Today we have a lot of mass-produced articles, "advertorials", outright plagiarism, and general trash out on the internet. Search engine optimization and hit generation is the name of the game, and the end result is everything from wasted time, deceptive advertising, baldfaced fraud, ID theft and criminal hacking.
In short, it's a jungle out there and it's costing both providers (traditional media companies) and users (us) a lot of money and grief. But we're stuck with it until the next wave of innovation hits. What will it be?
- Less reliance on generic search engines. Google, Yahoo and Bing all have the same problem, indiscriminate search algorithms and easily-gamed content controls. Today people seem to be amazingly tolerant of this. But look at it from a different angle: what would you thing of a grocery market that displayed green-painted feces next to the fresh okra in the produce section? Would you even bother to enter the door of a place like that? But every day people enter searches in Google for everything from shopping deals to serious medical advice, and tolerate sifting through the dreck and filth that is returned.
- Reputation and crowdsourcing. These are still in the process of maturing, and are subject to manipulation and gaming, but they have the potential to filter out deceptive or fraudulent content.
- Branding. Brands are still powerful psychological entities, even on the Internet. Branded content aggregators (like ZD) and advertisers are finding new models to leverage brands, but it has been relatively slow going for many. This is much more mature in the merchandising sector, where Amazon and iTunes have been able to leverage their brands effectively. The success of Amazon Markets is a "gold standard" that content suppliers need to examine closely.
Finally, a huge number of journalists have deluded themselves over the years about their value proposition. They underestimated the value of *information access* compared to the value of editing, writing, and distribution. Newsrooms had exclusive access to the wire services and reporters cultivated exclusive sources. That is all gone now. When the wire service feeds are freely available to all, and when previously reclusive sources started providing their information hosted on their own websites, that part of the value proposition was lost forever. Journalists have attempted to cover the hole with everything from "mash-ups" to "expert analysis" but honestly, they have done a poor job. Especially in the "expert analysis" area, where so many have misrepresented their credentials and experience ...
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