Pieces are not dreamed up by trained editors nor commissioned based on submitted questions. Instead they are assigned by an algorithm, which mines nearly a terabyte of search data, Internet traffic patterns, and keyword rates to determine what users want to know and how much advertisers will pay to appear next to the answers.
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The Answer Factory: Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell Media... - 8 views
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To appreciate the impact Demand is poised to have on the Web, imagine a classroom where one kid raises his hand after every question and screams out the answer. He may not be smart or even right, but he makes it difficult to hear anybody else.
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But what Demand has realized is that the Internet gets only half of the simplest economic formula right: It has the supply part down but ignores demand. Give a million monkeys a million WordPress accounts and you still might never get a seven-point tutorial on how to keep wasps away from a swimming pool. Yet that’s what people want to know.
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That’s not to say there isn’t any room for humans in Demand’s process. They just aren’t worth very much. First, a crowdsourced team of freelance “title proofers” turn the algorithm’s often awkward or nonsensical phrases into something people will understand: “How to make a church-pew breakfast nook,” for example, becomes “How to make a breakfast nook out of a church pew.” Approved headlines get fed into a password-protected section of Demand’s Web site called Demand Studios, where any Demand freelancer can see what jobs are available. It’s the online equivalent of day laborers waiting in front of Home Depot. Writers can typically select 10 articles at a time; videographers can hoard 40. Nearly every freelancer scrambles to load their assignment queue with titles they can produce quickly and with the least amount of effort — because pay for individual stories is so lousy, only a high-speed, high-volume approach will work. The average writer earns $15 per article for pieces that top out at a few hundred words, and the average filmmaker about $20 per clip, paid weekly via PayPal. Demand also offers revenue sharing on some articles, though it can take months to reach even $15 in such payments. Other freelancers sign up for the chance to copyedit ($2.50 an article), fact-check ($1 an article), approve the quality of a film (25 to 50 cents a video), transcribe ($1 to $2 per video), or offer up their expertise to be quoted or filmed (free). Title proofers get 8 cents a headline. Coming soon: photographers and photo editors. So far, the company has paid out more than $17 million to Demand Studios workers; if the enterprise reaches Rosenblatt’s goal of producing 1 million pieces of content a month, the payouts could easily hit $200 million a year, less than a third of what The New York Times shells out in wages and benefits to produce its roughly 5,000 articles a month.
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But once it was automated, every algorithm-generated piece of content produced 4.9 times the revenue of the human-created ideas. So Rosenblatt got rid of the editors. Suddenly, profit on each piece was 20 to 25 times what it had been. It turned out that gut instinct and experience were less effective at predicting what readers and viewers wanted — and worse for the company — than a formula.
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Here is the thing that Rosenblatt has since discovered: Online content is not worth very much. This may be a truism, but Rosenblatt has the hard, mathematical proof. It’s right there in black and white, in the Demand Media database — the lifetime value of every story, algorithmically derived, and very, very small. Most media companies are trying hard to increase those numbers, to boost the value of their online content until it matches the amount of money it costs to produce. But Rosenblatt thinks they have it exactly backward. Instead of trying to raise the market value of online content to match the cost of producing it — perhaps an impossible proposition — the secret is to cut costs until they match the market value.
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57 Useful Google Tools You've Never Heard Of | College@Home - 2 views
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Docs: You no longer need desktop publishing applications installed on your computer to type out documents or create spreadsheets, you can do it entirely online with Google.
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Ride Finder: Hook up with taxi, limousine and shuttle services through this search tool which uses GPS data from vehicles in 14 US cities.
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Transit: Those taking public transportation will appreciate this mapping tool which helps users to plan a trip via the local public transportation options by using Google Maps.
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It provides easy access to images from the Hubble telescope through the Space Telescope Science Institute, allowing users to look through planets, stars, galaxies, satellites and more.
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uses satellite imagery and mapping technology to allow you to find and see any location in the world through an attractive and easy to use interface.
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SketchUp: SketchUp is a simple but effective 3D drawing tool designed for both Macs and PCs that can be a handy tool
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Web Accelerator: Make webpages load a little faster by making use of this tool. It uses data compression, prefetching of content, and shared cached data to make even slow Internet connections less painful to use.
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Base: This tool from Google is an online database in which any user can add content– text, images, documents and webpages.
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Orkut: This social networking service used to be invitation only, but since 2006 has been open for anyone to join.
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Shared Stuff: Google offers this free Web page sharing system that allows users to save and share pages they find interesting on the Web with others.
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Talk: You may have heard of Google Talk but did you know that it’s not only a chat tool but can be used for VoIP conversations as well?
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Friend Connect: This new feature offered by Google allows users to easily add social networking functionality to their sites.
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Scholar: Google Scholar provides a great way to search through the full text of scholarly literature from all fields and formats.
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allows you to enter a few items of a set into a search query and the site will try to predict other items in the set.
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Simply Google: This site provides access to all of Google’s specialized searches in one easy-to-use place.
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As Classrooms Go Digital, Textbooks May Become History - NYTimes.com - 1 views
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students who own laptops can register for “digital sections” of several English, history and science classes
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With California in dire straits, the governor hopes free textbooks could save hundreds of millions of dollars a year.