The Inevitability of Blog Outsourcing
The blog outsourcing topic has rolled along while I’ve been spending the day at the Blog Business Summit, listening to discussions on commercializing blogs. There’s now a post about it (Outsourcing bloggers in China) at CNET, which turned up a few other skeptics, and it’s looking like the Blogoriented guys are probably a hoax.
Despite that, I also think it’s inevitable that we’ll see at least a couple of real projects along these lines within a year, not aimed at simulating teenaged girls, but rather at building blog networks, filled and buzzed by creating inexpensive original content and editing search feeds that target specific niches.
David Sifry at Technorati has a good summary on the growing problems of spam blogs and fake blogs, and all the search engines are likely to make progress against what are essentially the next generation of link farms. Unfortunately, as discussed in this afternoon’s sessions on web advertising and affiliate models, if you can get traffic, there’s potential for a lot of money to be made by simple manipulations of the system, at least until the search engines improve. Content picked up by the blog search engines gets indexed immediately, leaving a way around some of the the sandboxing and other mechanisms used by Google and others, and makes profitable links visible immediately.
It’s cheap and apparently effective to implement spam and fake blogs. I’ve noticed the volume of junk e-mail is decreasing, while the number of spam blogs in search results seems to be increasing. It’s going to take cooperation among multiple parties to fix this, but everyone recognizes this as a problem, so it’s going to get better. (Here’s Mark Cuban’s take.)
I think that a follow on issue is that genuinely “original” content, in the “first author” sense, rather than in the “new idea” sense, can be probably be reliably cranked out through a well defined process. Think of something like an Indian call center or coding shop crossed with a daily news bureau, supervised by an editor who picked topics with some guidance from Wordtracker, Google and others. You’d get low cost, original writing, around an editorially consistent, topically relevant set of themes, and perhaps even with some interesting domain expertise, all tuned to be informative and keyworded to be search engine friendly.
Many of the same processes used at Wipro, Infosys, and other software and BPO outsourcers could be adapted to this application. Why cheat the search engine rankings when you can just reduce the cost of production and actually receive ranking benefit when the search engines get better at filtering for contextually better results and get rid of the “really fake” blogs? The Weblogs Inc blog network model seems to be working so far - Jason Calcanis says they’ve just hit a $1M annual ad revenue rate. Reducing the content production costs can’t hurt. I’m sure they could apply some of these ideas, if they haven’t already, and if they don’t, some other new blog network will certainly try.
This approach to farming out the process-oriented writing tasks should apply equally to a number of periodicals, such as magazines and newspapers. The difference between the news content in many newspapers is already often just the local editor’s preferences on the AP or Reuters newsfeeds and what fit in between the committed ad inches.
I don’t think this sort of blog or content outsourcing would be “bad” or “evil” in the sense of creating lower quality content, at least in some topic domains, since a pool of skilled professionals already exists offshore, and is growing rapidly. If you got a good editor in place, it might even improve the overall quality of online content. It’s not misrepresentation, unless you tried to pass off your authors as being something they’re not. But I wouldn’t even bother with attempting the nuances of local US culture with a staff of offshore bloggers, despite the availability of cultural indoctrination programs they run call center trainees through. That would work about as well having US bloggers cover cricket or Bollywood gossip or Korean K-pop singers for their respective local audiences.
This seems to leave American pop culture as a secure niche for a while. Unfortunately, I’m incredibly bad at celebrity gossip. Although, now that I think about it, I did meet Cher once at her house in Malibu…
Putting on my evil genius hat, here’s a hypothetical approach for building an astroturfing blog empire, filled with posts from simulated teenaged (18-35) girls. Start by extracting common phrases, topics, and contexts from some LiveJournal and MySpace blogs. Next, build some auto-blogging agents resembling Weisenbaum’s Eliza program crossed with some modern chatterbots. Finally, set it loose on LiveJournal, Xanga, and MySpace and have it start forming its own blogrings and online cliques, responding to filtered inputs from comments, selected feeds, and topical news, biased for the current hot keywords and with statistically plausible content and linkage…any Emacs Lisp and SQL hackers want to take this on?
See also: Outsource your Blog, Reasons I Still Read Newspapers
Update 08-19-2005 12:32 - some discussion at My Heart’s in Accra
Update 08-27-2005 00:10 - See also Goofy algorithm generates web page about “Prostitute Phobia” (at BoingBoing), which comments on this site, which is one of a collection of automatically generated pages.
Tags: blog, outsourcing, blogging, media, advertising, publishing, marketing, india, china, business, bbs05, blogbusinesssummit
September 14th, 2005 at 2:18 pm
My company Ideologic LLC is already doing Business Blog Outsourcing for few of our clients here in USA. This is one type of outsourcing that you need not send outside the country necessarily. Good writers are not difficult to find locally. My targets clients are smaller businesses who can use low cost search engine marketing via blogs.
May 11th, 2007 at 1:59 pm
Hong Nguyen
English 126-0138
May 10, 2007
The Truth Behind Outsourcing
The United States has always been a country with many opportunities and a lot of wide range jobs available. However, as the time passes by these opportunities seem to be diminishing with the constant hiring of oversea workers. The outsourcing market is growing tremendously and expected to grow even more in the next couple of years. Companies are planning to outsource both low end and high end jobs in the United States and offshore. This new cheaper workforce seems to be a far better advantage for employers and companies seem to be taking advantage of the situation. The increase in oversea hiring means a lot of change for the economy, for the better or the worse it remains a mystery. While outsourcing provides companies with lots of benefits for some it’s considered to be a hazardous threat. Only the truth can settle this matter and by analyzing evidence we can come to the right conclusion.
Though outsourcing seems to have its advantages it may possibly be lies to cover up the truth. Outsourcing jobs is used by companies mainly to cut the cost of operations. Companies outsource in order to compete with other companies and at the same time make a profit (Otterman,2007).Profit and money is everything and there is no denying it. Some may argue that outsourcing is good because it creates cheaper goods but it only provides producers with the choice to sell cheaper goods. Given the opportunity companies don’t do what’s best for the consumer; they do what’s best for them, making profit. Though jobs are outsourced and goods are made for less money, products still remain relatively high because companies can. Outsourcing jobs can also mean lost of jobs for many Americans especially for those in the high-tech field. (Cyber Futuristics, 2007). According to Denise Dubie reporter for Network World, one of the biggest challenges employers face is finding qualified employees. Since this is such a difficult task they have to turn to oversea workers. Not only do oversea workers provide a bigger employment pond for companies they are cheaper too (Dubie, 2007). This however seems to be merely one of the excuses given by companies to excuse themselves for acting on their own behalf. Edwin J. Feulner, Ph.d says “The United States has the best educated, most productive, most adaptive workforce in the world.” If the United States provide educated, productive, and talented people, what more can companies ask for? Companies claim to outsource due to a small workforce available but here they are laying off people who are well- qualified for these jobs and ignoring the many others to outsource to foreign counties where education is a minimum and skills are lacking (Gollsby, 2007).According to Dubie 500 of the fastest growing North American companies turned to offshore services and 55% intend to move their work overseas (2007). This possibly could be due to the cut in cost rather then the search for talented workers. Though corporations seem to be thinking their getting a deal by hiring these offshore workers some companies who have tried regretted their decision. A company who outsourced many operations to India found how hard and costly it was to communicate with their workers. They also concluded that Indians are not productive and at times took 2 weeks to get a job done when it could’ve been done in 2 days in the United States by a skilled worker (Bartlett, 2006).
Business people, companies, corporations factories are driven by money, achievement, and fear. They fear failure, lost of power, and appearing weak. They are competing with one another and by being in competition they ignore the rest. They don’t care about employees, or consumers. They make quick decisions without considering all the details which result in long run failure, what they feared. Outsourcing at first glance seems the way to go due to smaller wages but the long run effects can be damaging. Companies who plan inefficiently risk heavy loses and customer dissatisfaction (Goolsby, 2007). Customer dissatisfaction can mean lost in sales, and profit which can destroy the whole concept of outsourcing jobs to begin with
Edwin J Feulner in an article titled “The Truth about Outsourcing “ asserts that even though employees are losing their jobs due to outsourcing they can easily find another one, often times at a higher salary. After doing research this seems very vague because