Lots of interesting writing at the moment about content farms, basically businesses that produce tons of crappy content, so that they can be found on search engines, get people to click through to their sites and make money from advertising. Demand Media (main site is eHow.com) and answers.com (who run wikianswers.com) come in for the most flack as they are the largest – both in the top 20 most visited websites in the US. Demand Media is reportedly producing over 4,000 pages of ‘content’ a day both are very heavily reliant on Google adwords for revenue. The main issue with content farms is that they fill up the internet with crap that is cheap and easy to produce, that generates traffic to sites whose only USP seems to be that they have lots of content. These are the ’empty calories’ of internet content.

McDonalds - a delicious burger

ReadWriteWeb have covered this better than anyone here and here for example.

Today Mike Arrington produced a very thought provoking piece in Techcrunch which talks about the McDonaldization of content here.

“So what really scares me? It’s the rise of fast food content that will surely, over time, destroy the mom and pop operations that hand craft their content today. It’s the rise of cheap, disposable content on a mass scale, force fed to us by the portals and search engines.”

Since I started writing this I also got, (like 19,ooo other people), a note from Jason Calacanis talking about Facebook’s disgraceful behaviour with respect to privacy policies.

“So why is Facebook trying to trick their users?

“Simple: search results.

“Facebook is trying to dupe hundreds of millions of users they’ve spent years attracting into exposing their data for Facebook’s personal gain: page views. Yes, Facebook is tricking us into exposing all our items so that those personal items get indexed in search engines–including Facebook’s–in order to drive more traffic to Facebook.”

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The basic problem here is simple, machines are not very good at working out what is good content and now that Google rules the world, the more content that you have, the more money you make, the more content you can produce…

The issue is likely to get worse as more sites start to produce more content as they realise what the game is. What can be done to prevent the web becoming a horrible sea of crappy link-baiting ‘content’ known to Google and thus to the rest of the world?

There is some hope, but it may be some time before machines can do the job of people.

Some people still value quality over quality. Talking to some large UK publishers recently, it struck me that many of them were not in fact that concerned about the volume of visitors to their sites. In the words of one national newspaper publisher, “We could easily double the volume of visitors overnight but we have taken a conscious decision to focus on increasing the engagement that we have with users that we can make money from”. (Or in other words, we aren’t too bothered about driving foreign traffic that we can only monetise through advertising when we can and will monetise our domestic traffic more effectively).

Sardines with blackcurrant and eucalyptus from ElBulli

Content producers need to focus on selling the value of their audience rather than the numbers of consumers. The value to advertisers of 1,000 diners is lower than the value of 1,000 diners at El Bulli or The Fat Duck. We all need to be reminded of the difference sometimes.

Computers can’t help much – yet. For Google to distinguish between content generated for keywords and link bait, it needs to develop a sort of variation on the Turing Test, the test of a machine’s ability to demonstrate ‘intelligence’.  Is there a way for a machine to identify when value is being created rather than a series of keywords stitched together for link bait? Sadly, some of the most insightful analysts don’t get heard as they get drowned out by the noise that comes from the most popular sites. Despite the potential of the long tail of content to uncover hidden gems, it rarely does in practice. If Google’s algorithms can get beyond measuring the number of links and volume of traffic to being able to measure the true value of content (and not the relatively empty calories of links and views), then behaviour would change almost overnight.

Social Media may be able to help. Startups that can help people distinguish content that they are likely to trust may be able to help reduce our reliance on content for the masses. I am far more likely to trust the views of my friends and colleagues if they like an article than because it is the most read on a general website. This is an area where we will see significant innovation in the next few years and reading habits are likely to change.

If Google, or someone else, can harness the power of the social web to help me find valuable content, I might even be prepared to pay the privacy price involved.

There are those in my home town who think that the massively over budget mis-guided busway project will become viewed as one of the most absurd vanity projects to have swallowed up over £130 million of public money. Confirmation comes that even if those in charge are not living on another planet, they at least speak another language.

From another planet or just another language?

The BLN CFO Breakfast Brainstorm (12th January, 8.00-10.30), is a high-level peer-to-peer discussion forum for individuals leading the finance function in some of the UK’s most admired companies.

Approximately 20 attendees, comprising successful CFOs and rising stars will attend under the Chatham House Rule. The programme exists to help CFOs network, learn from each other, share best practice and advance the role of the CFO in high growth companies in a relaxed, entertaining and facilitated environment.

Attendees: The BLN CFO Breakfast Brainstorms have already included some of the most experienced public and private company CFOs and FDs in the region including CFO/FD’s from Red Gate Software, NXT plc, nCipher, Xaar, Domino, Owlstone, Zeus, Sphere Medical, PriSmaStar, Atlantic Healthcare and 1spatial amongst others.

Theme: ‘Sales Directors are from Mars, CFOs are from Venus’ – making sense of sales forecasting. As well as providing a welcome opportunity for CFOs to meet and share issues informally, this event will focus on the challenges of short term sales forecasting.  Previous attendees have identified this subject as one of key interest, both from the perspective of running their current business more effectively, but also from a personal professional development perspective.

The BLN CFO Breakfast Brainstorms have been greeted by CFOs as a welcome and much needed initiative to facilitate the development of the strategic finance function in organisations – as well as offering a nice breakfast and a chance to meet fellow finance professionals.

Supporters: This initiative is supported by BDO and breakfast is provided courtesy of Red Gate Software.

Places are limited and in high demand so a prompt reply is advantageous to secure a place. If you would like to attend, please click here.

Just a teensy weensy bit self indulgent but it is almost Christmas. We are very proud of our daughter Violet who played the part of Peter Pan in her school play – despite catching a horrible cold at the weekend which put her in bed for two days. Well done Violet.

Violet as Peter Pan in the School Christmas Play 2009

Border went into administration last week so I was not sure what to make of the email I got today. Seemed very odd until I realised it was for an affiliate scheme run by the Customer Club Limited. As Borders already have my contact details, they hardly need them again. I guess the Customer Club wants the rights to use them to which is why theyare offering a £40 Wine Voucher for handing them over.

“As a registered customer of Borders, you were probably very disappointed to hear the business has gone into administration and may be closing down. We wanted to let you know that although you can’t buy online anymore, there are some great offers available in your nearest store with up to 50% off many items. If you’re not sure where your nearest store is just click here to find out and visit the store as soon as possible to pick up some fantastic bargains!

We’d also like to invite you to join Customer Club so you’ll know immediately if our circumstances change or more products become available. In the meantime, clearance items and special offers will be sent to you through the Club and you’ll also be one of the first to hear about any other savings and exceptional deals that you, as a customer of Borders, will have access to. So that we can offer you an efficient service tailored to your likes and requirements, we’d like you to complete a very short survey.

To thank you for completing the survey and as a gesture of goodwill from Borders to recognise your support we’d like to offer you a £40 Virgin Wines voucher. Just click here to complete the survey and receive your £40 Virgin Wines voucher.

Of course we respect your privacy so if you would prefer not to join Customer Club please click here and your name will be deleted from our records.

We really hope you’ll enjoy being a member of our club.

Blah, blah.”

Here is the wine voucher with the code in case you want to buy some wine without getting on another mailing list.

Borders Virgin Wine Voucher

Many of the publishing people who have come to our events this year to think about the future of publishing have been very happy to spend time away form the day today thinking about working ON their business, not IN their business. If there is one thing that gets in the way of thinking about the future, it is dealing with the present.

Will Lewis, luckiest man in publishing?

A lot of people would kill to be in Will Lewis’ Euston Office right now with a budget, a recruitment problem (100 CVs in 4 hours suggests people want to get involved – even in a recession) and the opportunity to do some fresh thinking in a business that can operate outside the prying eyes of many publicly listed publishing business. Meanwhile in the traditional world of publishing, old geezers make points about the decline of the Telegraph’s sales over 40 years – rock on!

Good luck to him.

An excellent interactive view of US Consumer Spending patterns as a percentage of household income over the past 25 years using data taken from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics produced by Flowing Data. With one or two exceptions – spending on clothing as percentage of household income has dropped by almost 50% over this time, the data shows that spending patterns are remarkably stable over this time.

US Consumer Spending Patterns

Interesting information and looking forward to the Timetric version: http://flowingdata.com/2009/12/02/past-15-years-of-consumer-spending/