But stay tuned, we’ll be back very soon (right after DEMO) to let you know what all of you have been thinking about for the last couple of weeks.

Sincerely,

Primal Thought Networkers

Primal recently launched its semantic synthesis platform and thought networking products for consumers.  Thought networking leverages software assistants that automate the time-consuming tasks of sifting through pages of content, organizing information, and discovering new ideas. These assistants are powered by the users’ individual thoughts and intentions, delivering a unique, highly personalized and productive online experience. The company is now taking to the DEMO stage to launch their latest innovation.

“The DEMO Conference has been a staple of the technology industry for so many years and we are honored to have been invited to present in front of this prestigious audience of press, investors, buyers and fellow entrepreneurs,” said Primal founder and Co-President, Peter Sweeney. “DEMO has played an integral role in launching some of the most successful technology companies to-date and we look forward to helping this institution celebrate its 20^th anniversary show for the first time ever in Silicon Valley.”

Keep up with breaking Primal launch news here:

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In the past 20 years, DEMO has reviewed over 20,000 technologies and hand-picked more than 1,500 companies, positioning the event as the essential ecosystem for emerging technologies. Find out more about DEMO at http://www.demo.com.

10. cameras

9. japanese teapots

8. seo

7. semantic apps

6. divorce

5. spyworld

4. job

3. wonderbra

2. photographs

1. crochet

10. film

9. buying investment property

8. bedding

7. waterloo university

6. thoughtcloud

5. japanese teapots

4. semantic apps

3. wonderbra

2. spyworld

1. crochet

New feature this week, click on a thought, check out the Primal Page.

9. semantic apps

8. semantic

7. recipes

6. link building

5. playing

4. job

3. divorce

2. photographs

1. crochet

Primal is a new interesting semantic search assistant that has drawn my attention due to keyword-research potential. It is being promoted as the tool that builds customized pages around your search term (which is not the reason I am sharing it here)…

Beginning last year, Michael Arrington and many others identified content farms as the great disruptor, an innovation that will eventually eclipse traditional and social media. With their vast pools of cheap distributed labor, farms would glut the market with low quality content, overwhelming older approaches.

Demand Media is the lightning rod for content farming. But with the information disclosed in their recent IPO filing, it’s clear that content farms are not the great disruptive innovation that people fear.

Figure 1: Demand Media is the lightning rod for content farming
(Image source: Demand Media)

To declare an innovation truly disruptive, it needs to embody some rare qualities. High on the list are productivity and cost advantages. Disruptive innovations bring massive improvements in productivity. The cost advantages allow the innovation to permeate to entirely new markets and usage scenarios, profoundly shaking the incumbents and delighting new customers.

Content farms don’t exhibit these productivity advantages. Demand Media, purportedly among the most sophisticated farms in terms of their operational processes, are reporting underwhelming results. While farms are automating aspects of the content manufacturing process, they remain labor intensive, hand rolled operations. When compared against older models, farms are not demonstrating the productivity advantages that would be needed to qualify as a disruptive innovation.

Figure 2: Content farms employ large numbers of writers, often freelancers, to create content
(Image source: Flickr, http://www.flickr.com/photos/bcostin/366629702)

Another crucial aspect of disruptive innovations is the element of surprise. Disruptive innovations are disruptive because incumbents often deny or ignore them until it’s too late. These innovations challenge our fundamental assumptions about what’s possible. As such, it’s difficult for those outside the innovators’ circle to appreciate the impact.

Consider social media, exhibited in projects like Wikipedia, as truly disruptive. When Wikipedia began, even those close to the project didn’t think it was possible to build a world class encyclopedia through a massive collaboration of strangers and amateurs. It was only through these types of grand experiments that the disruptive implications of Web 2.0 and social media became widely understood.

Again, content farms fail to exhibit this quality of disruptive innovation. Even in the earliest days, few were denying that content farming is possible. When you parse the attributes of content farms, they are understood by all as incremental innovations. Their main differentiation is in the commercial aspects: applying distributed and collaborative approaches to content manufacturing is old news; marrying those aspects to a sophisticated commercial enterprise is the incremental innovation.

Demand Media may disagree. In their SEC filing, Demand describes their differentiation as follows:

While traditional media companies create content based on anticipated consumer interest, we create content that responds to actual consumer demand. Our approach is driven by consumers’ desire to search for and discover increasingly specific information across the Internet. By listening to consumers, we are able to create and deliver accurate and precise content that fulfills their needs.

A fine purpose, but again, on closer examination, it’s hardly disruptive. The difference between anticipated consumer interest and actual consumer demand even sounds incremental, graduating along the same axis of consumer demand. There’s certainly no aspect of fundamentally challenging our assumptions of what’s possible. Publishers have been eking out incremental improvements in market segmentation forever. Even the specific approaches of Demand Media are exhibited across the activities of domainers and arbitrageurs, even reverse engineered in the patents of the most powerful search company in the world.

Content farms like Demand Media are important. They’ve demonstrated the scale under which social media projects can be conducted as commercial publishing ventures. They’re important, but in a very incremental way. Unlike truly disruptive innovations, they won’t put content industries on a new growth trajectory.

None of this is to suggest that the content industries should rest easy. There’s certainly a fundamental disruption in content on the horizon, but you won’t find it on the farm. Rather, the magnitude of productivity advantages and assumption-challenging capabilities needed are found only in factories, in far more industrialized and automated approaches. And although most will deny or ignore their presence until it’s too late, content factories will make farming seem quaint in comparison.

We’ll look at content factories in more detail in a future post. Follow us on Twitter or subscribe to our RSS feed.

Figure 3: Content factories create machines that automate content manufacturing
(Image source: Primal, http://about.primal.com/2009/11/are-web-factories-stealing-your-job/)

10. style fashion

9. plyometrics

8. planning software

7. oktoberfest

6. council on foreign relations

5. photographs

4. henry paulson

3. foreclosure

2. seo

1. cameras

• Social Media and The Semantic Web presented in January 2010 at Web 3.0 Conference
• Venturing in the Next Web presented in January 2010 at EpCon Conference
• A Fundamental Disruption: Moving Information Architecture into the hands of Individual Consumers presented in April 2010 at IA Summit
• Thought Networking: Building the Semantic Web with Consumer-directed Semantic Networking presented in June 2010 at Semtech Conference

Peter Sweeney, Founder and Co-President of Primal, created these presentations to help people understand a new and improved way to find information on the web. Each presentation takes an in-depth look at a ground-breaking approach called thought networking. Thought networking brings the power of thinking online, and helps everyone get more from the Web. Want to know more? Check out our website and sit tight for new presentation posts!

Machines and godless industrialists are running amok, polluting the Web with low rent content. Oh the humanity! Where will we find a little human redemption in this scourge of machine generated content?

Why, “News For You!” say some industrialists. Farms and factories may find redemption by adding social and personalization enhancements. Recently Google News, that granddaddy of content factories, unveiled its most significant overhaul since its launch in 2002. Features such as a personal news stream, where consumers can edit categories and content sources to suit their needs, bring that human touch to machine automation.

Google News: News for you

“We’ll save you!” say some experts. Farms and factories may redeem themselves through partnerships with legitimate organizations. Begrudgingly, traditional news organizations are partnering with farms like Demand Media, AOL Seed, and the Examiner.com. Even Google News is bringing in a select group of human editors as partners.

While all interesting developments, this reporter remains unconvinced. Such discussions and industry moves are suspiciously old school, overwhelmingly focused on the quality of content produced. Content farms and factories are often written off as sub-human attempts at journalism. It echoes earlier criticisms of blogging and citizen journalism.

Then as now, market disruptions cannot be evaluated against old standards. Content farms and factories need a new value assessment, one that has nothing to do with journalistic quality (or the lack thereof). Quality has already grossly overshot the expectations of many consumers, which is precisely why the industry is so ripe for disruption. And however glamorous it may seem to incumbents, most consumers don’t want to edit and curate the news any more than they want to report and write it. This self-absorbed supply-side perspective is leaving traditional journalists ill equipped to adjust to these changes.

Maybe there is a deeper, more pervasive humanity supporting the rise of content farms and factories. Consumers want content that is supportive of their immediate needs. They want convenience and simplicity, to be treated as markets of one. Content farms and factories succeed in this fine grained segmentation. Any perceived shortcomings in quality are more than overcome by the convenience benefits: content that is more individually task-oriented and crafted to the readers’ unique requirements.

“Create by consuming”, says Primal. Last week, our factory took another step towards our vision of consumer-directed content manufacturing, with the release of Primal Pages. We don’t expect consumers to act like journalists, but we do want to empower them as the ultimate architects of the content they consume. Under our model, consumers direct the automated content manufacturing in real-time — as they’re consuming it — through the topics they specify and their unique click-paths.

Primal Pages: Create content by browsing

By journalistic standards, this may be publishing at its most basic. But that’s the entire point: a drive towards ultimate simplicity and convenience for consumers as consumers.

The sad truth is that most incumbents are failing to examine the true humanity in content farms and factories in the motivations of the consumers. Eric Schmidt, describing the “cultural phenomenon” that is Google, captures it succinctly: “It’s a way in which consumers consume information.”

First and foremost, consumers consume information, preferring the most tailored and convenient information possible.

Posted by Peter Sweeney