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Cricket is a sport that drives people in my city crazy.
In the 1970s, our home stadium had a unique feature – the pitch would crumble on day #4. This means a ball bowled in the right direction could hit one of those worn out patches and veer grossly off-track, leaving the hapless batsman with little or any chance of doing anything with it.
Why talk about cricket while discussing content?
Because there’s a debate on a popular forum about quality content that has gone so wildly off-track, a reader has just as little chance as that batsman of making sense of it… and is highly likely to completely miss the point.
Kurt Melvin is a GENIUS. One of the best guys I’ve studied SEO (search engine optimization) from. And he has a refreshingly unique perspective about many things related to online content and traffic.
His “Big Page of SEO” is an amazing guide where I first heard the concept of ‘people rank’.
A few days back, Kurt penned an insightful post about what makes ‘Good Content‘. Read it to hear about categories he calls ’spewers’, ‘parrots’, ‘reporters’ and ‘creators’.
It is an elegant and pretty accurate description of the types of content producers that populate the online space.
As a closing comment, Kurt says:
“If you truly want to make it “big” as a content provider, you must be A Creator. You can do fine with being a Reporter or even a Parrot…But to truly be big you must be a Creator.”
Nice information until this point.
Then, the ‘pitch’ crumbled!
This discussion got going – “Kurt’s Parrot Being Parroted” – and the ‘ball’ spun away in many different directions. (Don’t read it all unless you have 30 minutes to waste, it isn’t necessary!)
In a nutshell, hot debate began on the role of a ‘parrot’ and the ethics of ’stealing ideas’. Missing, or skirting around, Kurt’s point that to be a ‘thought leader’ you need to create original and compelling content.
Not everyone can be (or wants to be) a ‘thought leader’!
Many years ago, I created a tool called “Make Content Unique“. I could have called it ‘Make Content EXCELLENT’ or ‘Make Content GOOD’ – but I didn’t, because all this tool did was to tweak written content to turn it into ‘unique content’ by search engine standards.
Even then, while compiling my research on the subject, I concluded that there was NO STANDARD for SE definitions of ‘uniqueness’… see this mini-report, “What is Duplicate Content?”
And that means it will always be POSSIBLE to beat a search engine algorithm for ‘duplicate content’ – which therefore, by extension, means that people WILL try to exploit that potential… by being spewers, parrots, and maybe even some form of superficial reporters.
Kurt’s discussion touches (as in the SEO guide) on the more important ‘factor’ in judging the value of content… PEOPLE. Readers, viewers and listeners.
He makes some very valid observations about the categories he recognizes from the perspective of his ‘human’ audience. Not surprisingly, spewers catch his ire – as they do mine, with one exception… when their ends justify their means.
I’ve engaged in this debate before.
If you have a cure or prevention for a deadly illness, and find the top pages in Search Engine results dominated by scammers who use ‘black hat’ SEO techniques to keep others out… then using powerful tactics that work to get YOUR page into the results where thousands will see your content and benefit from it are JUSTIFIED – even if that involves ’spewing’ rehashed junk for that specific purpose. (It’s called ‘teleological ethics’ and I discuss it here)
‘Parrots’ make a lot of us tired, for sure. And because Kurt is absolutely fair, he does point out the one exception – newbies (’noobs’). If a parroted article is the first time a person is exposed to a particular idea or concept, it still has an impact. But more seasoned readers find it a waste of time.
And therein lies the value in charging for your information!
There are many people who loudly proclaim that they will never consider paying for information, because anything of value is available on the Internet for FREE.
True, but a LOT of it is ‘parroted’ information, that you will pay for in time and effort to weed through to get to the gold beneath.
When you start out as a newbie, you’ll learn from everything. But after a while, you need to either find (or be shown) the more ‘original’ content created by ‘thought leaders’. Or else you could get mired for weeks, even months or years, reading re-cycled ‘ideas’ echoed by the prolific parrots who aim to beat SE algorithms to get the ‘click’ – not to attain MIND-SHARE which is the more effective metric of an advanced specialist.
The other two categories do not often generate debate, because they are pretty much well-defined, both in terms of what they do, and what they seek to achieve.
Reporters aggregate data into easily consumed information. Think of them as the ‘annotated footnotes’ you find in any textbook, where you get a compiled summary of the information presented in bite-sized chunks, with references listed in case you want to delve deeper.
Creators are the real ORIGINALS. Folks with the ability to not just hold many thoughts, but to seek correlations, patterns, synergies, connections, associations and relationships between them, and furthermore, carry out extrapolations and predictions based on them that might have value and implications for the audiences they are trying to reach.
If they do a good job of it, they become ‘leaders’ and others ‘follow’ what they say. When they don’t, they become little better than ‘parrots’ or ‘reporters’.
But here’s the bit where the ‘crumbly pitch’ spun the discussion way out of balance and perspective…
Every Type of Content Provider Has a Role!
True, one kind is higher up the greasy pole than the other. But each has a part to play. And an audience to reach. And an impact to make.
Deriding one or revering another is little more than a function of human nature that loves to praise or scorn. To the content publisher, both are arrows that pass (or should) harmlessly by in the dark.
Each kind can take solace in the thought that they are serving a purpose.
In their own way.
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Hello Dr. Mani,
Excellent post!
On a rather difficult topic.
Not so much because you can’t recognize the different kind of content providers, as explained in Kurt’s post, which was excellent by the way.
But because there are so many ‘grey’ sides to it.
When it comes to using language, it’s all about syntax, semantics and pragmatics.
The syntax are just words and sentences, spell-checked and nothing else. Like Kurt mentions, spewers use that. And you can use it to create unique content, search engine wise.
It takes some skills to add meaning to these words and that’s exactly what semantics is all about. I can imagine parrots being good semantic writers, as they can expain something very well to a different audience using the exact same words, phrased differently.
If that leads to taking action by the reader, even if it’s only generating ideas, then your content is pragmatic and creative. Again, by adding only one great idea in only one short sentence, I still can see parrots doing that, thus evolving into creators.
That’s why I was happy to see your remark: Every Type of Content Provider Has a Role!
As was said already: you can’t write pragmatic without first trying to write semantic. And the latter probably starts with only writing correct syntax. It’s a steep learning curve!
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