According to BusinessInsider.com Demand Media (NYSE: DMD) has sent out a letter to it current writers and editiors telling them they are going to cut back on production of “content”.
“We will have fewer eHow.com assignments for the foreseeable future.”
Demand also stated that we need to make sure of a few things including “That every article is written and copy edited by a qualified professional with background, knowledge or experience in the topic.”
I thought that rule would have been in effect from day 1.
Anyway here is the full letter that was sent out:
Dear Writers and Editors,
We realize there has been recent concern around assignment availability. We know many of you rely on Demand Media Studios as a regular income source and as a way to grow your careers. For those reasons and others, we want to be as transparent as we can about the future.In just a few years, we’ve worked together to grow the eHow.com library to an astounding 3 million articles. While eHow has been the main publisher of content produced by DMS writers, we’ve also developed other writing outlets on our own properties like typeF.com and LIVESTRONG.COM as well as through partnerships like Chron.com and USAToday. With our eHow.com library already so comprehensive, we saw the opportunity to shift our focus to more targeted categories and other forms of content such as slide shows, video series and feature articles. Good examples of these new formats can be found on eHow and LIVESTRONG.COM.
None of this would have been possible without having spent so many years working with you, our writers and editors, to build our comprehensive library.
Looking ahead, as we continue to publish articles for eHow and our other sites, we want to be sure we are building on what already exists, not replicating it. This is not to say we will stop assigning standard titles in How to and Topic View format for eHow.com. But it does mean that we will have fewer eHow.com assignments for the foreseeable future.
However, we will continue to add more publishers and sections as we’ve done over the years, and ultimately the work and opportunities will grow for our best writers and editors. We are also excited to completely execute on our vision of having the most qualified writers and editors working on titles within their areas of expertise.
In order for this to happen, we need to make sure of a few things:
- That only executable, valid and unique titles make it to your Work Desk.
- That every article is written and copy edited by a qualified professional with background, knowledge or experience in the topic.
- That every article has the appropriate format and word count for the topic to be comprehensively covered.
We will also be putting additional focus on helping you grow within your fields. This means offering ways for you to gain exposure on our sites and new tools for you to promote yourself and your work. We will send additional updates and information on assignments going forward. We will also set up some new avenues for you to ask questions and offer feedback. For the time being, if you have any additional questions, please use this forum thread.Best Regards,
Demand Media Studios Team
“I thought that rule should have been in effect from day 1.”
+1
looking for quality finally? or is it the big G treatment that made them rethink their Business model?
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“The best guitar strings are those which have the highest resistance to tension. Usually, when you go to buy strings, you would only want to invest your money in the best guitar strings. In order to single out the best strings, the main thing that you should know is that the strings you buy should be from a branded company, or otherwise the local guitar strings that you buy might not be as good as you would expect them to be.
For that purpose, it is important that you locate the best guitar strings, and there are a variety of factors that would denote this decision. The first thing that you should know if you want to buy the best guitar strings is that the best strings can only be purchased at a price that would be higher than others. The best guitar strings are usually not available at any music shop, and you would have to search extensively. Most of the people have the opinion that the D’Addario strings are considered to be the best guitar strings because of the fact that these strings have a very high resistance to tension and you can easily tune your guitar to a variety of different pitches.
The one thing that you should know if you are going out to buy the best guitar strings is that they would certainly not fall in the same price bracket as normal guitar strings, because the quality of the best guitar strings shall obviously be much higher as compared to other guitar strings. Therefore, it is vital that you raise your level of budget to a higher level if you want the best guitar strings so that you can easily accommodate the elevated prices. The best guitar strings however, would give you true value for your money and you would not be disappointed if you opt for these guitar strings as your guitar would sound amazingly vibrant and you would really enjoy using these strings.
The best classical guitar strings are those that are made of nylon and are of a medium gauge, because then the classical guitar strings, as they are known, would give you amazing functionality and you would easily be able to tune your classical guitar on a variety of different pitches because the best classical guitar strings are resistant to tension and pulling for great periods of time and you would really enjoy using the best classical guitar strings.
However, the prices of the best classical guitar strings are a bit higher as compared to other guitar strings, and for that purpose it is important that if you want to buy the best guitar strings, you would have to pay a little higher than you expected to. Another thing about buying the best classical guitar strings is that they would not exert a lot of pressure on the neck of the guitar, making sure that overtime the neck doesn’t snap. You can also find the best bass guitar strings in various shops, because the best bass guitar strings are quite affordable as the bass guitar features all bass strings of a high gauge. ”
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I’ve read ehow articles that were actually worse than that.
It seems like I remember an article by them that tells you how to wake up in the morning.
How do you determine an expert for that?
lol!!!!!
well, you can bet rosenblatt made out like a bandit from the demand media scam. it worked long enough for him to cash in. just like myspace. but as we’ve been saying here for many months, this company simply has no foundation, no real technology; it a google parasite. and in time it will just fade away. google can kill it at any time.
I think one of the reasons is Google´panda update!
The days are numbered if not over for putting low quality content online and being rewarded for it. At least they’re now heading in the right direction with this message. Better late than never.
there’s an easy solution to this “quality” problem.
(although it does present its own problems… nothing is perfect)
the solution is called anonymous peer review. consult the “submission guidelines” portion of the website of your favourite scientific journal for an example of the process.
if you want to publish to a large audience, you have to be approved by an anonymous group of “qualified” people.
before you scoff at this as irrelevant, consider that this is where the google kids got their “pagerank” idea from: academic publishing.
the problem (manifested by their present day serach engine) is that they focussed on “number of citations” (backlinks in search engine lingo) as some sort of quality ranking of each published paper. in other words, if almost no one cites your published paper, it’s quality is lower than a comparable paper that is oft cited.
indeed when you search in the pre-google academic journal databases, the results get sorted by number of citations.
but to infer that this sorting order means something to every researcher is absurd.
the researcher is looking for the “right” paper to support his research. if it’s already been cited 3,000 times, sure it might be more persuasive as a citation than a paper which has been cited 3 times. but that’s not going to be the decisive factor on whether to read it in every case.
as with the search engine, the researcher is looking for something specific to develop, support, expand or refine a certain line of reasoning and there’s simply no way for the database to know precisely what that is.
the researcher cannot just look at the first paper that appears in the list. no database is that good (easy).
she has to look at the entire list. and refine her search if necessary. research takes work.
on one end of the spectrum, librarians know this. but few of them are computer nerds well-schooled in the likes of tcp/ip and http and other knowledge needed to crawl the www and do what google does. as would be expected, many of them tend to feel threatened by google, and see only the www’s worst content as being accessible, to the point where they often discourage use of search engines, with varying degrees of subtlety.
on the other end of the spectrum, you have people who think compters can solve every problem known to man. the a.i. believers like those who run companies such as google who seem to think that computers can replace human thinking and that human intent is predictable pattern. when a simple search engine produces millions in revenue (regardless of the source of that revenue) it only encourages them to believe more strongly that computers, some sort of a.i. using pattern recognition is the way of the future in terms of how people investigate and obtain information.
somewhere in the middle lies common sense.
both computers and human judgment are useful. but neither is perfect. computers as tools of discovery are relatively new and they are replaceable. however the human element in discovery is not.
on – did you write the guitar string article for Demand Media too?
It’s remarkable in favor of me to have a web page, which is helpful in support of my know-how. thanks admin