Balancing Professional and Amateur Online

Earlier this month Newsweek ran an interesting story about the resurgence of an old debate — if/how content should be edited on the Internet. The viewpoint that venerates the wisdom of crowds and the individual blogger/YouTube poster has seemed dominant lately, but is there now a movement back to “professional” content vetted by experts?

I say old debate because the conversation has been around since the Mosaic browser lit a bomb under the growth of the WWW. Many forget that Yahoo started with human-edited categories being the most used and trusted parts of their search results. See here for a typically strong and thorough explanation circa 2004 from Danny Sullivan on Yahoo’s gradual evolution away from categories in the face of a tital wave of web content growth:    http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=597

Driving this evaluation now is advertising. Advertisers want their messages to be placed next to high quality content that draws a premium audience — not an angry screed from a blogger long on opinion and short on facts. Or a popular but tasteless YouTube video. Professional editors/experts can presumably produce quality content that can then be monetized more effectively.

My take is there’s plenty of room for both kinds of content — the Web is a very big place, and getting bigger all the time. Here’s the article written by Tony Dokoupil: http://www.newsweek.com/id/119091/output/print