Content Farms

[Victor Steinbok]

Sounds like a web content equivalent of a puppy mill or a quarterback
stable. And "X farms" does not sound a bit unusual these day. "Mill" and
"stable" sound almost archaic, by comparison, and "stable" must involve
living things, mostly people.

The meaning is quite transparent, though. I am not entirely sure if I
heard the specific combination "content farms", but that's precisely the
point--if I /had/ heard it, I would not have found it a bit unusual and
likely would not have flagged it. And I flag quite a few things that are
"ordinary" by others' measures.

     VS-)

On 11/1/2010 12:17 PM, Federico Escobar wrote:
> A popular NYT article on a new search engine, Bekko, used a term I hadn't
> seen before, and that didn't come up in the ADS archives: "content farm".
> Here's the quote:
>
> "Blekko's search engine scours three billion Web pages that it considers
> worthwhile, but it shows only the top results on any given topic. It calls
> its edited lists of Web sites slashtags. The engine also tries to weed out
> Web pages created by so-called content farms like Demand Media that
> determine popular Web search topics and then hire people at low pay to write
> articles on those topics for sites like eHow.com."
>
> And this is the link to the NYT article:
> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/01/technology/01search.html
>
> There's also the new "slashtag" created by Bekko, which may soon start a
> profitable career as noun and verb.
>
> F.

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