasn’t there when Steve Gillmor took its pulse. Rather I was alerted to the fact that RSS had passed by way of Twitter. (case in point?) Sam Diaz concurred last week – RSS is, indeed, dead.

In fact, it seems like everywhere you look, things are dropping. I keep waiting for someone to tell me that social media is dead – and then what’s next? No media at all? Will we transmit thoughts and perception telepathically through Motorola chips implanted in our brains?

It seems like an ongoing trend to declare things in absolute statements. These are a few I’ve heard over the last year:

• Teens don’t tweet.
• Newspapers are dying.
• Public relations is dead.
• Kill your blog.

I could go on. I think it’s a mistake to relegate things that are no longer the trending norm to eternal slumber. Plus, more often than not, it’s simply not true. Teens do tweet – they’re just not the homo superior of the realm. Newspapers, as a whole, aren’t dying; the medium is becoming sustainable in the new information economy. Public relations isn’t dead – it’s certainly due for a shift in perspective, but it’s very much alive.

At this stage in communications, things are changing so fast, we don’t have time to see the gradient shift. The next hot item is just stepping out of the car and something needs to clear space on the runway. It seems like we’re no longer content to watch things play out. We have to kill off yesterday’s headlines so that we can herald tomorrow’s.

Plus, the age of Twitter is very much the age of catchphrases. “Microblogging is emerging as a viable, and worthwhile, form of expression and networking,” doesn’t quite roll off the tongue like “blogs are dead.” Plus, the latter leaves room for a link to the full article and any subsequent re-tweets.

I’m not saying that this is a bad thing. I love Twitter … most of the time. Best of all, I have the option of skimming in Twitter and then doing a deeper diver later into my reader. I also check certain sites, friends’ Delicious accounts, etc.

I just don’t think that Real Simple Syndication is dead. It’s been tweaked, torqued, twisted and integrated. I think the main idea, and correct me if I’m wrong, is that we no longer rely soley on our Web aggregators to inform us. Well, yeah, we have a few more options. That doesn’t mean that RSS died, it’s just not the only player on the field.

Collective Soul just released their eighth album, but I still take the time to listen to “Shine” and “Pretty Donna” – they’re just part of a steadily growing playlist.

At most, I think we can say that certain functions of RSS have been adapted and customized to fit other formats. The future of social media, newspapers, public relations and so on and so forth isn’t death, but integration and adaptation. We don’t have to predict the future, because it’s constantly shifting – and it won’t be the same for everyone.

Some of us will abandon RSS for Twitter. Others will use both. Perhaps some will just use RSS. Or maybe some new tool will come along that combines the best features of everything and then we’ll all use that?

Isn’t that what Google Wave is supposed to be?

Announced in May, and recently available to some Apps users, Google Wave seems to be a jack-of-all-trades for communications. Is it a messenger, a mailbox, document sharer, collaboration tool, project dashboard … all of the above? But it enters the picture with a basket instead of a scythe. It’s not here to kill AIM or Twitter or e-mail – it’s here to take the best of relevant technologies and integrate and adapt them.

Evolution is constantly going on, but we don’t have to qualify things in absolutes. Remember, video did not kill radio – radio went online.

Historically, tough economic times have catalyzed surges in innovative thinking - Hewlett Packard and Polaroid were formed after the Great Depression, MTV came close on the heels of the recession in the 1980′s, and Apple’s iPod (developed during a sharp decline in sales and margins of consumer electronics in 2001) joined the “pantheon of game-changing innovations born of hard times, alongside Depression-era breakthroughs such as nylon and the jet engine.” (HBR, July/Aug. 2009) If history repeats itself, the current economic downturn is the perfect storm of opportunity for innovation.

The rustling in the bushes is all there – at the 2009 International Consumer Electronics Show, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer suggests that, “Companies and industries that continue to pursue innovation during tough economic times will achieve a significant competitive advantage and position themselves for growth…” … And, “… companies investing countercyclically in R&D (biz-code for innovation) during downturns tend to outpace their competitors on the upswing.” (HBR)

What all this means is, between random jolts from the Federal Reserve and the pitch and yaw of consumer confidence, companies and industries around the world are rifling through drawers, combing executive profiles, and making the mad dash into the ethers in search of both survival and triumph in the huge pot of gold at the end of the Next Big Innovation. Suddenly, the fluffy and elusive x-factor of creativity/innovation/design has become the imperative “it-force” behind economic recovery and prosperity. From Washington to Wall Street, everyone is using the “I” word, rushing into the vortex with new takes on how to pin down and quantify innovation.

Dev Patnaik, founder and chief executive of Jump Associates, a Silicon Valley growth strategy firm (clients include Nike, Target, and Hewlett-Packard) discusses the underpinnings of innovation in this month’s Fast Company, ”Forget Design Thinking and Try Hybrid Thinking.” Fast forward to his point, Patnaik suggests that there is a unique role that designers and their skill-set/way of thinking can play in making everything — products, services, experiences, and industry-specific entities such as finance, education and government — better.  He then pushes beyond that thought to propose that something bigger is going on in the minds of successful innovators:

“… something bigger is going on, more powerful than the adoption of a single school of thought. The secret isn’t design thinking, it’s “hybrid thinking “: the conscious blending of different fields of thought to discover and develop opportunities that were previously unseen by the status quo …”

We’re not talking about “multi-tasking” here … True hybrid thinkers (you know who you are) traffic in the cracks between traditional areas of expertise and are able to ”connect the dots between what’s culturally desirable, technically feasible, and viable from a business point of view.”  The new face of innovation demands that we “see the world through multiple lenses and draw meaning from seemingly disparate points of data.”

According to Patnaik, “hybridity” matters now because the problems we need to solve are too complex to be handled by any one skill-set. Gone are the good old silo days where depth in a single field trumps breadth in multiple areas. Audiovox design executive Lou Lenzi asserts that those who want to innovate, must be “one part humanist, one part technologist, and one part capitalist.” 

Well, “hybrid thinking” might be a catchy modern phrase, but it isn’t a new concept. In the spirit of “Everything old is new again,” hybrid thinking can march to the back of the line behind lava lamps, lime green and liberal arts.  Two words for Dev: 1. da; 2. Vinci.

*What kind of currency are you going to put the meters in? If Ryanair chooses the euro, they’re leaving out the UK: a huge portion of their market.

*How much are you going to charge? Will it eventually cost extra if you want the door locked?

*What happens if you don’t have any change? Will you then have to endure the humiliating experience of demanding of the fellow sitting next to spare a euro or you’ll simply pee in your chair?

Right, so we live in a world where everything has a price, but it’s hard to know where to draw the line. Using the bathroom is a very personal and regular part of one’s life.  It seems like a human rights violation to be depriving someone of,  or charging  for that privilege. Next, there will be an Oxygen Fee tagged onto our ticket price.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Ryanair.  As an avid, albeit poor traveler, Ryanair is my saves-the-day airline for cheap flights and European jet-setting. I’ll give up my feet space, I’ll surrender being trendy for the sake of only taking a carry-on, and I’ll even pack my own lunch, but I won’t put a price on my dignity.

This is John Paget‘s award-winning video for the Congress for New Urbanism. Paget lays out his argument that while urban sprawl is designed to fail, new urbanism is a model that is built to last. In addition to his suggestion to keep our personal living spaces condensed, Paget should also recognize that it is important to look at our building methods on a large scale. Aside from the housing market,  businesses can begin to set the example by requesting sustainably designed structures for their companies. They may not be able to cut corners on the size of their manufacturing plants, but they can definitely cut social and environmental costs.

My dad is the owner of Sage Structures, a sustainable construction company in Madison, WI, and he has made a career  in tilt-up concrete construction. Consequently, I have been receiving environmental build lectures since I was a little kid. Especially in a climate like the Midwest, where winters can reign brutally cold and summers are unbearably humid, the quick heating and cooling capabilities of a concrete building can make a huge difference for a large building. Green Concrete, a division of the National Ready Mixed Concrete Association, also highlights the many other sustainable aspects of concrete buildings. They are much more durable than metal manufacturing buildings, they reduce energy costs by as much as forty percent, and concrete is made of air, cement, water, sand, and gravel – elements that are available locally most everywhere.

Due to its accessibility in the construction realm, a push towards concrete builds seems would be an easy first step in sustainability for larger businesses. For even more architectural ideas, check out Blaine Brownell’s publication, Transmaterial: A Catalog of Materials That Redefine Our Physical Environment. He takes an innovative approach to design-build by using an array of unorthodox materials from coconut palm to” sonic fabric.” Pretty cool stuff!

Do you want to add a little more meat to your resume? Try handing out your business cards in beef jerky. A carnivore’s delight to networking, MeatCards provides custom made beef jerky business cards via a 150 Watt CO2 Laser Beam. No joke. Their website simply states, “these business cards have two ingredients: Meat and Lasers“, with the added disclaimer that “MeatCards do not fit in a Rolodex because their deliciousness cannot be contained by a Rolodex.” Is this for real? Yes. Can you eat the business cards of your competitors? Not recommended. The guys behind MeatCards assure that their product is edible, but they make no promise of it being palatable; due to legal implications, they don’t plan to market it as such.

Nonetheless, it is an interesting concept. I feel like their target market may be somewhere between the avid outdoorsmen and the die-hard rodeo rider, but anyone keen on standing out from the rest could probably be served well by a MeatCard. Who cares if you get a call back for an interview because your contact information smells like Mesquite BBQ? You still made it to round two!

And why do I get the feeling these cards were designed by a bunch of stoners? The conversation probably started with, “Dude, what if the whole world was made of beef jerky?” Upon agreeing this would be a good idea, they decided to start small – with the business card, but full-blown hickory-smoked venison resumes are likely what’s next. (Or maybe that’s just the Wisconsinite salivating in me).  I can just hear PETA starting up their cannons for this campaign, but I got to give props to MeatCards for adding some flavor to the workplace.

Obviously, competing companies are not always going to be keen on working together, but conclusive research on product sustainability can be used by more than one industry.  The example that Agnes Mazur gives on the WorldChanging blog is that of a truck tire manufacturing company using Nike research on maximizing the efficient of air pressure in sneaker design and applying it to truck tires. This type of collaboration, with some consideration for free market competition, can save a lot of time and money. It also has great potential to accelerate the sustainability movement, which is good news in a world where it is increasingly evident that our carrying capacity has already been reached. Check out the informational preview here: Green Xchange