Group warns of blog 'content mills'

A small trade group called the Internet Content Syndication Council (ICSC) has been circulating a document since late May--highlighted Tuesday in an AdWeek article--to drum up industry concern about "content mills," a fast-growing sector of the digital media business that publish loads of cheap, fast stories (mostly created by low-paid freelancers) that rank high in search engine results, and run ads against them.

Content mills like Demand Media, AOL's Seed.com, and Associated Content (freshly acquired by Yahoo) say they're streamlining the creation of print and multimedia content up to the speed of the Digital Age, filling up holes in the Web with new, often very niche-oriented material. But they have also unleashed a bogeyman of a business model onto the Web, with many journalists and media outlets claiming that their craft is getting cheapened, perhaps fatally so.

For more of this story, read Will blog posts get stamps of quality? on CNET News.