Content Creation
AboutUs engages in a variety of efforts to create and enhance content on our site. These efforts can be broken down into two distinct categories based both on the type of content they concern and its scope.
- One-off: single articles to be written
- Portals:
- Company centric: multi-page project on a company
- Concept centric: multi-page project surrounding a concept
- ...read more about ContentPriorities
History
Beginning around August '06, our content creation efforts focused on hiring out one-off articles. Over the past 11 months we've covered:
- The Alexa top 500+ websites (with nearly full coverage of the top 1000)
- The top 100 US Universities and Colleges
- The Fortune 500 (nearing the top 700 as of 7-26-07)
Tak managed this effort for the first few months and then gradually handed it off to Chris throughout the first couple months of 2007.
ContentPriorities - Current Efforts
One-Off's
- Chris is currently hiring out approximately 150 articles per week via Rentacoder.com. Current hiring includes companies ranked between 500 and 700 on the Fortune 1000 list.
Portals
- LASIK: Obed Suhail and Asad Butt are working in conjunction with TedErnst and ChrisBabson to perfect city listings pages and ready them for the sponsorship sales effort. As part of this continued effort, general content (i.e. non-location specific content) in the portal is undergoing constant maintenance.
- Election Portal: Kasey Goltra is working in conjunction with Asad Butt, KristinaWeis, and Blake Hinkley to maintain and update this portal.
- Projects:WikiAnatomy: Kasey Goltra, TakKendrick, Isabel, KristinaWeis, JohnStanton and MarkDilley are currently putting the final touches on this project.
For more information on specific projects please see the individual project pages by clicking on the links above. All content work figures into OurWork, so visit this page to see how each employee is focusing their time.
The Future of Content Creation: Common Answers
As we move forward, the list of content to create/massage will be derived according to CommonAnswers. We will develop content based on the demand of the community (as indicated by their queries on our site and on many others). This process will likely be automated in the future, but will proceed by hand until we decide it should be a development priority.
Content from this list will be developed using a variety of resources:
- Rentacoder.com (RAC): We have been using this service since the beginning. Writers tend to be decent, but rarely outstanding. A 500-1000 word article costs between $10-20, including the small service fee for using the site.
- Lahore interns: We will be hiring a group of college age interns through the Lahore office. Some of these may be assigned to write articles.
- Main employees at the Portland and Lahore offices: Specific articles or projects may be prioritized for these groups. These will likely be larger efforts (company or concept portals as opposed to one-off articles).
- Community: The queue of articles to write will be opened up to the community to pitch in where they see fit. This is already happening in specific areas of the site, and we hope that making this list accessible and uniform will encourage such activity universally.
Per our recent discussions in the Portland office, it seems desirable to switch as much of the content generation efforts to in house both as a means of reducing cost and taking advantage of the learning curve that comes with more consistent work. Given higher cost and lower predictability of quality content, we will use Rentacoder only when necessary.
It should be noted that in the long run content can only be sustained and maintained by an active user community. Our efforts to meet demand for information with hired and in-house content will only get the ball rolling - this system will eventually have to be a self-driven outgrowth of the community for it to work.
Actionable Tasks
- Common Answers -
decide how the list of needed content will be created (i.e. from which sources), and do it! - Lahore hiring/training - hire interns in Lahore and train them. A list of needed content (even if unfinished) needs to be done before this can happen.
- Acronyms - discuss this more and prioritize
