- Finally, a conspiracy theory I can believe in. Lee Gomes speculates in Forbes that the whole Vista fiasco was a marketing ploy by Microsoft to drive sales of well-received Windows 7. After all, says Gomes, the biggest selling point of many Microsoft releases is that they fix the flaws of the previous release. (Ba-da-Bing!)
- Meanwhile, Microsoft is establishing a cloud presence. It has spent $500 million for a data center near Chicago, where 400,000 servers will run on Microsoft’s Azure operating system. But to compete in the cloud, Microsoft will have to build a new business model as well, in place of those software upgrades that have served it so well.
- And nuclear power struggles to make a comeback. In a section devoted to energy, Technology Review looks at nuclear’s prospects 30 years after Three Mile Island. (No full free access.) The industry’s challenges now are mainly financial. Only large plants are economical, but their high front end price is a barrier, given the uncertain future cost of other power sources.
Archive for November, 2009
Thanksgiving Leftovers
Sunday, November 29th, 2009If Content is King, Where’s My Crown?
Sunday, November 15th, 2009Following the tech press is always instructive, frequently entertaining, and sometimes alarming. An October article by Daniel Roth in Wired, ‘The Answer Factory,’ falls into that third group.
No writer likes to hear that the divine spark of creativity can be automated, particularly if this innovation is associated with low paying work, but that is exactly what Demand Media has accomplished.
The technology itself is pretty clever. Demand Media hunts through ‘long tail’ search terms, the sort that Google sells cheap. Then it feeds them through a ‘Knowledge Engine’ that determines what other search terms they are connected with, creating a sort of tag cloud.
At this point humans are brought in to arrange the jumble into prospective titles for articles or videos that, according to the algorithm, have a potential audience out there. (Mostly how-to’s of one sort or another.) Finally Demand Media hires writers or videographers to produce an article or video that fits the title.
The work is low paid, but there is a lot of it (and Demand Media pays, quickly and reliably). One videographer has ground out a staggering 40,000 videos – in all, the company has some 170,000 videos on YouTube. In one typical day he shot ten kayaking instructional videos in a couple of hours, earning $20 for each.
Should I be offended or worried by this intellectual assembly line? I’m not. The technology is pretty cool, and it is giving a lot of writers and videographers some steady income. There’s nothing wrong with that.
The articles and videos are not the greatest, but that merely points out an ancient adage that the Internet has not completely changed: By and large, you get what you pay for. And King Content isn’t the first king to have to skimp on the crown.