never say never. if there's a topic where there wouldn't be reason for off-the-record stuff, we'd be happy to stream it. it's hard to think of something right now, possibly hiring.
I think it would be hard to predict what topic people wouldn't be candid about.
But more importantly, people change their behaviour when they're being recorded. So many speakers have been 'unprofessional' (for want of a better term) in a way that they wouldn't have been if they were recorded.
The only solution I can think of is to record them without telling them, edit out the 'candid' bits, and ask them afterwards if it could be shown publicly. But that might ruin it for later speakers, since they'd know it could happen.
I would usually agree, but the techniques of rapid learning that he introduced make a lot of sense. I've been studying neuroscience recently, and it is well known that the brain learns by linking new information with existing (metaphors and analogies) which is what the article is basically pointing out.
Those paragraphs about being out of the country and acing an exam with just an hour of prep is Tucker Max-esque sensationalism.
It probably says a lot more about the author's college than his amazing methodology.
I don't have a steady income and am trying to save.
This is the case for most college students and entrepreneurs who haven't been successful yet. These people, including myself, are who mixergy's interviews might be most valuable to. We know that the interviews are invaluable, but we don't always have the $$$ to show for it.
Even if you have no money at all, I'm still giving you at least 5 new interviews per week for free, plus up to 10 of the most popular interview for free.
Wait, you're going to allow paying members to embed your paywall-protected videos on other sites to be viewed by non-members for free? If so, could I just register mixergyfreeinterviews.com and offer your entire archive there?
The free-embed idea is definitely risky, but it might help if you require there to be a certain amount of unique text/editorial surrounding the embedded video in order to avoid abuse. Otherwise, I'm going out right now to register that domain.
that's kind of a dick move. while MixergyFreeInterviews.com might not violate the letter of what Andrew's trying to do, it certainly violates the spirit.
They're also important. If Mahalo, Demand Media, etc. all continue to do what they're doing, then they'll have built a publisher-paid paywall around most of the content online.
That is bad news for anyone who tries to get long-tail organic search traffic. It's good news for sites with great brand names, but terrible news for anyone else.
Its not fair to lump Demand in with Mahalo. Demand's business model is filling in holes with their own original content, not scraping (or "aggregating") other people's content.
AFAIK, Google views their relationship as symbiotic, not parasitic.
Demand Media does not produce high quality content. They product content that is good enough to rank (i.e. it's written in English) and unique. But they have a strong incentive to have bad content! If your article on "how to make pancakes" tells someone how to make pancakes, they close their tab and make pancakes; if it's 300 words of "original content" that makes no sense, you'll end up clicking through to another site (that has to pay for the privilege).
When you think of how many struggling freelancers use those long-tail guides to build their business ("How to shoot a commercial for a gym," or "How to write brochure copy for life insurance,"), you can see the magnitude of this problem. People who could trade their time for traffic now have to trade their money for traffic. When they're just getting started, money is harder to come by than time. The result: fewer people creating this kind of content, more of them joining organizations that pay for the traffic instead.
As I understand it, their algorithm looks for keywords with little to no competition, but at least ~$10/year potential in AdSense revenue. If they can find such a keyword, they pay someone ~$5 to write an article or make a video on the topic.
The result isn't Pulitzer worthy, but its a lot better than you're making it out to be.
Using your example, here's the wikiHow article on "how to make pancakes":
But, doesn't Demand only occupy one slot in search engines result pages for a certain keyword search? Even if Demand would create billions of articles, one for each conceivable search term, other nine spots in first 10 search results are still available for others, aren't they?
All in all, I still think this is primary a Google problem, not Demand's. They can publish anything they want, it's their right protected under free speech. It's Google which should be concerned about quality of their pages.
The #1 search result gets about 40% of all organic clicks. And Demand Media has more than one property (eHow, Wikihow, Cracked, livestrong.com). So I wouldn't be surprised if there were some searches for which Demand Media got more than half of all traffic.
You are correct about this being Google's problem. These guys exist to exploit an arbitrage opportunity: Google's search algorithm picks them, and the average searcher's which-engine-do-I-choose algorithm picks Google. In the long run, one of these things will stop being true.
There's something about their content feels fake, though. When I run across one of their pages in a search, it's not always terrible, but if I don't initially notice where I am, I sometimes get this weird feeling that the text I'm reading isn't quite right, and might not actually contain any information. It frequently has this pumping-out-words-to-fill-the-page feeling, very strongly reminiscent of high-school students' essays.
They are about "original content" in the Google sense. It's not quality content, just well-SEO'd stuff that is 1) good enough for Google to think it's grammatically-correct English, but 2) bad enough that contextual ads on the article will still get clicks.
Guys, draw a big circle around point #2 here and remember it: Demand Media understands the user psychology of CPC ads better than any Valley startup you've ever heard of. They want their content to suck because if it satisfies the users' needs then the users will not click the ads. If, on the other hand, it introduces the topic and leaves the user feeling "Where do I go next?", then the only options from a Demand Media page are either a) other worthless articles or b) CPC ads. And people choose door #2 quite frequently.
This kind of frustrates me to the extent that I compete with Demand Media (limited, but real), because there is absolutely no circumstance under which a Demand Media article is a better result for the user than a page on my site if we're in competition, but Demand Media has the economics of it nailed such that they can produce content for some genres at scales I can't possibly keep up without duplicating their core strategy (automated keyword selection -> cheap freelancer -> post without substantial quality control), pushing my related content out of the SERPs and then charging me for the clicks I would otherwise be getting for free.
The 101st request should not be allowed to negatively impact the experience of the other 100 users.
What about the 300th request? I guess it's a matter of opinion, but is it better to provide a mediocre (or worse) quality experience to all 300 users, or to provide a good quality experience to 1/3 of the users and deny the other 2/3 requests?
It would largely depend on how gracefully you degrade your service to those other 200 users. Take any game server with the concept of queues. They could (depending on the game, I know this isn't universal) take in more players than they allow at a time, but the quality would drop significantly. Instead, they give you a number, and say "You are number X in line. Please wait". While it isn't great, and is very frustrating for players, it is a decent solution.
On the other hand, you have Monopoly Street View, which launched with a massively higher number of players than they expected. The end result was a game that was playable for a very, very small group of people, and no one else even knew what was going on.
In general, you need to be able to balance the two. There should be a point where you have an absolute cutoff, no more users/requests beyond that, but you should also have a sliding scale. Of course a server only processing one request at a time will be faster, but you need to be able to degrade somewhat, while still providing good service.
The challenge is that by the time you reach the 300th request your system is unusable. In the example mentioned the system starts to experience exponential degradation around the 100th request. One wants to avoid reaching that state of the system where the exponential degradation starts .
There IS a better solution to this than just rejecting the request and it has to do with request queuing.
