Content, content and more content

Just after my last post - the first week of August - a long awaited trip to Park City had finally arrived, a vacation of sorts. While I had all intentions of continuing to refine my new biz plan and the financial, I honestly planned on taking a week and not looking at industry events.

But there it was - almost everyday - story after story in WSJ, NYTimes and USAToday of how the lack of analytical understanding of relevancy and user intent was limiting revenue generation of some of the worlds most revered companies. These were not exactly the words the the press was using but this is exactly what they were describing.

It is absolutely amazing to see how blind top tier content creation companies let alone 2nd and 3rd tier companies are when it comes to adequately distributing their content while simultaneously increasing relevant and revenues with the advertisements they place on their pages.

Even more amazing is how many of these companies do not try to implement technologies that can help them "see" so they can be smarter and create higher value for themselves and their advertisers. Instead, they just hand over their content and ad inventory to outside companies - large and small - and trust them to 'maximize' the revenue generated from each page. At the same time many of these ad companies are creating competitive products and services thereby increasing their own margins and cannibalizing the revenue from the very companies looking to them for an answer.

As frustrating as this is to me, this is the opportunity for a "smart" technology to come along and help these struggling content creators... just need to get the team organized!

Conetent: Good Stuff versus Who Cares

Over the past few days as I've looked at various online content generating initiatives - both professionally generated and that created by the every day users - it's really sunk in how little, if any, governance is applied to content being posted as factual information.

Historically we've trusted our various media institutions to govern what we consume and believe to be factual statements. After all, the big media companies aren't biased and they would only provide us facts - right?

Fast forward to 2008 - Due to the ubiquity of easy to use publisher platforms we are faced with a growing number of consumer publishers - those everyday people that look for and consume information and then turn around and publisher their own views on what they've consumed. These people (obviously I am one of them) are creating more content than is realistically being consumed.

It is an all out explosion of content - but is it any good?

While I do have some ideas on how to self govern ourselves (i.e. Wikipedia & Knol), it is a large problem as this explosion of content is influencing real people's positions by feeding them opinionated at best or false at worse information and then it spread to others.

I've come to the conclusion that despite my ideas or others to self govern ourselves, what is ultimately going to happen is the market will get BIG, full of self proclaimed experts just as it is doing now and then shrink as people realize/decipher between good resources and those blowhards that are really witting Editorials and gossip gab.

But unfortunately it is going to take many years.

If there is a point to this entry it is merely an effort to call to one's attention that you should proceed with caution as you read information online and try to find multiple references before "buying what they are selling".