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Archives for March 2006

Red alert — content generator overload

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Lee Gomes of the Wall Street Journal had a funny piece yesterday about the “content mills” that are, uh, repurposing — read, pirating (or, in the case of Wikipedia and the like, reusing what’s free) — other people’s writing, in order to create pages that can be festooned with Google text ads and turned into cash.

There are different shades of gray on this spectrum. Some companies are building honest businesses by paying all comers small sums for articles that they know, in advance, will generate a certain level of Google-word money. Mesothelioma, anyone? (This rare form of asbestos-caused cancer has long been one of the best-paying Google words, because lawyers who represent asbestos victims are willing to pay big for leads.) Other shyster-entrepreneurs are simply paying writers to massage other people’s words just enough to pretend that the work is original, then reposting it. Gomes hooked up with someone from the latter group, and his account of conscientiously trying to deliver actual original copy to a patron who couldn’t care less makes a diverting farce.

Gomes concludes that the real villain here is Google itself: He blames the search engine for inspiring a flood of bogus content.

  In fact, search engines are more like a TV camera crew let loose in the middle of a crowd of rowdy fans after a game. Seeing the camera, everyone acts boorishly and jostles to get in front. The act of observing something changes it. Which is what search engines are causing to happen to much of the world’s “information.” Legitimate information, like articles from the WHO, risks being crowded out by junky, spammy imitations.

But Google the search engine is not the culprit; Google the ad machine is. The shysters wouldn’t be cranking out the HTML if it weren’t for AdSense, the Google text ads that publishers can plaster over their pseudocontent. Though AdWords — the keyword-based text ads that appear on Google’s own search results — are subject to a limited amount of gaming and manipulation (that Google is always trying to defeat or limit), the level of crap surrounding AdSense is far greater.

So blame Google — it deserves some. But keep the focus clear: A terrific search engine alone doesn’t make people publish acres of garbage.But put a few dollars in play and some “content providers” will do the most embarrassing things.

Yahoo: No shows

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Yahoo, having boldly proclaimed its intention to produce TV-style “Web shows” a la MSN circa 1996, thinks again. (Maybe they won’t be buying that movie studio after all.) That didn’t take long; six weeks ago Yahoo content guy Lloyd Braun was touting his shows to the Wall Street Journal.

Smart move. I guess the Webheads in the Valley gave the show-biz people in Santa Monica a crash course in how the Internet, you know, works.

Corruption’s two faces

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When the Enron and Worldcom scandals unfolded in the early years of this decade, it became clear that we were looking at two different species of corruption: let’s call them old-school and New Wave. Old-school corruption is blunt and obvious; you’d know it for what it is if you bumped into it in a dark alley, which is probably where you’d find it. Large sums of cash are moved unceremoniously from place to place; ledgers are altered; bribes land in open palms.

Worldcom, clearly, was old-school — out-and-out, prima facie fraud. Enron was something equally insidious but entirely different in form: a kind of corruption that consisted largely of deliberate and elaborate bending of arcane rules, game-playing in largely incomprehensible gray areas of accounting rules and laws, and fabrication of sham institutions to give these activities bureaucratic shelter — all orchestrated with a ruthless goal in view, but all pursued under rationales that at least appeared plausible to the casual spectator.

As today’s political corruption scandals roll out in depressing sequence, it’s clear that they, too, divide along these old-school/New Wave lines. Here, the outline of the Duke Cunningham Congressional bribery scandal — which would make wonderful opera bouffe if it weren’t our money and security on the line — is pure old-school. Check out, for instance, this report from TPM’s Daily Muck with the latest from Cunningham’s prosecutors: The congressman had deals with a couple of defense contractors who were kicking back part of their 800-percent profit as bribes to him, and when the Pentagon was slow in paying them, he’d “browbeat” Defense officials to move their butts, and demand that they be fired if they failed to comply.

But Tom Delay, he’s plainly a New Wave sort of crook — the Andy Fastow of the Republican Party. He played in the nether reaches of election law and congressional process the way Enron’s execs and accountants danced beyond the margins of finance law and corporate governance rules. As dramas of naked political power-flexing, patronage-wielding and election-influencing, they are riveting; we could admire Delay’s sheer creative chutzpah if we weren’t still suffering from its consequences.

With old-school crooks, exposure is a straightforward matter of accumulating enough evidence to obtain a confession. New Wavers are tougher to nail, because they’ll always be able to argue that their aggressive interpretation of the letter of various rules and laws wasn’t technically illegal. So what if their actions involved phantom companies, slush-fund transfers, or unprecedented mid-decade redistricting? Do the laws and rules explicitly say this stuff is illegal? Can you prove it? All of it? What if they were just being creative and entrepreneurial? If you prosecute them, aren’t you just telling businesspeople and politicians to stop dreaming of new ways to do things?

When you hear that argument, pinch yourself if you start to succumb, and remember: it’s just an apologia for the same old corruption in a clever new guise.