Yesterday we wrote about how Demand Media produces 4,000 new pieces of content every day- and whether it can sustain quality at that scale. There was vigorous discussion about the quality issue in the comments, including from some of Demand Media's thousands of freelance writers. In this follow-up post, we look at the type of contentthat Demand Media outputs. It turns out that much of it is driven by advertising demand. Again we feel compelled to ask: is this good or bad for the Web's future? SponsorDemand Mediais one of the largest producers of content on the Webtoday and is ranked among the top 15 Web properties in the United States. It's also syndicating content to large media sites like Yahoo. All of this means that the type of content Demand Media is producing will get more and more common on the Web.Service JournalismDemand Media claims that its content is not journalism. However, it does compare its model to service journalism(a.k.a. "news you can use"), a concept rooted in the 1960s and common in lifestyle magazines such as Good Housekeeping. This is content such as tips and feature articles about fashion, food and travel.Demand Media told us that it aims for "useful, used content." The content it produces has an "evergreen quality" to it, they say.CEO Richard Rosenblatt told me at the Web 2.0 Summit last month that Demand Media will be syndicating content more to traditional media properties in 2010 and beyond. They see 'service journalism' content as being complementary to not only magazines, but large portal sites like Yahoo.An interesting observation from Rosenblatt was that Demand Media content is "very similar to Associated Press content." In other words, it "helps fill the pages" for newspapers, magazines and other media properties.Matching Content With AdsWhat may be more controversial is that Demand Media makes no bones about their content being produced in order to put ads around it. OK, almost every online publisher has a similar objective: to make money with contextual ads. ReadWriteWeb makes most of its revenue from online advertising.What's slightly different here is that Demand Media is custom producing content in categories where there is strong advertiser interest. A specific example of that is a YouTube ad program with Targetthat is currently running. In this channel based around holiday consumerism, content created by Demand Media is featured side-by-side with advertising. Below is a screenshot showing an eHow video entitled "How to Make Cornbread Stuffing," with a Target ad to the right. Demand Media told us that advertisers are crying out for new content to advertise against. If a large media network like Yahoo is looking to "create content with ads," the next step for Demand Media is enabling their customers to "order content with ads." An example might be something like this: Demand Media produces a how-to article on playing tennis; then sells it to a Yahoo sports site accompanied by tennis equipment adverts placed around it.ConclusionIs what Demand Media is doing much different from mainstream media publications or blogs?One difference is that ReadWriteWeb (along with many other online publications) is a journalism business, so we strive for editorial independence and there is a 'church and state' line with advertising. Demand Media isn't journalism in the traditional sense - that isn't the reason for its being and the company freely admits that. Demand Media produces content to make money, it's as simple as that really.What do you think: is what Demand Media is doing just a natural extension of contextual advertising? Or is it crossing a line where content is too marriedto advertising?Discuss

  TodayYouTube has announcedits plan to support 1080p videos.This means that those amazing, high-definition videos you uploaded last year will now finally be converted to their original resolutions and will finally look as good as they do on your desktop. The new resolution represents a significant improvement over the current 720p maximum resolution, which leaves all those glorious, pirated segments of old movies tragically blurred and pixelated.SponsorThe fine folks at YouTube cited increased resolutions on consumer video recording devices as the impetus for the improvement.Here's YouTube's example of a 360p image:If you're not uploading videos from your phone, however, you're probably looking at something like YouTube's current HD setting, 720p:And, by way of comparison, this is the new maximum resolution YouTube HD videos will have:Those images are from YouTube. Why they chose a dog's muzzle, we may never know. But we're awfully grateful for the resolution improvements.Also, users are specifically encouraged to upload videos that will showcase t he capabilities of the new hotness that is 1080p resolution. YouTube engineer Billy Biggs tells users in the related blog post, "Be creative and choose subjects that really show off the beauty of your camera. We will run the best examples on our homepage in a future spotlight."While it'll be nice to see our own classic jams restored to their original awesomeness, it will also be interesting to see professionally produced videos now appearing in better HD. Well done, YouTube, and thanks for allocating the resources.Discuss

  Though I'm chronically checking in on services like Brightkite, Spontyoffers us a chance to plan and prep for casual outings. SponsorInstead of asking users to give their immediate locations, Sponty allows us to add events to a schedule. Users can add their information via the company's web interface or its newly released iPhone app. If you know you're going to be at a conference, happy hour or concert you can add the event, location and time to your Sponty calendar. From here it's easy to plan meet ups and tweet ups. Once you fill in your info, your friends are notified via the Sponty community, Twitter, Facebook, email or through an embeddable blog widget. Friends then click the "I'm down" button to express their interest in joining you. Users can cancel or bail out on events at anytime. While you may share calendars with your closest pals, a wider circle of friends would quickly make that overwhelming to track. Sponty is a great social calendar substitute and offers users a chance to plan impromptu events without the constraints of multiple registrations. What's interesting about this service is the fact that instead of offering us real-time event updates, it's more usefully giving us a look at real-time intentions. To register and test the service visit thesponty.com. Discuss

  This week, Justin.tvis rolling out new measures to protect copyrighted live video streams from being pirated on their site. The technology the company is using will allow them to remove pirate channels without having to issue a takedown notice first.Using technology from Vobile, an online video publishing company, Justin.tv partners (including FOX), will be able to use VideoDNAâ„¢ "fingerprinting" technology to watermark their digital content. If the content is spotted elsewhere on the site, Justin.tv will automatically remove the infringing channel. Think of it as DRM for real-time, streaming media.SponsorThese measures come in the wake of Justin.tv's legal and PR woes last year, when television broadcasters foundthat the site was being used to illegally redistribute their channels - especially sports and pay-per-view events - online. At that time, the site claimed traffic greater than Hulu's; however having to uphold stricter piracystandards has hurtthose stats, too."This has been part of our long-term effort to work with copyright holders... How can we help them automate the process of removing content?" said CEO Michael Seibel in a recent interview with NewTeeVee.Vobile's solution, VideoDNA, is a compact, unique digital signature, a.k.a. a fingerprint, that can be attached to online video without changing the source content. To identify an unknown video, its fingerprint is found and matched against the entries in the reference database, known as the Vobile DNA Database. If a match is found, the querying application is provided with comprehensive data on the match. The VideoTrackercomponent of this solution is intended specifically for content creators and has reportedly been adopted by many major Hollywood studios.Using this huge library of fingerprints, Justin.tv has worked with publishers to integrate digital fingerprinting with live, streaming media. It's a complicated solution requiring the proactive responsibility of the copyright holders.Check out NewTeeVee's video interview with Seibel below, and let us know in the comments what you think of the new measures for copyright protection of live, streaming media.Discuss

  Vookis a new company that's come up with a method for blending text and premium video to create an interesting mobile multimedia experience around popular literature.It combines the (relatively) old skool readability of a Kindle with the engagement of a YouTube series, all wrapped in the delicious flavor of a usable, interactive UI for web users and iFanboys alike.SponsorOf course, no experiment involving new media and books would be complete without reference to our dear friendMr. Gary Vaynerchuk, whose new title, Crush It!, was just published in every imaginable format, including this one. And as skeptical as we were about the marriage of books and video, at least for this author and product, the format really seems to work.Another one of the Vooks we saw was a cookbook- another product type that meshes very well with the hybrid book/video offering.We see vooks being awesome for many verticals. Celebrity-penned tomes interspersed with video interviews or anecdotes, how-to books with video tutorials, biographies, et cetera. But how does the format work for literary fiction, pop attorney dramas, or romance? Time and experimentationwill tell.Still, for nonfiction works, we thing that ebook formats that can integrate intelligently with online video are where it's at, and we applaud Vook's direction. If they can just get the licenses to splice The Princess Bride film footage with the ebook text, we'll personally invest our two cents.Discuss

  Often compared to Twitter for its meteoric rise to media darling status, location-based check-in game Foursquareis incredibly smart about its member stewardship and business strategy. On the heels of its September launch of Foursquare for Businessand its recent partnership with the Bay Area Rapid Transit service, the group maintains its moniker as "little company that could". Foursquarehas found a way to give to charity, increase members, test an advertising program and avoid footing the bill. SponsorBetween December 7-13, the location-based company is offering one sponsor a chance to re-skin the iPhone leaderboard site in exchange for a $0.03 pledge on every point earned on the Foursquare leaderboard. Through the Techies Give Backgroup, pledges will help

  With Google's Social Search experiment, Bing's integration with Twitter and Yahoo!'s partnership with One Riot, social search clearly has both potential and momentum. But what will social search look like, and will it help us search better? And if it will, how?I've written previously about how social search won't replace traditional search, how social relevancy rankcan be used to deliver good results, and why the concept of social search is a return to a familiar state rather than something to fear. Today, I'll get more specific about the three flavors of social search that will improve user search experiences.SponsorThis guest post was written by Brynn Evans.Collective Social Search"Collective social search" is similar in concept to the wisdom of crowds, in that search is augmented by trends shared on a network (a la Twitter Trends) or results ranked against the real-time buzz of a group. Why might this be useful? Well, in some instances, we can't immediately find the information we're looking for; and pooled, aggregated data from the collective may point us to new avenues that expand our discovery process.As of yet, no major search systems are doing this very well - and we don't know what type of interface would be optimal for sharing this information. The Cloudlet plugininserts tag clouds (based on keywords) into search results; but tag clouds are known to be more of a distractionthan a utility. BingTweetshas been touted as such a resource, but it really only offers Twitter and Bing results on two separate pages. OneRiotshows only collective data from the real-time stream, although it may be integrated with Yahoo! results soon. And we are still waiting to see how Googleand Bingintegrate the Twitter firehose into their traditional search results - as opposed to merely including them as additional document-like resources.Equally important will be understanding when collective social data should be shared with users: while performing the search or after? And for which types of searches?My researchon search strategies begins to address this question. Collective guidance may be useful when users are exploring a search space, possibly because the search domain is not familiar to them (i.e. they lack knowledge of how to drill down to an answer), or because they are passively exploring a problem. I find myself doing this all the time when I prepare recipes to cook. I want to browse recipes from many different sources before I decide what my own recipe will consist of. I don't have a specific recipe in mind (it's not an urgent, active request), and therefore I don't necessarily know when I've found what I'm looking for.That said, it's hard to determine from keyword strings how active or passive a user's search is; i.e. it may be quite difficult to determine the type of search they're performing or how far along they are in their search process ("exploring" or "narrowing"?). Furthermore, the utility of collective social data for mainstream consumers will be limited, mainly because it doesn't come from trusted sources, unlike "friend-filtered social search" (see next section).Friend-Filtered Social SearchFriend-filtered social search is approximately what Google is doing with its social search experiment: providing social data that your peers, friends of friends and wider "social circle" have shared. This data could appear alongside traditional search results(as with Google) or be exclusive results from within your peer network (as with TuneIn).This is useful if your friends have shared relevant links, blog posts or tweets about a topic that you're searching for. If you were gathering ideas about, say, "the future of the desktop," you would see thought pieces, write-ups and links to projects from the main search algorithm, as well as stuff your friends are saying about applications they've encountered recently. If you trust your friends, they may serve as reliable filters, pointing you to relevant information.The three major limitations of this approach are:Your friends may have no archived social content that's relevant (or available) to your query. Searching within your Facebook network quickly demonstrates this problem. For this reason, augmenting traditional algorithms with friend-filtered social data may be better, rather than relying exclusively on data from one person's small exclusive network.Current implementations are limited to keyword matching; whereas, searches that retrieve related posts based on topic, theme or timeframe might expose a wider set of results and combat the niche-social-network problem. This approach would be computationally harder than keywords alone, and exposing enough of the appropriate context remains a problem (see next item).Understanding the contextin which a post or link was shared is important. Without this, keyword- and even topic-matching might not convey to the user the relevance of a search result. Google provides limited context at the moment (showing only how you know a user, the source of the post and a short snippet). More testing is needed to learn how much and what kind of context is appropriate for social search content.Similarly there is the issue of whenfriend-filtered social search would be relevant during a search. My instinct is that it will be useful throughout a search and for many types of searches (it is, after all, just another type of search result). This is critically different from collective social search and collaborative search.Collaborative Search (a.k.a. Question-Answering)"Collaborative search" is when two or more users work together to find the answer to a problem. This could look like IM-based question-answering (a la Aardvark), Yahoo! Answers(which is relatively passive and asynchronous) or over-the-shoulder two-person search. In all of these cases, people speak to each other using natural language, which is incredibly useful for open-ended queries (e.g. "What is 'design thinking'?") or queries about unfamiliar domains (e.g. law, health, business, depending on your background). Such conversations, even not real-time ones, can assist people who don't know the right keywords to use (what's known as the "vocabulary problem").My research has looked at the benefits of question-answeringand at people's processes and preferences during search. Many users report that they want to attempt to search on their own first, or don't wish to interrupt their colleagues before they have given it a shot independently. This suggests that early social support should be passive (as with presenting collective or friend-filtered social data).But later in the process, if the searcher gets stuck on a problem, they often turn to a colleague for help. If systems had a way of identifying difficult queries or search-process inefficiencies, they could offer more explicit social support to searchers. Perhaps the system could identify a domain-specific expert from the user's extended social circle. Information that this person has shared could be presented to the user, or this person could be suggested as a resource to chat with or email (depending on availability and preferences).It should be clear by now that these three flavors of social search are complementary. Each has its pros and cons and is appropriate for different kinds of searches and during different stages of the search process. A powerful "social search engine" would be "smart" by making use of all three, while also exploiting the value of traditional algorithms.Photos by: Who Wants to Be?, Claudia Limand brewbooks.Guest author: Brynn Evansis a PhD student in Cognitive Science at UC San Diego who uses digital anthropology to study and better understand social search.Discuss

  An Interview With TweetDeck Founder Iain Dodsworthtweetmeme_url = 'http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_value_of_twitter_data_the_future_of_tweetdeck.php';tweetmeme_source = 'rww';A small startup company called InfoChimpsreleased for sale yesterday three very large sets of data extracted from 500 million Twitter messages. Included in the offering are the senders and recipients of 1 billion @ messages, Retweets and Favorites. We wrote in-depth about the release late last night. This morning we interviewed Iain Dodsworth, creator of the most popular Twitter client, TweetDeck, about the value he might find in that data and the direction he's aiming to take TweetDeck in the future.SponsorDodsworth:Straight off the bat - an archive of tweets could form the basis of a profiler and that's very interesting. Sentiment analysis (which I am ALL over) requires that kind of base corpus.RWW:InfoChimps isn't releasing full text yet, but they would do a custom slice if you wanted it.Dodsworth:It's the historical element that a large number of services are missing and where they will fall flat - analysis based on the last few hundreds tweets is almost pointless.RWW:I'm curious what "a profiler" might mean to you and what this data could help make possible in those terms.Dodsworth:For me a true profiler would be akinto the holy grail - we would analyse who a person converses with, who RTs them the most, essentially all interactions. Then we would track activity metrics (how many tweets sent, replies) and then we would analyse language patterns (usage of certain words) to ascertain how they express themselves and pinpoint sentiment. Off the top of my head this could lead to elements of intention prediction and I'm steering TweetDeck to have this kind of very very basic Artificial Intelligence at its heart.I'm currently researching intent predicition inside high frequency trading systems and it's fascinating and could directly relate to TweetDeck and social media systems/services in general.[Dodsworth's backgroundis in developing for financial services, at places like Prudential Financial and PricewaterhouseCoopers.]RWW:What would intention prediction look like in this context? On twitter?Dodsworth:At its most basic if TweetDeck could predict what the user was probably about to require next, based on current activity, then it could start to collate that data in the background - cross twitter/facebook/linkedin data for example. I'm looking at it right now from a cross-service data gathering perspective where our servers do the gathering and hopefully get around the issues of API limits for example.This is based on future functionality we're mapping out now which is a lot more complex than looking at someone's profile or seeing how many RTs one of your tweets has.I'm thinking the scope is full social graph rather than just twitter/facebook.RWW:I guess I'm having a hard time imagining what "what the user was probably about to require next, based on current activity, then TweetDeck could start to collate that data in the background - cross twitter/facebook/linkedin data for example" might look like. Like, if I'm looking at a person's profile, I'd probably like to see their LinkedIn data?Dodsworth:Good example...or see how a certain person you're tweeting with right now stacks up against "similar" people you've spoken to - a box could pop up mid-conversation and give you a tonne of metrics on this person. How full of [crap] are they? Are they a social media guru? Would you be wise to tell this person anything sensitive? Based on previous language patterns, is the person you're tweeting with right now probably lying? A bit out there but possible in theory.Discuss

  Google has just announcedthat it is working on a new protocolthat will minimize latency and speed up the Web experience for users. SPDY (pronounced "speedy") is not meant to replace HTTP, the protocol that allows Web servers and browsers to talk to each other today, tweetmeme_url = 'http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/spdy_google_wants_to_speed_up_the_web.php';tweetmeme_source = 'rww';but it does augment HTTP. The new protocol incorporates features like multiplexed streams, request prioritization and HTTP header compression. Google has already developed a prototype Web server and a versionof Google Chrome with built-in SPDY support. SponsorGoogle claims that pages loaded 64% faster in lab tests in which the research team downloaded the top 25 websites. Now that the SPDY team has developed workable prototypes, Google decided to open up the process and is soliciting the "active participation, feedback and assistance of the web community."In today's announcement, Google stresses that SPDY is not a replacement for HTTP. It uses HTTP methods and headers, but it overrides the parts of the protocol that manage connections and data transfer formats. Google will soon release its open-source SPDY-enabled Web server. The source code for the SPDY-enabled version of Chrome can be found here.Creating a Faster and More Secure WebAccording to the SPDY white paper, the project's goals are to reduce page load times by 50%, minimize deployment complexity and avoid the need for website owners to make any changes to their sites to implement SPDY. Instead, all the hard work will happen in the client and the Web server. The team also wants SPDY to allow many concurrent HTTP requests to run across one TCP session and to make SLL the standard transport protocol.Google clearly has an interest in making the Web experience as fast and secure as possible for its users. One of the reasons Google released its own browser was to get every other browser developer to focus on speed again. SPDY is even more ambitious. With SPDY, Google wants to change one of the most fundamental protocols on the Internet.According to Google, these are the basic improvement of SPDY over HTTP:Multiplexed requests. There is no limit to the number of requests that can be issued concurrently over a single SPDY connection.  Because requests are interleaved on a single channel, the efficiency of TCP is much higher.Prioritized requests. Clients can request certain resources to be delivered first.  This avoids the problem of congesting the network channel with non-critical resources when a high-priority request is pending.Compressed headers.  Clients today send a significant amount of redundant data in the form of HTTP headers.  Because a single Web page may require 50 or 100 subrequests, this data is significant. Compressing the headers saves a significant amount of latency and bandwidth compared to HTTP.Discuss

  Boxeejust announcedthat it plans to release a dedicated Boxee hardware device in partnership with an undisclosed consumer entertainment company. This is a big step for Boxee. The software, which aggregates Internet video content from a wide variety of sources, is already designed to run on home entertainment PCs that are connected to TVs. The market for these devices is still very small, but if Boxee manages to get its software on a large number of connected TVs, set-top boxes and BluRay players, the company could easily establish itself as the standard interface for bringing Internet content to the living room. Boxee will share more details about the device on December 7.SponsorBoxee's Ambition: To be on Every Connected DeviceRight now, the easiest way to use Boxee in the living room is through hacking an Apple TV. While this is an easy hack, it doesn't help Boxee to bring its service to a mainstream audience. According to today's announcement, Boxee's goal is "to be on every Connected device in the living room" - and to do so, the company will need to partner with large, well-known brands that can push its software into the living room as a default feature.On Collision Course With RokuThis announcement, as the NYTimes' Brad Stone points out, also puts Boxee in direct competition with Roku. Roku made a name for itself by offering a cheap and easy-to-use hardware device that allows users to stream online movies to their TVs. Just last week, Roku announced it will branch out from just offering streaming movies and that it plans to offer different channels with Internet content in the near future. Chances are that within the next few months, both Roku and Boxee will offer very similar services and hardware devices. If Boxee manages to strike up enough partnerships and gets its software into more devices, however, it will have a major advantage over Roku.Discuss

  If you're not one of the fortunate few to have gotten your hands on a Google Waveinvite, then you probably don't have too much use for Waveboard, an iPhone-ready interface for Google's new real-time collaboration system. However, if you've recently become a member of the Google Wave cult, you may have already forked over the 99 cents for this mobile app so that you could create, browse and respond to "waves" while on the go. While some early testers of the Waveboard app complained that it didn't do anything more than what the iPhone optimized websitealready offered, the next release of Waveboard may have those naysayers changing their mind. Waveboard 2.0 has a few new features, but the one that will grab everyone's attention is its ability to offer "push" notifications on the iPhone. SponsorAccording to a post on the GetWaveboard blog, the next edition of the Waveboard application(iTunes link) has been submitted to Apple and is now awaiting App Store approval. This process usually takes a few weeks, but in the meantime a couple of video previews let us see what's to come. Quick InboxOne of the new features of Waveboard 2.0 is something called the "Quick Inbox" view. Since Google Wave loads a little slowly on the iPhone - something developer Dirk Holtwicksays is out of his hands - he's come up with a workaround for a speedier launch. The new "quick inbox" feature offers a fast-loading overview that displays the waves that have changed, as you can see in the following video:Push NotificationsEven more exciting, perhaps, is the push notifications feature. In addition to displaying a badge on the app's icon showing the number of new waves, the push notifications feature will tap into the iPhone's ability to display pop-up alerts on your device. As new text is entered into a wave, the iPhone will display the additional text in a push notification message:Of course, depending on the number of waves you're involved in and how heavily they're used, this feature could easily become an annoyance. Unfortunately, Google offers few control mechanisms for managing the waves you belong to at the moment - something that could lead to serious information overload for Wave users. For example, anyone can add you to awave - even without your permission. This can lead to an inbox crowded with waves that you don't really care about following. For some, this feature is a key selling point for Wave, but for others it's just a chaos-inducing mess. That may change in future, though, when Google implements the "whitelisting" feature, which will allow users to create an approved list of fellow wavers, and only people on that list will be able to contact you. There's no word yet on if or how you'll be able to manage the new push notifications feature in the app's settings. If there were configuration options that let you exclude some waves (like public ones, for example), then it would be even more useful. In any event, the app will now have some value-added features that make it worth the $0.99. Stay tuned to the GetWaveboard blogin the coming days for more details on the new features and how they work. Discuss

  When Google announced its plansfor a new cloud-based operating system built around the Web browser, there was some concern about the OS' capabilities. Although a lot of our computing can now be done in the Web browser these days thanks to online applications and services, quite a few operations still need to take place on the hard drive - running iTunes, for example, or importing photos from a digital camera. How would a Web-based operating system handle these sorts of tasks? Based on what we knew of Google Chrome OS, it seemed like the OS just wouldn't be able to do them. But a new discovery in the Google Chrome OS browser code basepoints to a "mount library" that monitors devices inserted in the computer. Would Chrome OS be able to see your iPod? Your camera? And what would it do then?SponsorChrome OS Code Reveals "Mount Library"Thanks to some serious sleuthing on the part of the DownloadSquad blog, a site that often scours through Chrome OS code to uncover hidden gems, we've learned that the new operating system will monitor for new devices attached to your system. As Sebastian Anthony points out in the blog post, the Chrome Web browser can already access your local file system(e.g. Windows users can just type C:\ in the address field to see a list of files), so this new feature would simply extend the browser's current functionality. Anthony then speculates that in Chrome OS you may be able to launch a new tab in the browser to see a real-time view of "My Computer," complete with attached devices and the files they contain. Or perhaps a new window would pop up showing you the drive you've just inserted into the netbook's USB slot. That would certainly be an unusual trick for a Web browser to handle; navigating your local file system is a task usually left to file explorer programs like Windows Explorer and Mac OS' Finder. But because the interface for Chrome OS is the Web browser, it appears that the browser will have to step in and do the OS' job in this case. If Chrome OS' Browser Can See Your Drives, What Could You Do With Your Files?More importantly, what does this mean for the end user? If the browser can "see" your attached devices and the files they contain, how would they then display them to you? If you plug in a USB flash drive containing spreadsheets and text documents, would Chrome OS launch Google Docsto display them? Or would it allow you to preview them in HTML, as is possible in Gmail? Or both?And what about when you plug in a digital camera? Would Chrome OS prompt you to import your photos to Picasa? Your videos to YouTube? If so, Chrome OS would overcome one of the perceived stumbling blocks of being a cloud-based operating system - the need for the computer's hard drive to act as the middleman when it comes to importing external content hosted on other drives and getting it posted to the Web. Wait a Minute... Didn't We Already Decide This Was a Bad Idea?As exciting as that sounds, a commenter on the blog postpoints out that a browser that acts like this could mean serious security issues for the new operating system. Would a malicious Web page be able to tap into this feature to wreak havoc on your system? We know that Google has said that security is one of the key aspects of the OS, but we also know that hackers are extremely crafty as well. No matter how good the security measures Google puts in place to limit this sort of access, nothing would provide 100% protection. And isn't this the same sort of functionality that Microsoft ditched in Internet Exploreryears ago with the launch of IE7 due to these very same security concerns?What do you think about this new feature? Is it a great feature for the Web browser or a security hole just waiting to be exploited? Let us know in the comments. Discuss

  Clicker, which aims to be the TV Guide for Internet television, just launched. We first reviewedClicker last week when it was still in private beta. The version that went live today features a number of significant improvements to the private beta version. Clicker now indexes 33% more shows than before and indexes over 400,000 full episodes from 7,000 shows. Clicker also now features an improved DVR-like playlist, integration with Facebook Connect and improved search. In addition, Clicker users can now also comment on shows and use a wiki-like feature to contribute information about a given show or episode.SponsorIn last week's review, we called Clicker a "one-stop shop for online video." Today's updates and the public launch turn it into an even more convenient service. The most important new feature is the improved playlist, which now makes it even easier to watch shows on the Internet and to keep track of which ones you have already seen. Clicker now also indexes over 30,000 movies that are available through Netflix Instant Streamingand Amazon VOD.Video Search Market is Heating UpAs more and more TV viewers turn to the Internet to see full-length episodes of their favorite shows, the market for services that index these shows and make them easily available is also heating up. TVGuide.com released a number of significant updates to its site yesterday that include embedded full-length shows. Microsoft's Bing video searchnow also makes it easier to find content from TV and cable networks online. While Google offers a comprehensive video search engine, it doesn't offer any specific features that make it easier to find and watch TV shows online.Clicker's new DVR-like playlists give it a unique feature that makes it stand out from the crowd and turns it into a one-stop shop for TV content on the Internet. You can find our full review of Clicker here.Discuss

  In August we reviewed Demand Media, one of the largest producers of content on the Webtoday. Wired Magazine recently comparedDemand Media's content business to Henry Ford's production line for cars. Demand Media currently produces 4,000 new pieces of content a day. tweetmeme_url = 'http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_demand_media_produces_4000_new_pieces_of_content_a_day.php';tweetmeme_source = 'rww';What's more, it's increasingly syndicating this content to media sites outside of its own network of vertical websites. In other words, Demand Media is becoming a very large content production factory for third party sitessuch as Yahoo.In this follow-up post, we dive deeper into Demand Media's content production model - and ask questions about the qualityof the output.SponsorThis article is based on an interview I conducted with several Demand Media executives, including founder Richard Rosenblatt, at the Web 2.0 Summit in September.Will Demand Media Soon be a Household Name?In our previous posts, we've noted that Demand Media is rapidly rising up the comScore list of the top 50 web properties in the U.S.- in July it was #24, in Septemberit was #15. At this rate, Demand Media will soon be one of the top 10 Web properties in the U.S. - right up there with Amazon, eBay, Apple.Think about that: how many of you had heard of Demand Media before this year? Amazon, eBay and Apple are all household names. Demand Media (along with another fast-growing mega content site, Answers.com) could be a household name soon too, if its current growth rate continues. Behind this remarkable growth is a very large output of content each and every day, fueled by thousands of freelance writers and content creators. So how does Demand Media produce so much content every day? 4,000 new articles a day is a quantum leap above the 20-30 new posts a day that the most feverish of professional blogs pump out. About Demand StudiosDemand Media produces so much content with a system it calls Demand Studios. It's a proprietary editorial system which is part human-processed and part automated. The system starts with an automated process, crunching data and running it through an algorithm to identify story ideas that have the best chance of success. The algorithm factors in audience type, ability to attract advertising and potential for traffic. For a written piece of content, human editors will then check the top story contenders. Potential titles are placed into a pool for writer selection. Once a writer picks up a story, it gets written up, goes through a fact checking and copy editing process (including a plagiarism check), and finally the editorial team approves the completed article. The article is eventually published and the writer gets paid. This is a simplification of the Demand Studios process, which happens 4,000 times every day! The system appears to be an efficient mix of automation and human labor. As we'll see on Page 2 of this post, the editorial process isn't foolproof. But even so, the scale of this system is impressive.As at the end of October, Demand Studios had created more than one million original pieces of content, both text articles andvideos. There are more than 6,000 active Demand Studios freelance creators - including writers, filmmakers, title proofers, copy editors. In my meeting with Demand Media executives at the recent Web 2.0 Summit, I was told that an average of 11 people- and 15 unique roles- touch a piece of content as it flows through Demand Studios. The company argues that this, along with community rating of content, produces quality content. But does it, actually?Next Page: The Quality Question...Demand Media: Is This ReallyQuality Content?Demand Media is sensitive to criticism of the quality of its content. It's a question that ReadWriteWeb has raised a few times and which Wired picked up on in its October profile. At the end of that article, Wired noted that Demand Media is "trying to place a new emphasis on quality." However it concludes by saying that Demand Media is "not moving far from [the] Henry Ford model."I asked Demand Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt about this criticism. Bristling, he responded by pointing to two things. Firstly Rosenblatt claimed that many of Demand Media's content creators are professionals. He said that 75% of them have been published in magazines or newspapers, 25% have written a book, and 25% have held professional marketing roles.Example of Demand Media content, on Yahoo! network site 'Shine.'Secondly, Rosenblatt noted that Demand Media content creators have choicesin the market - but they choose to work for Demand Media. What's more, Rosenblatt said that "quality is based on relevance" - a quote he attributed to Wired editor Chris Anderson, who wrote the books The Long Tailand Free.Who then are these people that write and shoot video for Demand Media? They're professional freelancersand they're paid anywhere from $15-30 per piece of content. This isn't a great deal of money for a freelance article. But according to Demand Media, there are hundreds of such freelancers earning thousands of dollars per month from Demand Studios (although this would be the top of the range).4,000 New Articles Per Day - What Percentage is High Quality?The trouble with the term 'quality' is that it's both variable and subjective. I've seen examples of Demand Media work that are poor - e.g. this eHow articleabout how to get Twitter followers.Step 3 reads as follows:"Engage in discussions. If someone on your timeline says something interesting or says something that you can put input into, do it. There's nothing worse than Twitter followers who follows for no reason. Even if you don't get responses some of the time, it doesn't hurt to try and the people you're following will know you're attemption to converse and are more likely to follow you back."There are a couple of bad typos in that paragraph (where were the copy editors?), but worse is that the advice is mediocre. It's relevant content to many people, but is it goodcontent? Apparently it was to the people who've read it, as it has 5 stars...UPDATE:Demand Media contacted us to explain that above article is what they call a "user-generated article." This is marked in the screenshot below as "user submitted article," whereas a Demand Studios article would have "eHow Contributing Writer" as the attribution. Demand Media advised that "this UGC does notflow through the full Demand Studios editorial process - and is not counted in our 4,000 pieces of content."The bigger question is: there are surely many examples of goodDemand Media content on the Web, but how many of the 4,000 articles it produces every day aren't?As we posited in our previous article, tweetmeme_url = 'http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_demand_media_produces_4000_new_pieces_of_content_a_day.php';tweetmeme_source = 'rww';the concern with fast-growing content factories like Demand Media and Answers.com is that quality is taking too much of a back seat to quantity. Let us know your thoughts in the comments.In our next post, we will look into the type of contentthat Demand Media is producing - and what it plans to do with it next.Discuss