I cannot BELIEVE this bullshit. The MTAour favorite group of assclownshas now come up with another genius way to rob us of more money.

They're proposing that monthly Unlimited MetroCards will now be limited to 90 swipes per month. If that wasn't enough to send you down to the nearest subway station with an assault rifle, you'll have to pay an extra $10 a month for the pleasure of owning a Limited Unlimited MetroCard.

I HATE EVERYONE.

Via NY Mag

We know this month has basically been one long heat wave, but we had no idea what we were putting up with. A reader's travel plans led to a rather interesting discovery. He wrote to us, "Traveling to Kenya in about a week and was gearing up to have more of the same temperature. I checked a single day's weather, liked what I saw, then charted the whole month of July thus far. Someone please call Mr. Gore."

While New York has been baking in the 90s (and the occasional 100) for much of the month, Nairobi, Kenya, classified as having a mild "Subtropical Highland climate," has been chillin' in the 60s and 70s all month. It's actually Kenya's cool season right now, but our reader's discovery inspired us to see how New York's heat stacked up against that of other cities with sweatier reputations. And did you know that today will be the 17th day above 90 this yearthat's the average amount for an entire year.

As you can see, our temperatures exceeded those in Cairo, Egypt on several days, and overall, averaging out our city's relatively wild fluctuations in temperature, we seem more on par with Miami than anywhere else. So why didn't we get LeBron James?

At their genesis, bike-sharing networks were low on tech and heavy on grassroots, cooperative spirit. But the programs and systems rolling out today for tracking and distributing up to thousands of bicycles in cities from Milan to San Antonio are of another generation one built upon mobile access to the real-time web and GPS chips.

Armed with these IT tools, new and evolving bike-sharing networks fit into the larger trends of smarter digital and networked transportation systems, innovation around providing mobility as a service, and moves by unconventional players (from non-profits to advertising giants to health insurance firms to new startups) to assume new roles in the transportation sector.

Public entities are getting into the act, too, with Montreal's BIXI system being deployed in cities in the U.S. and the UK, while federal and state governments are providing seed money and ongoing funds for some programs. The hope is that the right combination of technology, pricing and convenience will help integrate bicycles into the larger transportation system at mass scale (right up there with buses, trains, ferries and taxi cabs, for example) and spur the growth of some new businesses in the process.

On Friday, the world's largest bike share network will launch in London, with 6,000 bikes at 400 stations. It's an illustration of what technologies like text messaging, smartphones with GPS, and the real-time web are ultimately driving in the bike-sharing market: a shift in scale, as infrastructure costs come down, and growing convenience attracts a broader market.

As it becomes increasingly common for consumers to have web access on the go and operators can use sensors and real-time communication to flag available docks and bikes barriers to adoption are falling away. It's just plain easier to find a station and a bike that's ready to roll. And with GPS chips that can locate you, a bike, or a parking spot, operators have a tool for tackling the bane of bike sharing networks of yore: theft.

A similar shift can be seen on the automotive side of the mobility as a service market. Whereas car sharing providers have had networks at the city or regional scale for years, often using a nonprofit model, Zipcar has built up a national footprint and begun to extend its reach overseas over the last decade. While the company which filed in June for a $75 million IPO has never turned a profit, its revenues reached $131.2 million last year, up from just $13.7 million in 2005.

Zipcar, which has also grown through acquisitions, developed its fleet technology with a plan to scale it. The company's vehicles carry some essential hardware, including a black box device (a custom circuit board, processor and modem) fitted to a vehicle windshield that allows users to unlock the car they've reserved, and also lets Zipcar remotely monitor vehicles. It's a relatively streamlined customization process, compared with competing systems that require installation of keypads in the dash, for example, or a hands-free calling setup. In fact, Zipcar CEO Scott Griffith has told us that the ideal vehicle for car sharing would be modeled after smartphones, with an open platform that would allow Zipcar to roll new cars into its fleet with little more than a software download.

Zipcar's grand vision is for a subscriber who lives near its Cambridge, Mass. headquarters, for example, to rent a car in a Barcelona or London Zipcar fleet just as easily as in their home network. Might we eventually be able to rent a bike just as easily in any city around the world, with the swipe of a smartcard or by sending a text message? The race is on to find out, as a growing number of operators seek to replicate their systems in other cities.

We put together a cheat sheet on 10 bike sharing networks to watch earlier this year. But the pace of growth in these programs called for an update, so we revamped our guide to show how bike-sharing networks are putting technology to work, who's paying how much, and what you might expect to find in your own city sometime soon. There are dozens more that we couldn't include on our list (tell us about em in the comments section), but here's 20 places to watch as the latest generation of bike sharing systems put chips to work for pedal power.

Related articles on GigaOM Pro (subscription required):

Mobility on Demand Takes Aim at Transport Networks' Last Mile

Electric Vehicles Give Mobility as a Service a Jumpstart

Content strategy might seem like the domain of giant content sites and big-brand online publishers. But if you run a blog, you're a content publisher. And a solid content strategy can help you to more clearly define your goals, and identify how you'll achieve them.

For those for whom content is a business, a content strategy can help support, and achieve, the goals set out in your business strategy.

What is Content Strategy?

A content strategy is a plan that helps your users achieve their goals, and helps you to achieve your own goals, through your web site's content.

Content strategy treats content as an asset that can be used, or combined with other informational or interactive tools, to help users achieve their aims on your site. Content strategy prevents you from seeing your content as mere tactical executions that hopefully support some distant business goal. Content strategy frames content as a tool.

Kristina Halvorsen, content strategy guru and founder of content strategy consultancy Brain Traffic, defines content strategy as including editorial strategy, web writing, metadata strategy, search engine optimization, content management strategy, and content channel distribution strategy.

Stepping Toward Strategy

I see the creation of a content strategy as involving these steps.

1. Set content goals.
2. Conduct content inventory and identify content gaps.
3. Review and amend, where appropriate, site taxonomy or labeling, content tagging, and categorisation so that your current treatment of content reflects the goals you've set.
4. Identify content-related tasks and responsibilities.
5. Set a plan for:
   - filling content gaps
   - the direction of future content
   - recycling or reusing evergreen content to achieve the greatest possible ROI

Let's look at each step in turn.

1. Setting Content Goals

Every good blog meets a particular need for a given audience. Your content goals are the place where, on paper, your audience members' needs can be aligned with your business needs.

For example, imagine I run a blog on chicken keeping, and my audience is backyard poultry keepers families and others who aren't exactly poultry enthusiasts or breeders, but want to have a few hens scratching in the backyard. And let's say I want to generate an income of $1000 per month from my blog six months from now.

The only way I'm going to achieve my goal is through content: by providing my audience with the information they need. Whether I join affiliate programs, conduct paid product reviews, sell ad space or sell ebooks about chicken keeping, if I don't publish the content, I won't have an audience, and I won't generate an income.

Content translates to pageviews, audience growth, engagement and loyalty all the things that bloggers need to monetise their blogs. So my content goals might cover:

• publishing frequency
• per-post, per-month, or per-category traffic objectives
• topic emphasis, post type, or media used
• the quantity and quality of comments, discussions and feedback

Even if your blog isn't a financial concern, content goals will help you stay focused on your blog's unique advantage its point of difference and make the most of that with every post you publish.

2. Conducting a Content Inventory

A thorough content inventory involves listing each piece of content on your blog, and noting its publish date categorisation, tags, and any other metadata associated with it.

Through this process, you'll find outdated posts, incorrectly categorised or tagged posts, broken links, spam comments, typos all kinds of issues! Once you're finished, you'll also have a clear idea of the strengths of your existing content assets, as well as the weaknesses. And by considering your content inventory in light of your content goals, you'll quickly be able to find content gaps: areas in which you lack the content that will be required to achieve your goals.

If one of my goals is for my chicken keeping site to be the recognised authority for backyard hobby poultry keepers, I'll need the content to back that up. My content inventory will undoubtedly reveal some areas in which my content is lacking, incomplete, amateurish, or fails to represent best-practice approaches. They're my content gaps for this goal.

3. Reviewing and Amending Content Treatment

The information you collected on your content's metadata during the content inventory also needs to be analysed in light of your goals. This might reveal other gaps perhaps you've overlooked some important tags, or the tags you've used don't reflect the terms audience members usually search for. You'll want to identify those issues and address them, creating additional tags, making sure your content is categorised as logically and intuitively as possible, and ensuring that the mechanics of your content are closely aligned with your content goals.

One of my chicken keeping blog goals was income, and I've decided I'll use good organic search placement as one technique to build my readership. My content inventory shows that I've tagged all my content about poultry housing with the tag hen houses, but my research shows that searchers most commonly search for the term coops. I might add that tag to my site and all related posts to boost my position in those search results. I might also change the navigation label on my blog that leads to specliaised content about hen houses from Housing to Coops so that when the users I've attracted reach my blog, they see exactly the thing they're looking for.

This step is really about looking at the ancillary information that allows users to find and contextualise the information you present, and making sure it's optimised for your user and blog goals.

4. Identifying Content Tasks and Responsibilities

If you're a solo blogger, the second part of this step will be easy: you'll be responsible for everything! But just what is everything?

How often will you publish new content? What tools will you use to publish it? Where will you source it and what requirements will you place on every item published on your blog? Who will follow up on any copyright issues and check the factual accuracy of each post? Who will run the spell check? Who will schedule the posts and who will hit the publish button? How will you work out, or know, when you need to add a category or tag to the site? And how will you populate that new category with content?

If your blog is time-relevant, you might need a plan for retiring old content, but every blog contains some content that will become outdated in time. How will you manage that? Where will you redirect users who try to access retired content?

These are just some of the questions about tasks and responsibilities that you'll want to answer through your content strategy. The guidelines you'll want to set at this point will depend on the nature of your blog, and where you want to take it in future. For example, in developing my authoritative chicken keeping blog, I might decide to request guest posts from well-known breeders. This decision has implications for copyright, publishing schedules, consistency of style and voice, and so on. I'll need to try to anticipate and answer those questions in my strategy.

5. Setting Your Plan

The work you've done so far forms the basis for your content strategy. You've defined a focus, audience and goals, and reshaped your blog (and its underlying process and management) so that it's in the best possible position to achieve your goals as you move forward.

The final step involves setting out action plans to implement strategies and tactics that will help you achieve those goals over time.

That might involve tasks like:

• filling large-scale content gaps
• trying new content-sourcing tactics, post types, and media
• recycling, reusing or repackaging evergreen content to achieve the greatest possible return on your investment in it

When you work with content all the time, it can be difficult to step back and see your blog as a whole. That's why comparatively few bloggers have developed content strategies for their blogs. But a good content strategy can help you to focus, and build your offering strategically using content assets that appreciate, rather than devalue, over time.

Do you have a content strategy for your blog, or are you winging it?

About the Author: Georgina has more than ten years' experience writing and editing for web, print and voice. She now blogs for WebWorkerDaily and SitePoint, and consults on content to a range of other clients.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Blog Content Strategy 101

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OK, this has been an interesting two weeks on th e-book front.

If your life is like mine, everyone is asking you, the librarian, for your personal and professional opinion on e-books and e-readers.

So, to prepare you for the family, neighbourhood and friends' BBQ's this weekend, here's some interesting tidbits to throw about in conversation:

First read the full post for this one:

Top 10 Myths about our e-Book Future

Here's the highlight list:
1. Due to an avalanche of self-published and poorly edited e-books, readers will be submerged in a big pile of suck.
2. Publishers are going to disappear.
3. Paper books will disappear.
4. E-books are going to destroy libraries.
5. All authors will have an equal shot.
6. The book world will be divided into a few megabestsellers and everyone else selling only two copies. It will be impossible for authors without platforms to get anyone to pay attention to them.
7. We're all going to drop our e-readers into our bathtubs amid a massive, world-wide power outage and multi-government e-book deletion conspiracy that causes us to permanently lose every book the world has ever published.
8. The reading world will be divided between those who can afford an e-reader and those who can't.
9. Bookstores will disappear.
10. E-books will evolve into all-knowing robots that will implant carnivorous baby e-books inside our brains and devour our heads from within.

Of course the big news was Amazon's anouncement:

Amazon: Paper Books Are Dead, Or Something

Over the past three months, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 143 Kindle books. Over the past month, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 180 Kindle books. Peace. Out. Trees.

KINDLE DEVICE UNIT SALES ACCELERATE EACH MONTH IN SECOND QUARTER;
NEW $189 PRICE RESULTS IN TIPPING POINT FOR GROWTH
Amazon.com now selling more Kindle books than hardcover books

SEATTLE-July 19, 2010-(NASDAQ: AMZN)-Millions of people are already reading on Kindles and Kindle is the #1 bestselling item on Amazon.com for two years running. It's also the most-wished-for, most-gifted, and has the most 5-star reviews of any product on Amazon.com. Today, Amazon.com announced that Kindle device unit sales accelerated each month in the second quarter-both on a sequential month-over-month basis and on a year-over-year basis.

We've reached a tipping point with the new price of Kindle-the growth rate of Kindle device unit sales has tripled since we lowered the price from $259 to $189, said Jeff Bezos, Founder and CEO of Amazon.com. In addition, even while our hardcover sales continue to grow, the Kindle format has now overtaken the hardcover format. Amazon.com customers now purchase more Kindle books than hardcover books-astonishing when you consider that we've been selling hardcover books for 15 years, and Kindle books for 33 months.

Kindle offers the largest selection of the most popular books people want to read. The U.S. Kindle Store now has more than 630,000 books, including New Releases and 106 of 110 New York Times Best Sellers. Over 510,000 of these books are $9.99 or less, including 75 New York Times Best Sellers. Over 1.8 million free, out-of-copyright, pre-1923 books are also available to read on Kindle.

Recent milestones for Kindle books include:

Over the past three months, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 143 Kindle books. Over the past month, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 180 Kindle books. This is across Amazon.com's entire U.S. book business and includes sales of hardcover books where there is no Kindle edition. Free Kindle books are excluded and if included would make the number even higher.

Amazon sold more than 3x as many Kindle books in the first half of 2010 as in the first half of 2009.
The Association of American Publishers' latest data reports that e-book sales grew 163 percent in the month of May and 207 percent year-to-date through May. Kindle book sales in May and year-to-date through May exceeded those growth rates.

On July 6, Hachette announced that James Patterson had sold 1.14 million e-books to date. Of those, 867,881 were Kindle books.

Five authors-Charlaine Harris, Stieg Larsson, Stephenie Meyer, James Patterson, and Nora Roberts-have each sold more than 500,000 Kindle books.

Readers are responding to Kindle's uncompromising approach to the reading experience. Weighing 10.2 ounces, Kindle can be held comfortably in one hand for hours, has an e-ink display that is easy on the eyes even in bright daylight, has two weeks of battery life, lets you buy your books once and read them everywhere-on your Kindle, Kindle DX, iPad, iPod touch, iPhone, Mac, PC, BlackBerry, and Android-based devices-and has free 3G wireless with no monthly fees or annual contracts-all at a $189 price.

To reiterate, those stats don't include free Kindle books. A tipping point indeed.

Of core,you'll want to remmeber that: Amazon isn't only place peole buy books and e-books, the Kindle isn't the only reader, some people borrow books (grin), paperback books are by far the biggest part of the market and Internet buyers and brodband users represent a different demographic than the average or general population at this time.

See this post:

How Many Kindle Books Has Amazon Sold? About 22 Million This Year By Jay Yarow (Silicon Valley Insider)

Yesterday Amazon announced a big milestone: In the last month, Amazon's e-book sales outpaced its hardcover sales on Amazon.com nearly two to one.

It's a nice stat, but what does it actually mean? How big are hardcover sales, anyway?
According to Nielsen Bookscan, only 23% of total dead-tree book sales this year come from hardcover books.
The rest are from paperback books. In other words, assuming Amazon's book business reflects the overall industry, Amazon is still probably selling twice as many paperback books as Kindle books.

Amazon is estimated to have 19% of the book market, which implies the company sold 15.6 million hardcover books so far this year.

In its announcement yesterday, Amazon said it sold 143 Kindle books for each 100 hardcover books last quarter. (Last month alone, it sold 180 e-books sold for every 100 hardcover books sold.)

If we use the ratio from the last quarter, it implies Amazon has sold around 22 million Kindle books so far this year. That's just the equivalent of 6% of the total print book market, which remains tiny.

Another factor that Amazon doesn't mention is that it makes less money per e-book than it does on print books, and in some cases is losing money on e-books. It's good for Amazon to attack the e-book market and try to own it, even if costs a little early on, but let's not forget that e-books don't generate the same income or sales.

Five Reasons Amazon E-Books are Outselling HardcoversBy Steven

PC Worlds Are you still holding out to see what happens with this whole ebooks fad before deciding whether to embrace it for your business? Well, the times they are a changin' and there are a variety of reasons that ebooks are outpacing printed books. Amazon reports that ebook sales are three times higher than last year, and that Kindle versions of books have outsold their hardcover equivalents by 43 percent over the last quarter. The traditional written word printed on paper will not be fading to oblivion any time soon, but here are five factors contributing to the success of the ebook

1. Cost.
2. Portability.
3. Accessibility.
4. Cross-Platform. (A device like the iPad provides access to various e-reader platforms.)
5. Conservation.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/07/20/urnidgns002570F3005978D800257766005BA5CF.DTL#ixzz0v6aeSFx4

Lastly, we have your first million seller (downloads) this month with Steig Larson.
It's a shame he didn't live this milestone.

Stieg Larsson is the first author to reach one million books sold on Amazon

So there's some interesting soundbites to throw about over hot dogs. Hey, you're the book professional so you're in the know!

Stephen

A few weeks ago, Brian Clark of Copyblogger.com confided in me that he was leaving DIYThemes, and splitting paths from the embattled Thesis theme and lead developer Chris Pearson. He agreed to do an interview with me exclusively about this news. This is the entire transcript of that interview.

Technosailor.com: Brian, thanks for agreeing to this interview. Obviously, the timing of this announcement and interview are interesting considering the discussions that have been happening in the WordPress community as it pertains to licensing and DIYThemes, the creator of the Thesis theme. You've been with DIYThemes since its inception and have championed the theme. You're leaving the company now. Can you describe the reasoning that has gone into this decision?

Brian: Chris Pearson and I have been discussing an amicable way to split for the last 3 months. The very public disagreements Chris recently had with Matt Mullenweg were ugly and embarrassing, but that's beside the point.

The reason for the split is more fundamental than that one issue. For the last year Chris and I have had completely different opinions about the direction of the development of Thesis, the running of the company, and our relationship with the WordPress community. And there really hasn't been any way to resolve those different opinions given that I'm the minority owner of the company and what he decides goes.

Technosailor.com: Well, when you say our relationship with the WordPress community, that's got to mean the GPL issue, right?

Brian: That's part of it, but also, fundamentally I think Chris really wants to build something new that has nothing to do with WordPress. Trying to force his development ideas into a WordPress framework creates a whole set of issues. I wanted him to go build his thing on a separate development track and simply be okay with Thesis being a great framework that extends the power of WordPress because that's what it was supposed to be.

As for the GPL, I took steps from the very beginning to make sure we never issued a license that was in contravention of the GPL. We used a membership concept since 2008 after I came on board. Our terms of service said you follow the rules of your Thesis plan and get the benefits of membership support, updates, etc. If you don't follow the rules, you get kicked out. It was never a problem, because most people are honest.

My last official act with DIY Themes was drafting the Thesis split GPL license after Matt Mullenwag publicly committed to suing Chris. I thought that was the right move for Thesis going forward, and Chris eventually saw the light. But we were going our separate ways no matter what.

Technosailor.com: There's a lot more to the story than that regarding the GPL. I know the story because of our conversations over the years, but other people don't. Can you elaborate?

Brian: Okay. At the very beginning, I was completely in the dark about the GPL. I'm a content guy I'm busy writing and producing content, not following WordPress politics. But once Chris asked me to partner with him, I naturally had to educate myself. What I found out about the GPL didn't make much sense, frankly, but it was the way things were with WordPress. So I made sure we never took an intellectual property position in our membership terms that opposed the GPL.

About a year-and-a-half ago, Matt Mullenweg made a big push for the major WordPress premium theme developers to expressly declare themselves GPL. I think Brian Gardner of StudioPress was the first to go along. About that time, I told Chris I saw no problem with going expressly GPL, since we're selling way more than just code and again, most people in our particular market are honest.

Chris told me to go talk to Matt and Automattic CEO Toni Schneider about going GPL and being welcomed into the WordPress community with open arms. It's important to remember that due to the Copyblogger audience and my personal relationships, we never needed the blessing of WordPress for marketing purposes. But Matt was offering prominent exposure on WordPress.org, so why not?

Long and short is, I spent a lot of time discussing things with Matt in the early summer of 2009. We had everything worked out. I went back to Chris and he said he had changed his mind and didn't want to go GPL after all. I thought that was a mistake, and looking back, we started diverging on just about everything from that point forward.

Technosailor.com: Now, you've argued with Matt publicly about whether the GPL is even legally enforceable. How do you explain that?

Brian: Oh, don't get me wrong as a former attorney, I think the odds of the GPL being shot down in court in this context are pretty good. A lot of practicing attorneys think so too (if you're interested in that kind of stuff, you can read this and this).

But the law is not the point. If you're going to develop on a massive open source platform like WordPress, it makes sense to follow the rules of the community that's developing it. If you don't want to, go build on something else, or build your own thing. I see the point behind the philosophy of the GPL, and I'm fine with it. I don't like people trying to assert that it is the law and that non-GPL developers are breaking the law, because that's just not accurate.

The GPL is a license (a contract) that has never been judicially tested in the way WordPress says it applies, and that position probably wouldn't survive a court case. But I got out of law because I hate litigation, so why would I want to fight about it? Just play according to the home court rules and you can still make money with a great offer.

Technosailor.com: So you're selling your stake in DIYThemes or are you maintaining your interest and stepping away from daily operations and intervention? Is there an advisory role here or is the relationship done?

Brian: At first, around 3 months ago, we explored selling the whole company. Then I floated the idea of me buying Chris out along with some investors. Chris said he wasn't interested. We finally settled on Chris buying me out over several months of installment payments. The paperwork was drawn up, Chris had a few minor questions, and he told me it was no problem getting it done by the end of July.

Apparently now Chris has changed his mind about that as well. So things are in limbo, but I no longer have any active role with DIY Themes, operational, advisory, or promotional. Like I said, my last official act was preventing him from getting sued by WordPress.

Technosailor.com: What's the future then for Copyblogger? You have been running Thesis for as long as Thesis has been around. Do you continue doing that or move to a different framework?

Brian: We stopped using Thesis as a development platform for pending projects months ago. It's perfectly fine for some people, but it doesn't play well with WordPress enough for our needs. So I'm sure I'll move Copyblogger to something else soon. And that was part of the reasoning for my departure I can't promote something I can't use.

Technosailor.com: What about Scribe? Is that part of DIYThemes?

Brian: Scribe is a separate company with a different partner and has nothing to do with DIY Themes. It's exceeding all my expectations after only 6 months and we'll be releasing version 3.0 this month. So it's not all doom and gloom. ;-)

Technosailor.com: Now that Thesis has gone Split GPL, do you feel like the damage that has already been done in the community can be fixed? Is it possible for Thesis to have the prominence and success it has had prior to the public altercations?

Brian: I don't know. I just know I no longer have to wake up each morning worried about what altercation has broken out overnight. That's a good feeling in itself. Life is too short to be involved in things that make you unhappy.

T-Mobile and Three have finally started offering the iPhone 4, with a variety of price plans announced for the Apple handset.

The plans in T-Mobile's case are all 24-month contracts and range from 30 to 60 (as we told you earlier in the month), with the iPhone 4 16GB version offered for free on the most expensive tariff.

Speaking about the news, Lysa Hardy, vice president of T-Mobile Propositions, said: "Bringing iPhone 4 to our customers in the UK is a fantastic move for T-Mobile.

"With a range of value plans we're making iPhone 4 more accessible to even more customers in the UK."

Three's numbers

When it comes to Three, you will be able to get a free 16GB iPhone 4 on the 45 monthly contract. There are also 30 to 40 per month contracts available.

Obviously the 32GB is also available, but you will have to fork out more on the handset ranging from 89 and 189.

Now that T-Mobile and Three have opened the iPhone 4 floodgates, the circle is now complete for those offering the handset, with the pair joining O2, Vodafone, Orange and Tesco Mobile as networks that are offering the phone in the UK.

Content farms have been in the spotlight over the past year. They're companies that generate hundreds or thousands of new pieces of content on a daily basis. Much of their traffic comes from Google search, so the aim of content farms is to rake in the money with online advertising. Demand Media has been the most ambitious of these companies, but even the big portals are doing it nowadays. Yahoo! recently acquired Associated Content and AOL launched an initiative earlier this year disingeniously called Seed.

In our content farms coverage so far, we've focused mostly on textual content farms. But video may well be the next frontier. A startup called Howcast specializes in mass production of video content.

Sponsor

I spoke to Sanjay Raman, Chief Product Officer at Howcast, to find out what its strategy is and what he thinks of Demand Media and other competitors.

How Howcast Works

As the name suggests, Howcast is all about how-to videos. As with other 'content farm' companies, Howcast has identified a big opportunity to provide so-called "evergreen" informational content on the Web across hundreds of thousands of categories. The rationale being that people search, mostly on Google, for instructional content. How To Shuck an Oyster, How to Save Water in Your Garden, How to Avoid Dropped Calls on the iPhone 4, and so on.

Howcast is betting that how-to videos will have more relevance to searchers in the near future, than textual how-to articles. And given that YouTube is already the 2nd largest search engine in the world, behind only Google, that seems a solid business assumption.

Distribution

Howcast launched in February 2008 and now has nearly 200,000 instructional videos. It streams 25 million videos each month on both its own web site and across a network that includes web portals like AOL and Yahoo, and TV-on-demand sites like Hulu and Dailymotion. Its biggest distribution platform though is YouTube, where it has over 150,000 channel subscribers. Raman said that around 80% of its videos are viewed offsite, with 20% being viewed on Howcast's web site.

It also has a strong mobile presence, which Raman said was key to Howcast's future growth. He noted that Howcast has had over 2 million app downloads across the iPhone, iPad, Android, and BlackBerry devices. The Howcast for iPad app alone has been installed by 150,000 iPad users (approximately 5% of global iPad users) and was for a time the number 2 free iPad app in Apple's App Store.

Raman noted that user engagement is very good on mobile - for example users watch videos on average twice a day and watch two videos per session. Perhaps for this reason, Raman said that the value of users on mobile is much higher than on other platforms.

The Quality Question

In my discussion with Sanjay Raman, Chief Product Officer at Howcast, the word "quality" came up a number of times.

Every time I talk to 'content farm' companies, they insist that the aim is to produce quality content. That's because the most common criticism of content farms is that they clog up search engines with poor quality content.

In Howcast's case, the content appears to be professionally produced. It outputs about 400 how-to videos each month, most of which flows through its Emerging Filmmakers Program. Raman said that the program attracts wanna-be filmmakers, who are looking for a place to prove their skills. Howcast pays between $50-$300 per video.

Raman told me that Howcast wants to keep the content bar high. He claimed that Howcast has a much higher ratio of subscribers per video than Demand Media. Howcast is "not necessarily playing the volume game," he added.

Comparison to Demand Media

Who is the top YouTube provider, measured by views? You guessed it, Demand Media. This is because it produces far more video content per month than Howcast (Demand competes directly with Howcast with its property eHow). While Sanjay Raman didn't have exact figures, he estimated that Demand Media produces about 10 times more videos every month than Howcast. However he implied that this resulted in lower quality videos.

"Demand Media takes tasks and makes them smaller than they need to be," said Raman.

He also claimed that Howcast's playbacks per video are higher than Demand Media's. Howcast averages 44-50,000 playbacks per video, he told me, whereas Demand is around 7,000 per video.

Despite Demand Media Threat, Howcast Well Positioned

Many questions about content farms seem to center around whether other companies can compete with Demand Media, which operates on a much larger scale than its competitors. Perhaps the only company capable of stopping Demand's relentless growth is Google, which is reportedly tweaking its algorithms to better account for quality over quantity.

Howcast is hoping that its focus on professional video-making, via its filmmakers program, will lead to high search results. That remains to be seen. One thing that Howcast definitely has going for it is its positioning in the mobile space, which is increasingly where video content is consumed.