Recently I’ve taken note that a number of media outlets have spoken up against mindless regurgitation of content. The most recent example is this complaint on the louisgray blog.
The most dumbed-down, and perhaps most honest, version of this phenomenon is the rampant automation of reblogging or reposting of content. I’m guilty of this myself: I feed my Google Reader favorites through friendfeed and tumbr- who knows where the rabbit hole ends. Less honest is to regurgitate or paraphrase someone else’s thoughts without a mention or a link-back to the original author.
Naturally, the problem gets back to everyone. Take my Google Reader for instance. I subscribe to a number of blogs, aggregators, etc. On top of this, Google Reader shows me what my friends share. On any given day, I may read a good post directly from an author, then see it again several times via various aggregators, and then one last time if friends “like” it. Not to mention all the “copy-cat” content that gets spawned shortly thereafter and that is also fed back to me.
The result is that my Reader quickly gets overwhelmed with noise; before you know it, I am “Google Reader bankrupt.”
Ultimately I think the solution will rest in the advancement of the very systems and tools that allow for this data overload. If you Google “Oil Spill” today you will get to a screen that showcases news articles and also lets you click for “More like this.” To state the obvious, this means that Google’s algorithms are able to categorize by similarities. Google Reader doesn’t appear to have the same algorithm as yet. Nevertheless, I see tools like Google Reader advancing to incorporate similar filters that could eliminate duplicate content and either hide or de-prioritize copy-cat content. I would be surprised if this was not already in the works somewhere.
I see part of the garbage-content problem as being rooted in the fact that most content sites are still very much silos, and everyone is trying to drive traffic in-house. This is changing.
Take for instance the “More like this” link. When you click on it you have the ability to sort by date, a useful feature that lets you read content in the order it was generated to follow the progression of a story in chronological order. As more stories get linked back to each other, another great feature that I would like to see is a sorting by chorological link-back. This feature would allow you to follow the evolution of ideas. This would be great because today it is really difficult to capture how an author’s post influences another or how it fosters creativity in general. I would posit that blog posts are often real discussions. They are not appreciated as such because, again, each blog is a silo. There are a number of companies tapping at the door of these issues. Disqus, for example, does a great job at opening the discussion potential of blogs. The problem, however, is that blogs remain silos and the discussion that disqus fosters is largely trapped in a single blog ecosystem. Food for thought: why can’t a blog post be a blog comment at the same time? Why can’t it exist simultaneously in both formats? Why does a discussion have to exist solely in one author’s blog? This, I think would be a great additional feature for disqus – the choice of having a comment be automatically posted on your own blog. Such a comment would be akin to a spore, spreading the discussion to another blog ecosystem thus growing the audience and participant body.
These types of advancements in technology intelligence will render the garbage-content problem obsolete and will make for a much richer media experience. I don’t’ see myself as Google Reader bankrupt in the future.
